Why I love innovation

Innovation produces many economic benefits. It generates many new products and creature comforts. On those merits alone it ought to be greatly valued.

But the truth is that although I enjoy these benefits of innovation, they are not the primary cause of my passion for innovation.

The reason I care so much about innovation is that innovation reflects the natural state of the human soul. (I'm using "innovation" as a verb here.) The human soul seeks to understand. It seeks to improve the world based on that understanding. It craves beauty, excellence, dignity and nobility. It pursues truth.

When people are stifled in their attempts to express the natural desire of their souls, they become depressed in a way. You can see them in their robotic drone-like state in many organizations. They become listless. They go through the motions but there is no real passion behind what they do. As Thoreau said "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." These people are more predictable. They are more easily managed. But they are barely human.

Setting up organizations to allow, or even encourage, people to pursue the natural desires of their souls leads to many salutary benefits. Most immediately, it breathes life and passion back into the quietly desperate. These newly energized people are happy. Not in some superficial sense of having the material comforts they need and a lack of external pressure. They are truly happy in the profoundest sense of the term. They are fully engaged. They are maximally productive. They might not be producing exactly what you wanted them to produce but, in the aggregate, they best contribute to human progress and towards the creation, development and maintenance of the most beautiful, noble, excellent and dignified world we can possibly have.

Oh yeah, they also turn out some really cool products and generate all that economic activity that makes the bean-counters happy.

True in the soil vs. True in the heart

Some things are true because they just are. They are theoretically sound or necessary such as the proposition that 2+2=4. Or they have been shown to be true through rigorous empirical study. These things are true whether you like them or not. They are true regardless of your personal, political or sexual agenda. They are true whether you put on your socks before your shoes or you follow the sock-shoe, sock-shoe approach.

But there are other truths. There are things that are true because you believe they are. These truths start out as the glint in the soul of one individual. That glint grows and becomes a passion. Almost an obsession. And that person through sheer force of will, inspires others to believe. When that happens, this individual has created a movement. And there is very little a passionate movement cannot achieve.

Soil truths are fine. One ignores them at one's own peril. It is important to educate ourselves on these truths.

But let's not ignore heart truths. This is where the magic happens.

No shoes

Something wonderful happened to me recently. It seemed too good to be true. And so I started thinking "when will the other shoe drop?"

So many of us spend far too much time wondering about when and how life will take a turn for the worse. This isn't healthy. And it's counterproductive.

Worrying about the future degrades your ability to live in the present. And not living well in the present degrades your future opportunities. So from a purely rational standpoint, it is far more productive to live your best now than to worry about the future. Let me be clear: I am not advocating an irresponsible worry-free life. This is not about "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die." That is simply irrational escapism. It is no more intelligent than covering your eyes while driving so as to avoid an accident. What I am saying is that living life excellently will open up many doors to you and that you can only live excellently if you focus on what you are doing now. Distracting yourself with thoughts about future possibilities pulls you away from the very excellence that will ameliorate your future.

But worrying about the future does far more damage than simply to reduce your future value. Your present experiences are not just the keys to open doors you will chance upon in the future. Your present experiences become part of your soul. More accurately, your perceptions and interpretations of those experiences become part of your soul. When you are worrying about the possibility that there may be a chance that someday something bad might happen to you, you cast a shadow on everything you experience. You make it much more difficult to see beauty. And as life rolls on, your soul becomes gray and listless.

There is an alternative. You just refuse to focus on this. You take what comes your way and deal with it. When beauty crosses your path, you enjoy it. When you have occasion for laughter you grab it and shake loose every little peal. When love comes your way, you wrap yourself in it and luxuriate. And, when hard times come your way you deal with them too. But when you deal with them, you will be armed with a strong, vibrant soul.

And so, I have adopted a policy. The no-shoe policy. I will do my best to not think about or worry about any dropping shoes. I will live my life as best I can. Enjoy what the world graciously provides, try and accept whatever real limitations inhere in me or in nature. I will try and be smart and do what I can to create a better future but I will live in the world as it stands now and not in some imaginary world that might never come to be.

