Ideas Give Birth To Us

"This is the eternal origin of art, that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him."

-- Martin Buber in I and Thou.

When I was a much younger man, an idea came to me. I don’t remember it being very dramatic, no bells ringing in the trees or chills running up my back. It was just that I had been thinking about the meaning of quality and the idea was that I might have something to say about it.

I had just finished re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (one of the most important books of the 20th century, it seemed to me) and I thought I could write an article about where it took me. And since I’d been trying to sell articles to magazines – and in particular to car magazines – it seemed like a good idea to write something about quality in automobile design and manufacture.

So that’s what I did. I got up out of bed and wrote something. Not long before that, I had quit my day job, which was running operations for an industrial security firm in Houston. The company had a small fleet of Chevrolets which had an embarrassing low level of quality. I wrote about memories of earlier, legendary Chevys of the 50s and 60s, collector’s items now, and how strong and well-built they felt, just to sit in.

I wrote about the need to balance innovation, cost, and quality and called the article How Chevrolet Lost Its Mojo. I put it in an envelope and sent it off to Road & Track Magazine, absolutely positive that I finally had an article so good they would have to publish it. And I never heard a word back.

So I kept at my freelance writing, trying to bring enough money in to keep things going. It wasn’t easy but I knew in my heart, I knew in my whole being, that I had to write, that that was what I was here to do.

And then a few months later, I got a voicemail. “Hello,” said the voice, “my name is Don Runkle. I’m the Chief Engineer at General Motors. Would you please give me a call?”

It turned out that the Editor of Road & Track sent my article to GM and they made it required reading in the executive ranks. Runkle was calling to talk to me about it and see if I could turn it into a speech for him. I said yes and the next Tuesday I was on a plane to Detroit. I vaulted into the C-suite and stuck the landing.

In the months that followed, my income quadrupled and then in the years that followed, it doubled and tripled again. Soon, I was writing speeches for leaders of many of the world’s biggest and most respected companies.

That one idea gave birth to me. I am who I am today because I listened to what that little, seemingly random idea was trying to tell me.

What about you?

You have ideas knocking at your door every day. Maybe you pay attention to them, maybe you swat them away like flies.

Maybe you don’t think you’re good enough or smart enough. Maybe you don’t think you have time. Maybe you don’t think it could possibly work out.

And maybe it won’t, not this one.

But one of them will. And as you listen to them they will build. They will build your success. They will build you.

So whatever idea is trying to get your attention – an AI app, a new way of delivering pizza, a better plan for helping your team – pay attention to it and trust it. It may be the idea that changes everything and it will reward your trust.

Try this: try to remember every little idea that has popped into your head in the last couple of months, every idea that you tried to ignore. Write them down. See if one of them speaks to you. If it does, spend some time with it. If nothing comes, then try making up ideas. What’s one thing that people around you could use? One thing that could make life just a little bit better.

Then see where it leads you. Ideas are part of your life force. Trust them.

Let them give birth to the new you.

#innovation #management #future #creativity

Leonard Khirug David Irvine Eric McNulty Vince Poscente