I think it was the author John Gardner who said, and I paraphrase, that there is no motivation too low for art. He went on to say that if your motivation was to make money, and that you wrote a romance novel, and you just happened to have a great mind, you would end up writing a great novel in spite of yourself.
This is in perfect contradiction to my prior post’s insinuation that true innovation (assuming “great” also means “different” in some way) cannot be forced by typical motivations, that one’s motives need to be completely atypical, and hence, innovative in themselves.
Where these two notions may find confluence is in what may make a “great mind,” however, since that seems to be requisite to even Gardner’s position.
So how does one develop such a thing as a “great mind,” as if it can be done, purposely, or in order to generate great and innovative ideas?
And do we even want a great mind? After all, so many great minds ended up in dire straights, or were just underappreciated. We would likely not want to end up with Alan Turing’s or Nikola Tesla’s luck. Van Gogh cut off his ear and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Giordano Bruno, who speculated that there were many suns and planets back when the church stood by the notion that we were the center of the universe, was burned at the stake.
Perhaps it’s better to steal their fire, call what we do “innovation” because we worship them even though we tend also to despise and treat the real innovators like garbage, perhaps because they make us feel irrelevant and inconsequential.
On the other hand, it may be far greater to seek out the strange in ourselves and others, to honor it, protect it, and to continue on ahead, regardless of what other people may be thinking.
Richard Bandler, one of the co-creators of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), once said something about how after NASA had gotten rid of all their lunatics, and hired sane business-minded people, they could no longer get anything done.
And he said his job was to create more lunatics because those are the people who really end up doing things worth doing.
Maybe he’s right. Look around you. Is this what you aspire to?
I don’t know, but perhaps having a great mind is similar to being a lunatic, in Bandler’s view.
But what kind of great mind? Tesla gave us alternating current, and a few other amazing things. Einstein gave us relativity and nuclear energy.
I prefer Gertrude Stein, who gave us a new way of thinking about the way we think, in language, a way of understanding its habits and limitations.
I may also prefer Marcel Duchamp, who helped turn the art world upside down, and when you turn something like art, that quintessential practice of representation, upside down, everything follows.