Child's Play

Child's Play

Almost everyone has retained some of their creative spirit from childhood. If you played with blocks, you ’ll default to combinatory ways of working. If you were good at math, you’ll have another way of working. They shouldn’t be labeled with anything like “creativity” or “innovation”, as people will automatically compare what they do to those words. Certainly, innovative companies should recruit people that were precociously innovative at age seven and put them in teams or groups in which those talents can flourish.

The fact that most workers don’t like their jobs is the reason we want to be innovators and entrepreneurs. We share a common desire to continue the creative spirit of our childhoods in our adult lives, simply because it makes us feel good, and gives us a sense that we are making meaningful contributions.

Over the years I have studied the lives of jazz musicians, many of whom suffered through abject poverty and/or abuse as children, and used curiosity and creativity as a means of escape, figuratively and literally.  It can be said that  the escape from economic impoverishment is through the partially open door of creative possibility, in all its weird,  unconventional, eccentric forms--and certainly jazz, as well as many new forms of music emerging in the 20th century,  were a major motivator for upward mobility and the migration to major cities, or simply to flee intractable circumstances.  Freedom  (and capitalism) was the spiritual ground for that, which lives on spiritually to this day. But even if you continue to innovate, in art or otherwise, it doesn’t necessarily have an effect on growth or prosperity, which leaves us with the only thing left: the ability to live a life fully in the present, and in a state of flow. It can be just fun to do. At the end of the day, do you feel intrinsically enriched, or are you simply busy going through motions?