I invite you to adopt the no-shoe policy as well.

Just because it's shiny

It's hard to stay on track.

First of all, you have to have a track. That's not so easy. You've got to figure out what animates you, makes your heart sing. Basically, you've got to find your soul. Having found it, you need to figure out how to create a life around it. How to spend your time. With whom to associate. How to earn a living...

BTW, I'm not saying you ought to pick a track and stick with it forever. You should always re-assess what you're all about. As Emerson famously said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." Your track needn't have been foolish from inception but as times change (and as you change), it may become foolish and obsolete. So no, don't pick a path and stubbornly follow it forever. But you should always be on some path. Know who and what you are and have a plan for being that. [Similar to Gretchen Rubin's "Be Gretchen" rule.]

And then you have to stay on track. And staying on track is really hard. Much like holding reservations after you've taken them.



You see, shiny objects are going to appear as you move through life attempting to manifest your soul in all that you do. Those shiny objects can be large and very shiny such as beautiful women or men that look so delicious but are all wrong for you, financial opportunities or jobs that can be lucrative but which will take you further from your soul... Or, they can be small and just sparkle a little bit when you're at a moment of weakness. A brief opportunity to say something hurtful to someone you'd really like to hurt, a chance to not tell someone something they ought to hear but which will be difficult to say, even parking in a handicapped spot for just 2 minutes.

But you've got to ignore the shiny objects. They aren't good for you. They will destroy your life. Because your life is entirely about your soul. The rest of it is all about enabling the soul. And the problem is that the soul is not subject to apprehension by the senses while all of the other stuff looks so vivid, smells so delicious, tastes...oh man how it tastes! But those things are not real the way your soul is.

So find a way. Muster the courage to ignore the shiny object in an effort to burnish your soul.

Where are you hiding yourself?

There are so many interesting people out there. People who don't seem like other people. Who are just themselves. I'm not talking about wacky nutjobs who look like Jesus or wear hats made of tinfoil to prevent the aliens from recording their thoughts. I'm talking about "mainstream" people who are just themselves. Who bring a twist to whatever they do that comes from within and reflects what and who they are.

And then there are so many others - most people - who seem so desperate to prove that they are not themselves. These people want to be the average of everyone else. They won't use the word "average" to describe their aspirations. They'll tell you they want to be the best. They want to win. But they behave in ways guaranteed to snuff out anything interesting or novel.

These conformists are human. They have a soul, an essence. Try as they might to cram it down deep beneath their skin, I know it is there.

Let it out people. Please. You're not helping anybody - including yourself - by filing down every interesting facet of your personality. You're just making the world dull and less capable of producing the diverse ideas that we all need to thrive.

Of souls and society

How does one reconcile the need for the soul to find its purest expression with the need for society to effectively function? This is perhaps the most difficult question for one who places unlimited value on the beauty and nobility of the human soul but who also admits of the need for people to assemble and march forward together.

And it is a thornier issue than some might think. This is not simply the conflict between individual and society. It is that and more. Sure, we can point to the importance for the individual of having the opportunity to self-express, an opportunity without which there might not be anything to express. But one can make a case that the needs of the soul are also the needs of society. That society cannot function without the robust and diverse development and expression of individual human souls. Much as we require biological diversity on our planet, we require the diversity of thought and behavior to help us refine our knowledge and our methods of living. John Stuart Mill expressed this same position in On Liberty:

"In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so?... Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind."

This is as true for the small adjustments we must make to move from legitimate expertise to even greater levels of accuracy and Truth as it is for the major leaps forward that require truly divergent thinking.

So if both individuals and societies need a diversity of expression of the soul, how can we insure this diversity while also respecting the more mundane needs of society?

I'm not going to offer any good answers here. I don't have any yet. But perhaps I can offer a few thoughts that may prove useful.

