"Strive for perfection in everything. Take the best that exists and make it better.
If it doesn't exist, create it. Accept nothing nearly right or good enough."
(in other words, be remarkable)
"Strive for perfection in everything. Take the best that exists and make it better.
If it doesn't exist, create it. Accept nothing nearly right or good enough."
(in other words, be remarkable)
Do you remember Wonder Woman's Invisible Jetplane? If you don't, you can read about it over here, and it looked something like this (because it's invisble, there aren't that many images of it floating around):
It strikes me that her Invisible Jetplane is a good metaphor for a well-equipped journey through the world of the possible. As you embrace the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, you're going to have moments where you are going to have to stare into nothingness. Literally, there will be nothing there, and as a generative creator of future options, it is up to you to create something. If you're floating out above an abyss, it's good to be packing something to help ensure that you can get through the tough spots.
People who make it through the rough parts of a creative journey have an Invisble Jetplane of their own making, and it's called creative confidence. It's a set of tools you build for yourself, a personally tailored version of whatever design process you subscribe to, a way of working which you know will deliver results. It's certainly not about bravado or pumping yourself up. Not at all. Rather, it's about have the confidence to stop when the going is good, to celebrate when things break, to be able to listen and learn and test over and over in order to create a strong point of view about how things should be going forward — at least for now. And, as with Wonder Woman's jet, creative confidence is invisible, but it'll get you places, and people around you will notice what it can do, too. You can't see it, but you certainly can feel it when someone has it.
So where do you go to get your jetplane? If it were as easy as getting a degree or reading a book, everyone could do it. You certainly can't buy it, and it is not about credentials. The good news — at least for those of us who can't help but apply ourselves toward bringing cool stuff to life — is that it builds in strength with practice. As my friend Jon Winsor says, you have to ride a thousand waves before you truly get what it means to surf. It's the same for creative confidence, too: it's about practice and cycles. To grok it, do it. It's about getting miles under your belt.
Have fun with your jet!
While it is important to keep in mind that most new ideas aren't likely to be new, sometimes something really is new. And thank goodness. Life would be a dull, grey affair if we couldn't bring truly new things into the world. Today marks the birth of just this sort of thing: according to metacool's research and development partner Telstar Logistics, today marks the 100th anniversary of naval aviation:
Naval aviation was invented one hundred years ago today, on January 18, 1911, when a 24 year-old barnstormer pilot named Eugene B. Ely completed the world's first successful landing on a ship. It happened in San Francisco Bay, aboard the crusier USS Pennsylvania, which had a temporary, 133-foot wooden landing strip built above her afterdeck and gun turret as part of the experiment.
I love the context of this historical event, for several reasons. First, it happened in San Francisco. It's cool to think that remarkable mashups were happening out here back when "web" meant something that came out of a spider. Second, that this innovation really is a mashup: it slams together several new technologies — an airplane and a modern warship — in a way which produced a genuine first. Perhaps the very nature of mashups makes them more likely to disprove the rule of nothing being new under the sun? Take two common things, put them together, and that interaction may be genuinely new and a great source of value creation. Finally, innovation doesn't just happen. Close your eyes and imagine the human drama of this day one hundred years ago, and the importance of measured risk taking becomes readily apparent.
Hats off to Eugen B. Ely, who had guts to get out and do it.
"Above all, think of life as a prototype. We can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives. We can look for opportunities to turn processes into projects that have tangible outcomes. We can learn how to take joy in the things we create whether they take the form of a fleeting experience or an heirloom that will last for generations. We can learn that reward comes in creation and re-creation, not just in the consumption of the world around us. Active participation in the process of creation is our right and our privilege. We can learn to measure the sucess of our ideas not by our bank accounts but by their impact in the world."
Original. Creative. Breathtaking. Daring. Singular. Brilliant. Artistic. Practiced. Considered. Inspiring. Flabbergasting. Elegant. Ingenious. Astonishing.
Remarkable.
Do you want to achieve something amazing, or are you just here to phone in an acceptable, if ultimately forgettable, solution? Remarkable successes are born of affirmative answers to the former. Be remarkable.
