The New Era of Human Innovation Needs You

I couldn’t breathe. 

I went numb and completely motionless for a few minutes. I was at home, laying on the couch on a quiet evening when I thought I could just relax and take some time to recover from the insane amount work I had been putting at the office. Instead, my body had temporarily shut down from all the stress I’ve been putting myself through.  

And there I was, laying on the couch, literally paralyzed and unable to breathe or move or say a word. 

I was 24 years old and I was working for a young startup in Toronto. We were doing things no one else was doing in 2004 and we were on fire. I was employee #26 and, in a few years, we grew to over 400. Our product was unique and it worked well. We spent a lot of time making it better every day and the results were better and better. 

I had poured my life into that product.  

I would forego any kind of social life or even eating and sleeping, yes even showering, just to write another few lines of code or just to hunt down another stubborn bug. 

My girlfriend at the time, my wife now, used to bring me lunch at the office at 2am just to make sure I ate enough to stay alive. 

I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.  

I still have no idea what I would do without her. And without her love. 

Love is Like Innovation 

And innovation is like love. 

Both innovation and love are words that mean different things to different people. Both words are controversial and at the same time, they both seem to point to deep mysteries of the human heart and mind that we simply can’t live without. Both words have the specific quality of keeping us at night and turning our lives upside down. We can easily become obsessed with both, transformed by both and either destroyed or revived by both. 

Carmel is a story of revival. A revival of human innovation. 

That innovation requires a revival, much like love, is plain to see.  

Love, in its transformative and practical sense, has nothing to do with preference, such as loving vanilla ice cream more or less than chocolate ice cream has nothing to do with the deep desires of the heart. Love is much more than mere subjective taste in fashion or lifestyle. Love is deeper than that.  

And so is innovation. To say that something new is innovative when in fact it is merely new and nothing else, is the go-to-market strategy du jour and it is as disastrous as a go-to-marriage strategy based on ice cream flavor preferences. 

Innovation-as-news is strictly speaking nothing more than journalism, which in itself can be useful and at times truly innovative but in the case of merely releasing news about a new product is nothing more than a glorified press release. And when innovation becomes that, a glorified press release, an announcement of some sort, of something that wasn’t and now is, and that’s it, nothing more - that in itself announces nothing else but the death of innovation.  

To see why, one simply has to start from first principles and ask what innovation is.  

Innovation is about growth. Much like love. We love someone because we want the good of the other person and we want to participate in their good life. And more good means better and better eventually leads to growth. We love someone because we want to help them grow and flourish and we want to accompany them in their journey of literally transforming into a better version of who they are today.  

Innovation, like love, is also about growth. If love helps us grow as individuals, then innovation makes organizations grow. 

If innovation does not lead to transformational change, but keeps the status quo alive and well, then that “innovation” is clearly not innovation in its truest transformational sense and so authentic innovation is truly massacred and thrown under the merciless bus of inflexible revenue projections. 

Just like love is massacred when it is equated with mere preferences. And just like human beings cannot develop to their full potential without being fully loved, so too an organization will fail to grow to its full potential without a healthy infusion of true innovation. That applies equally to startups, corporations and even non-profits. 

When my heart almost stopped that evening, when I was 24, and when my body literally shut down, I thought I was innovating. Oh, I thought I was innovating my heart out. We all thought we were innovating.  

And yet, we went bankrupt. And we wore ourselves out in the process too. 

Maybe we forgot what it was all about.

Work Means Becoming More – Not Just Getting More 

As I laid there on that couch that evening, trying to catch my breath, my life literally flashed before my eyes.  

Maybe not all of it. But enough to get me to still think about it 15 years later. 

I realized that I got it all wrong. I thought work meant renting yourself out and earning a profit in the process – somehow. Most likely by earning a salary. Kinda like hey, here’s my brain for a few hours a day, gimme some cash back. Rent-a-brain sort of deal. 

And it is true. A lot of knowledge work is structured that way. It’s not like there’s an evil corporate plan out there to turn every employee into a purposeless cog in the revenue generating soulless beast that some companies do become at times – unfortunately. 

