Month: November 2017

Let’s imagine that real innovation comes at the cost of the individual. Or it at least involves a temporary destruction of what most defines the individual: the individual ego, or what we ordinarily call identity.

Let me explain.

First of all, word of warning: if you are not interested in, or at least curious about, the challenges involved in being an innovator, please do not continue reading. At best, what remains will bore you to tears. At worst, it will make you feel crappy.

And let’s say, for argument sake, that an individual is a self who has assumed a role, and that role is specific to the context in which that self finds itself. In other words, we are brought into this world, are socialized into accepting particular beliefs, sets of values, languages, and other conventional modes of behavior. Before we even begin to have the tools to ask ourselves what it is we might want, we have a multitude of rules we need to begin to follow, assumptions we need to begin to hold, and so forth. We need to know that we defecate in one particular place rather than another, and that some things are okay to eat, while others are not, and with good reason. Hence, the individual.

The individual is a fictional persona – the gloved hand, not the hand itself. Perhaps there is never a hand without a glove, and no one glove that it wears for every context, but many. We all know how become different people in different contexts, how our friends bring out a different person than our boss does, and how our spouses and lovers, perhaps our most intimate friends, may bring out a most vulnerable, perhaps most true likeness to whom we feel we really are.

But even that self, the most intimate and credible of all selves or collections of selves, is in part a construct of our language and the social conventions we integrated, most unconsciously, throughout our entire lives.

These roles we occupy, mostly unaware, are no more real than the characters of a Harry Potter  story, or Madame Bovary. Yet we take them for real, even create a sense of consistency that blinds us to the fact that we are these many things, not one, and this blur around them we generate in order to do so, we make into an imaginary skin that holds the whole thing together.

What more, some of the social conventions we have accommodated, have tattooed into the fabric of who we take as ourselves at our very core, are assumptions regarding the production and consumption of goods and services in our community, everything from the economics of paying for our sins, to how we go about seeking retribution or payment for the work we are hired for.

A person who innovates is a person who, conscious or not, will break from the default construct, and form fictional selves that are, at least at the outset, perhaps a bit absurd, irrational, in the context one has come into being within. That person has found new reasons for doing things, and to some degree, a different reason for living. She has found a line of flight.

 

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

—Wallace Stevens from The Man with the Blue Guitar

 To be continued…

 

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.

We are not your enemies
Who want to give ourselves vast strange domains
Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it
Where there are new fires colors never seen
A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of
They must be made real
All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country
where everything is silent
And there is time which somebody can banish or
welcome home
Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers
Of the illimitable and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins

– Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. James Wright)

 

We at times should ask ourselves what we mean by innovation and change. To truly innovate means to create new motivations for our actions. The pursuit of money and noteriety are the least imaginative, least individual, and innovative reasons for doing things.

It is also not very novel to seek better solutions for the same problems. Innovation requires us to create new problems, to dream up obstructions where none are seen. And not for money. Longing for money is simply a mask for fear and the desire for domination.

That said, true innovation can attract money, but the desire to do something novel in order to create better products and solutions, to enhance one’s bottom line, is not true innovation. It is merely tinkering, inventive though it may be.

We can see where some of today’s billionaires may have started out as innovators, though they have tended to end up as something quite different.

The innnovator is never the one who is rewarded. You must become something quite different first. That’s up to you.

One’s whole raison d’etre needs to be different from everyone else’s. One must speak another, unique and truly individual, language, that few will even begin to understand. It is lonely, and it is rare that it will reap vast rewards, or at least not visible rewards (there will be rewards, however, I promise you).

You should try it. Become one of the pool of lunatics that in the long run will really make a difference, though not everyone will have gotten credit for doing so. You will know, and that’s what matters.