Great things come from a total, unwavering commitment to being remarkable.
This 20th principle is foundational in the sense that it is an enabler of the desirable behaviors called out in all the other principles. For example:
Being remarkable is the source of the grease we need to keep the process innovating moving along. A broad commitment to being remarkable reduces the friction, smooths out the bumps, and turbocharges the chuzpah we all need to bring cool thingsto life.
How you are guides how things willl be.
"I spent weeks thinking about and composing this. It’s very important to me, to the company, and I hope to all of you. This is a statement of the philosophy by which we are building Clover. We’re not coming to you with a product that is complete. Instead we’re hoping to engage you. We have big things we want to achieve and we’ll only be able to get there with your help.
Third, like most things Clover this wall is going to change. The white paint comes out in 3 weeks."
– Ayr Muir-Harmony, founder, Clover Food Lab
I'm a big fan of what Ayr Muir-Harmony has been doing with his startup Clover Food Lab over the past two years. I'm jealous, even. Ayr is incredibly gutsy, but also deeply thoughtful about how we goes about failing his way to success. His venture is all about learning by getting out there and engaging with customers in an authentic, honest, and open way.
Ayr lives Principle 5 better than just about any other person I've met.
My last post on Shinya Kimura created some great discussions, both in email, on forums across the internets, and around my workplace. That video certainly struck a deep chord with me, as it has with many other folks. Kimura combines an extremely strong point of view with a strong bias for doing, and the combination is entrancing. As I watched it again over the weekend, it made me think of two commercials which aired earlier this year, one for Jeep, the other for Corvette.
Here's the Jeep spot, which, if you listen carefully, sounds more like the manifesto for a social movement than it does an ad trying to hawk sheetmetal (and that's a Good Thing):
And then there's these amazing 45 seconds of brand building from Chevrolet:
Warning: rant approaching.
For me, the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010 America is clearly saying "We need to start thinking with our hands again", and that we need at least to have confidence in our decision making as we seek to create things of intrinsic value — be they forged in metal, hacked in bits, or whipped out of the air via meticulous planning and rigorous execution. It's not difficult to get to a strong, compelling point of view. That's what design thinking can do for you. But in each of these videos I sense our society expressing a strong yearning for something beyond process, the courage to make decisions and to act. Talking and thinking is easy, shipping is tough.
I think that courage comes from foundational experiences messing with stuff. We're still in hard times, undergoing a structural shift away from the economic flows which underpinned the 20th century. The imagery expressed in the Jeep and Chevy videos is from that receding economic period, which still exists here in places, but which will continue to drain away unless we can grasp the essence of what those images are saying to us. We need to start thinking with our hands again. The Corvette piece pines wistfully for Apollo rockets and the like… and implies that we can't make them anymore. Which is probably true.
However, we are indeed still creating Apollo-like icons for the future — for example, Facebook, Google, and even the Chevy Volt — but we certainly need more people who, like Kimura, can't keep themselves from hacking away at stuff. Tinkering, hacking, experimenting, they're all ways of experiencing the world which are more apt than not to lead to generative, highly creative outcomes. I firmly believe that kids and young adults who are allowed to hack, break, tear apart, and generally probe the world around them develop an innate sense of courage when it comes time to make a decision to actually do something. I see this all the time at Stanford: people build their creative confidence by doing things which are difficult, rather than by mastering theoretical concepts, which, though complex and difficult in and of themselves, are not transformative in a personal sense. In my training as an engineer, I took years of complex math, and it was incredibly useful to me as I applied it to thermodynamic and fluid mechanics issues I encountered as a design engineer, but nothing gave me the courage to act as the experience I had creating a casting pattern on a lathe and milling machine and then pouring molten aluminum in the negative space left by the handiwork of my mind. It was my I can do this moment. If we want more people to fall in love with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, we need to help them have that moment, wherever and however it may come.
Brian W. Jones left a wonderful comment under my Kimura post, one which I think sums it all up really well:
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” – Jacob Bronowski
How will you grasp the world? What can your hands tell you? We need to start thinking with our hands again.
What can you ship today?