No, companies want happy employees. They really do. Sure, they want profitable bottom lines but employee satisfaction – and more – happiness, is of utter importance in most successful organizations. When it comes to tech companies, Software Developers are treated like royalty because without them, nothing would happen. Without them, there would be no company. No profit. No business. 

No growth. 

No innovation. 

Ask any executive what one of their top priorities this year is. And innovation is always sure to come up as a top 3 of not the number priority. Because innovation equals growth. And growth is everything. 

But here’s the catch. 

Innovation requires human ingenuity. Innovation requires Fluid Intelligence. Sure, Crystallized Intelligence is also important but without the ability to see the unseen opportunities, to connect the unconnected dots and to travel the untraveled paths – there is no growth. No innovation. 

And that requires a great deal of Fluid Intelligence. The kind of intelligence that machines are not capable to harness.  

Human Intelligence. 

A new era of human innovation will be unleashed as soon as we learn to harness our authentic human intelligence that makes us stand out from machines. Our Fluid Intelligence. 

As we learn to reason without relying on previous data, we will do what we have done for millennia. We will adapt. We will evolve. 

We will grow. 

We will become more. 

More human. 

If we change our outlook on work as a whole from an opportunity to simply earn more, to a challenge to become more – we shall indeed grow. And we shall indeed stand our ground in the new emerging machine world. 

We Need More Developers Who Think Like You 

The 23 million or so developers that produce all the technology we use on a daily basis have been schooled in an industrialized Tech Educational system that relies heavily on standardized testing, facts, figures, statistics, data – in other words – Crystallized Intelligence. 

Out of the 7 billion humans today, a mere 23 million have the knowledge required to build technology that serves us. 

And most of those developers have been schooled in a way that undervalues our innate Fluid Intelligence. So much so, that it’s not uncommon for non-technical folks to get utterly frustrated with a developer’s lack of understanding of non-technical concepts. 

If you’ve ever tried to speak to developer about non-developer stuff – perhaps you know what I mean. 

It’s not a programmer’s fault for thinking the way we’ve been taught to think. We’ve been taught to be fact and data oriented at the cost of forgoing our intuition and our power of fluid reasoning. 

And that’s why we need you. 

You who think you won’t stand a chance against that 20-some year old rock start software developer that Facebook, or Google or take your pick – fight to win over on a regular basis. 

You don’t have an MIT or Stanford Computer Science degree. 

You don’t know what Redux means. Or Serverless APIs. Or even APIs. You don’t know what a real-time database means. You have no idea how a mobile app works. 

No. You don’t have the Crystallized Knowledge to compete with those rock star millennials. 

What’s crazy is that soon, they won’t have the knowledge to compete with AI machines either. 

This is where you come in. 

You have something machines don’t have. And something that privileged first-world Software Developers have less than you. 

Yes. You have an upper hand. 

You, my struggling immigrant friend. 

And you – I'm looking at you, Chris, my middle age friend, who is raising a family in a developing country, on a miserable salary, doing excruciating difficult work. Which will soon be replaced by a machine. 

Your advantage is that your Fluid Intelligence is high. 

It is high because you have been in new and uncomfortable situations all your life. You’ve struggled. You hustled. And you survived. All these years – you survived. 

I know how that feels. I’ve been there. 

I am there. 

And so you my friend, is the reason why Carmel has a soul and the reason why it exists. 

Because I believe that if we give you the right technical skills, to go with your high Fluid Intelligence – then you will not just make a better living for your family – but you will build better innovating products and services for all of us. 

Why? 

Because you have heart. 

Because you know where you came from. And you know the real depth of the human condition. 

You are not just going to invent a better mousetrap.  

You are going to create Software Products – when you’re ready – that will solve deep, authentic, needs. 

And companies will love you for it. 

We will love you for it. 

We need you to get those technical skills as fast as humanly possible, because you have what it takes to innovate. 

If I were 24 again. I’d want to have a boss like you. I’d like to innovate with you. 

Get technical. Now. 

The whole world waits anxiously to see what you have to offer. 

We need you to show us what true Human Innovation looks like.