Finding an Equation for Innovation

Life obscures harmony; it’s everywhere, but oftentimes hard to recognize because of the noise. Music, nature, reading, conversation – harmony exists in so many things, bringing beauty and ideas together. Over the years, I’ve looked for ways to quiet the noise and let in the harmony, whether through sports, writing, running, and – most recently – meditating.

I started meditating almost a year ago. My goal is for five minutes, five days a week. I look at this as a no-excuses type of goal because I have no excuses not to dedicate five minutes to quieting my mind and letting the world in a few days a week.

Meditation seems like it’s different – at least in part – for everyone, but the basics are the same in that it’s a quieting of the mind to let in peace. If you’re interested in learning more about meditation, Dan Harris’ Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics might help. If you’re feeling less skeptical, Thich Nhat Hanh has a large body of work that is worth checking out. Meditation was a total mystery to me, so I read these and many other writings to reach my current understanding, which continues to grow.

My experience with meditation is that it declutters my mind so that I can let new ideas – and connections between those ideas – bubble to the surface, and I wanted to share one such recent experience after reading three books full of inspiring ideas: What Got You Here, Won't Get You There, Where Great Ideas Come From, and The Design of Everyday Things.

Idea 1: Success is earned, continually

In his book What Got You Here, Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith argues that success in the past is not a guarantee of success in the future. He identifies a number of common self-limiting behaviors that can prevent people from achieving their full potential. These behaviors include:

• Not taking feedback: People who are unwilling to take feedback are unlikely to learn and grow.
• Being defensive: People who are defensive are less likely to be open to new ideas.
• Playing the victim: People who play the victim are less likely to take responsibility for their own actions.
• Not being coachable: People who are not coachable are less likely to be able to improve their performance.

Goldsmith argues that it is important to be willing to change and grow in order to achieve lasting success. He provides a number of tips to help people overcome their self-limiting behaviors. It’s a fantastic, quick read, and I highly recommend it. But, if you’re not planning to read it right now, here’s a quote that captured a lot of this for me:

“If you want to succeed at goal setting, you have to face the reality of the effort and the payoff before you begin. Realize that the quick fix and the easy solution may not provide the lasting fix and the meaningful solution. Lasting goal achievement requires lots of time, hard work, personal sacrifice, ongoing effort, and dedication to a process that is maintained over years. And even if you can pull that off, the rewards may not be all that you expect.”

This quote captures so much - especially perseverance – and made me think about the importance of thoughtfully planning the steps to a goal and appreciating the journey to achieving it. If you’re able to do these things – set stackable, achievable goals and appreciate the journey to them – it’s much easier to find success (however you define it) and actually feel it because this instills a learning-driven approach that is contrary to the limiting behaviors that often stagnate progress.

Idea 2: Creativity does not work in a vacuum

In his book Where Great Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson explores the nature of creativity. He argues that creativity is not a mysterious process, but rather a combination of different factors, including:

• Connections: The ability to make connections between different ideas is essential for creativity.
• Playfulness: Being playful and open to new possibilities can help us to come up with new ideas.
• Mental models: Our mental models of the world can help us to generate new ideas.
• Chance encounters: Sometimes, great ideas come from chance encounters with new information or experiences.

Johnson argues that creativity is a skill that can be learned and improved. He provides a number of exercises and tips to help people become more creative and provides a great 3-minute whiteboard video to visually explain this concept.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an ideal pull-out quote from this one, but the video above is a great, quick walkthrough. My biggest takeaway was that creativity comes from diverse experience – conversations, taking on new things, travel, etc. – and sometimes (or oftentimes) requires an incubation period, where the creative enlightenment happens years after the fact as you come back to an idea to water it through reflection and ideation, helping it to grow clearer, bigger, better – like Darwin in my last article.

Idea 3: Design is complex, but simple if done right

In his book, The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman argues that good design is about making things easy to use. He identifies five key principles of good design: affordances, signifiers, mappings, feedback, and conceptual models.

• Affordances are the perceived properties of an object that suggest how it can be used. For example, a doorknob affords turning, while a chair affords sitting.
• Signifiers are cues that help us understand how to use an object. For example, a label on a button can tell us what it does.
• Mappings are the relationships between controls and their actions. For example, the up arrow on a keyboard usually corresponds to the action of moving the cursor up.
• Feedback is information that tells us whether our actions have been successful. For example, a light on a microwave oven tells us when the food is done.
• Conceptual models are our mental representations of how things work. For example, we have a conceptual model of how a door works, which allows us to use it without having to think about it too much.

Norman argues that good design takes into account the needs and capabilities of the user. It makes things easy to understand and use, even for people who are not experts. This book tied the other two together for me. Goldsmith’s thoughtfulness around removing the blockers – which are often self-imposed – from our path to success, and Johnson’s ideas about creativity – where it takes a mind that is open to feedback, iteration, and solo and group ideation – thread together while thinking about design, and it’s not just the design of everyday things.

Idea 1+2+3= Novel Innovation

Looking at these three works together made me think about the design of life’s trajectory in a different way than Designing Your Life, which I’ve written about previously here. It moved from life design to innovation design.

Listening to audiobooks enabled me to read these three works over the course of a month. With that tight timeframe, I felt a connection between these ideas. That relationship grew through my daily meditation as I found the quiet space to let these ideas play together in unencumbered space. In the peace and clear-minded stillness of morning, I saw a clearer connection – thinking about the validation that success is earned, continually; that creativity does not work in a vacuum; that design is complex but simple if done right – these three pieces can lead to novel innovation when tied together.

Though, like Johnson outlines in his book, sometimes it takes days, week, months, or even years for an idea to fully develop into something that can drive that innovation. I’ve got some great ideas from each of these three books and more from the sum of them together, but I do think there is more to gain and will revisit this in a future article once I’ve had more time to connect the dots further.

Thanks as always and, if you read this far, please recommend this newsletter to someone you think would appreciate it like you do!