Authenticity, Relevance and Jaw-Dropping Creativity
WE LIVE IN A TIME OF MIRACLES!!! Are you aware of it?
I’m interested in the fact that your average person has no idea what an amazing, miraculous creative era we are living in! Growing human ears on mice? Building walking dog-style robots? Moving things with your brain waves? The question isn’t “what is possible” but what ISN’T possible?
I’m a diehard reader of Wired and Fast Company magazines, but I am hardly an early adopter tech geek. I have an iPhone because it was a gift and just enough tech knowledge to be stunned and awed by the collective mind’s capacity for invention and reinvention. Home is TED.com where reasons to be “rationally optimistic” abound:
MakerBot (a 3-D printer???), Maker Faire, etsy, crowdsourcing, open source…. Almost all done for the love and joy of creating than a profit motive. Dan Pink talks about this at length in his new book Drive which then takes me down the rabbit hole of thinking about all of these amazing “business” books and the ideas within them: The Long Tail, Blink, Freakonomics, A Whole New Mind, The Art of Possibility. They are not only informative but enjoyable (a completely separate form of creativity, eh?).
Never, in history, has the opportunity to be AUTHENTIC and RELEVANT been so accessible to all of us ORGANIC? It moves at the speed of light these days. The challenge, I think, is in learning how to harness and trust it. I absolutely DO NOT have the answer to this, but I’m learning.
(This post was inspired by Chris Anderson’s amazing article in Wired)
2 Responses to “Authenticity, Relevance and Jaw-Dropping Creativity”
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The desire to “do it because I can” will trump any other motivation every time. Lots of “stuff” makes lots of money but only exists because of an original drive by someone to just do it.
The automobile industry is huge, but Henry Ford built a car because he wanted to, not originally to make money.
Anything aircraft oriented can thank the Wright brothers desire to just see if they could fly for the aircraft industry’s huge revenues.
A lack of creative desire, combined with doing something…anything…because it is “in” or trendy is a recipe for disaster. The dot.com bust is a good example…lots of folks creating nothing out of thin air and selling it to gullible investors. Lots of money to invest combined with no creative desire is always going to end in failure.
Bottom line…MAKE something…and make it because you want to.
Bob
Bob Hayles´s last blog ..How to live sustainably- part 1 of a series
Bob! So very true! I worked for an independent bookstore owner who opened a bookstore because she wanted to make money (laugh, snort). She hired me because she knew nothing about books. Seriously. Was not able to recommend, recognize anything for her customers. Needless to say, even with my 20 hours per week, the store failed (plus there is simply no money in books).
You must be passionate about the work first, but you must have a talent second. The combo of those two and incredible hard work will drive an authentically-motivated product or service to the market and, if it is relevant too, you have success. But you must give a shit about what it is.
Thanks so much for being here.