To start with, I think it important to acknowledge that some souls are just screwed up. Whether nature created them that way or they became so by dint of a malformed nurture, some people have evil at their core. Allowing them an opportunity to explore, develop and express their souls will accord them and society no benefit. They must, somehow, be prevented from doing so. And whether we conceptualize this as a necessary infringement on the rights of the soul based on Mill's greatest liberty formula or we argue that an evil soul is really no soul at all and that its restraint is actually a nod of respect to the human soul, most reasonable people agree that the restraint of an evil soul is good.

But this is almost easy. What of souls that are not evil but which are only non-conformist? The most extreme case might be where an individual rejects formal laws on moral grounds. The American Revolution would be one such example. Socrates' behavior in Athens another. The recent Iranian demonstrations another. And so on. What behavior should we support? In this case it seems hard to me to support maintaining the formal law and looking down on an individual that follows his soul in an effort to dismantle an unjust law. On the other hand, what if he is wrong? Do we want anarchy?

A less extreme case would be where an individual, in the search for a pure expression of soul, violates not a formal legal rule but an informal social more. Say he burps at a table where such behavior is considered impolite. In this case, it seems difficult to argue that individuals should restrain themselves. Sure, a loud burp might be unpleasant, but would we really want to stifle all thought and behavior that upsets social mores and prevailing opinions?

So it seems to me that there is a continuum along which we can place the various types of situations. At one end, lie situations where the pursuit of individual aims and the expression of the soul can only damage society. This is the case of the evil person bent on wreaking havoc. At the other end lie cases where the individual cannot meaningfully damage society. In the middle lie the difficult cases. The violation of law on purportedly moral grounds. The extreme business risk in pursuit of success. And the like.

From the perspective of society, I suppose we can talk about the expected value to society of pursuing the individual expression of the soul versus blindly maintaining the prevailing system. At least here we have a grounds for comparison in the common unit of value (though in practice it may be difficult or, even, impossible to measure).

But how can we ever decide between the value of letting souls pursue their beauty and nobility and the need to maintain societal harmony?

Which brings me back to my opening question. None the wiser but considerably more tired!

Writing takes heart

If you look at some of my recent posts, you'll notice that I haven't written much lately. Part of the reason is that I've said much of what I wanted to say and I'm not going to write just because there is a social media diktat that you have to keep the content flowing. I write when there's something to say. But it has felt to me like there's something more behind my recent radio silence.

And it occurred to me the other morning that I've been suffering from a lack of inspiration. Work has not been enjoyable for me for some time now. It has been extremely de-inspiring. Not uninspiring. Uninspiring is just a lack of inspiration. Work has been de-inspiring. It has actually been sucking whatever inspiration I do have, right out of me. And it has left me either with nothing to say or without a desire to say anything.

And here's where it gets interesting to me. In order to have something to say, you need to keep your eyes and ears open. You need to care enough to look and listen around you and make observations. You need to think about those observations and play with them in your head so that you develop an idea with some measure of novelty that is worth sharing with others. In short, you need to be inspired.

This is why I have long been such an advocate of innovation and, particularly, creating cultures of innovation. It's not that I appreciate the new cool stuff that comes out of innovation efforts. Although I do. It's not that innovation is good for the economy. Although it is. It's that innovation allows for the human soul to reach its most elevated purpose. It allows us to take our most valued gifts - our hearts and minds and souls - and use them towards their most treasured end.

We all want to innovate. Or, more precisely, we all want to engage our hearts, minds and souls in the direction that our passions take us. And we want to channel those explorations and the ideas that they generate towards the common good. (Unless you're an evil bastard, but I'm not talking to you now so go away.) When we are allowed to do that, we find ourselves inspired. We are happy. We are productive. And everybody wins. When we are not allowed to do that, when institutions block our efforts to pursue our humanity for the common good, when we are forced to spend our time in fear of politics or in meaningless pursuits, then we become de-inspired. Unhappy. Unproductive. And everybody loses.

I'd love to end this post on a happy note. But I can't do that now. I hope that soon I'll have more inspiring news to share.