Business Insight Zone

Most of us don’t have job duties that we take as seriously as the sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknowns take theirs. That’s all right — business doesn’t have to be life-and-death all the time.

What’s striking, though, is how many successful people will tell you that they’ve focused, in the course of their careers, not on the dutiful pursuit of earning a living, but rather on pursuing their dreams.

I’m thinking particularly of the comencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005. (John Moore of Brand Autopsy has the download details.)

In his talk, Jobs encouraged the Stanford graduates to follow their own dreams, and to live by the words printed on the back of the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog:

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

These messages resonate deeply with me, not least because I’ve tried to maintain and develop my “foolish” creativity as I’ve built my career in the corporate world. But it’s also easy for Jobs to talk like this, because hindsight makes his choices look very good, and because he’s made boatloads of money.

There’s another oracle of creativity I like to consult — Bruce Mau’s “Incomplete Manifesto”:

. . .
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
. . .
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
. . .
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
. . .
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
. . .

And so on. Again, this is high-octane stuff for the creative person. But Mau is an architect and designer — he’s supposed to push boundaries as part of his business. What about the rest of us who aren’t in that sort of field?

Put it another way:

How do those of us — who aren’t Steve Jobs or Bruce Mau –
balance a vision of individual freedom, intuition, creativity, and community
against the business imperative to make plenty of money?

~

(Photo by dbking.)

Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship, The working life