What We Did: In
class today we discussed the psychology of innovation and the
idea that innovators aren’t born, they’re made. Innovators and entrepreneurs behave
differently than the rest of us in that: they challenge the status quo and they’re
willing to take risks and view their failures as lessons. We learned about the
“regret minimization framework,” which basically says to do what you won’t
regret when you look back at life.
“The people who are
crazy enough to think
they can change the
world, are the ones who do.”
One
of the best ways to behave more like an innovator is to follow the Innovator’s
DNA. It says that the five key steps to being innovative are associating,
questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Part of the class
discussion was fitting Steve Jobs into this model. He associated by using his
knowledge of calligraphy from a college class to influence the typography on
his company’s Mac computers later on. He questioned by challenging the idea
that a computer needed a fan. He observed when he noticed that the average
person didn’t want to have to put all their computer’s components together on
their own, and thus he came up with the idea for the personal computer. He
networked when teaming up with the brilliant and tech-savvy Steve Wozniak.
Lastly, he experimented by building his own “blue box” and selling it.
We talked about the similarities between Steve Jobs and Elon
Musk, two of the greatest entrepreneurs who exhibit the Innovator’s DNA
perfectly. Both Jobs and Musk are serial disrupters; they’re not afraid to
rattle their own industry to achieve something greater. The interesting thing
is that both of these men aren’t necessarily inventors – they had other people
to do that part. They were just excellent at connecting the parts and moving
forward with a good idea. While typical executives simply focus on the numbers,
these innovative entrepreneurs focused on customers. Their unique brand of
genius is system-level design thinking and extraordinary conviction. Because of
their unparalleled passion for their ideas, they were able to achieve amazing
things. Steve Jobs was able to revolutionize the personal computer, as well as
the portable music industry with the iPod and iTunes, while Musk conceived
Space X, PayPal, and Tesla motors.
Key Takeaways and
Future Applications: Before today, I always sort of had the notion that people
were either born to do greatness or they weren’t. Sometimes I felt like I fell
into the latter category, despite having an abundance of creativity when I was
a little kid. I remember asking questions about everything and coming up with
the most imaginative games that all my friends wanted to play. My parents like
to tell a funny story about how they lost me one time in an airport. They ended
up finding me with a family of Lithuanians who didn’t speak a word of English,
and apparently I was introducing myself and had already become best friends
with another little girl my age. I often wonder what happened to this curiosity
and why I didn’t harvest it, but if there’s one thing I’ll take away from this
class, it’s knowing that I still have creative potential. We learn to conform to social norms as
we get older, but this is the very cause of the unoriginality in today’s
society. It never occurred to me that someone could be taught creativity or
innovation skills, but the Innovator’s DNA made this seem possible. Contrary to
popular belief, it requires a unique mindset, not an innate gift, to achieve innovative
greatness.
I reflected
on the five skills and my current performance in all of them. I would say my
associating skills are relatively weak because I have a horrible memory. This
makes it hard for me to dig deep into my brain to recall information and relate
it to newer things. What I should start doing to improve association is write
things down more often so that I don’t forget as much. I am not as good at
questioning as I used to be. I remember specifically in 9th grade I
was in a math class with all kids older than me. They used to make fun of me
for being dumb because I would raise my hand and ask at least 5 questions per
class. However, I got almost all A’s on my test. That proves that questioning
gets you more knowledge, it doesn’t mean you’re dumb. I regret listening to
those bullies in 9th grade because I think they caused me to
subconsciously stop asking as many questions. From now on I’m just going to
stop caring what others think of me. Asking questions only makes you smarter. I
think observing is my best skill out of the five. I have always been an attentive
person, and often notice things that others don’t. I especially enjoy people
watching and learning things from the actions of others. Networking and
experimenting are my weakest skills. However, thanks to this class I am
learning a lot about how to network, and I will start to improve that by
creating a Linkedin account. To get better at experimenting I think I will
learn to not be as scared of failure and just live in the moment.
.JPG)
One
company that really values failure is IDEO. One of their mottos is “fail often
to succeed sooner.” Not only do IDEO offices have their successful inventions
on display, they also exhibit their failed ones. Because I consider myself a
perfectionist, the idea that a company could be satisfied when they have failed
is so taboo to me. I figured the only way I could understand this theory would
be to try it out myself. After class I went through my papers and found a very
unfortunate math exam from the beginning of this semester. Similar to how my
mom used to hang up my good work on the fridge, I hung my math exam on the mini
fridge in my dorm. What I did was the complete opposite of the typical practice.
Let’s just say this wasn’t exactly a grade that I was proud of. By hanging up
my failure, it was a constant reminder of what I did badly and provided me with
daily motivation to do better next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment