Never before has the need for creativity been more critical.
Never before have set about crushing creativity before it has a chance to bloom more than we do now.
My nephew is dyslectic, always had trouble at school, with teachers, sitting still, and anything that required him to read and write. In a parent-teacher interview when he was about 12, my sister was distraught and angry to hear that her son, who had by then built a computer from bits and pieces, powered by a cobbled together solar panel on the roof, would be lucky to progress beyond being a day labourer.
He was lucky. After scraping into a regional university with a practical focus, he earned a masters degree in electrical engineering, got bored, and went back and did medicine. He is now an ophthalmic surgeon, restoring sight in the footsteps of Fred Hollows.
Had his practical talent not been recognised by an academic with a long life of non-academic experience behind him, my nephew may have continued tinkering in the garage while making his living on a production line. What a waste that would have been.
How many like him have we wasted?
How many like him will we continue to waste as we dose up the kids who cannot sit still in school, or colour between the lines, with Ritalin?
Back in 2008 an executive coach named Wayne Burkin wrote a book called ‘Wide Angle Vision: beat your competition by focussing on Fringe suppliers, Lost customers, and Rogue employees’. The title says it all.
Creativity and the resulting change does not come from those who can colour between the lines, always behave in a disciplined manner, are prepared to do as they are told at all times. It comes from the outliers, the originals, the rebels, as Steve Jobs noted, those who ‘Think Different’.
Seth Godin’s remarkable essay introducing us to the ‘Purple Cow’ resonates even more now than when it was written back in 2003. Paragraphs 5 and 6 should be reproduced and stuck on every wall of every room that ever has a student of any kind in it, and every office of anyone seeking to be a leader.
Never have we needed those who think different to have their hands on the wheel of the companies and institutions that together make up the economy, and will shape our kids futures more than we do currently.
Header cartoon courtesy of gapinvoid.com
The late Sir Ken crossed my mind as I wrote the post.
What a wonder he was!!
Spot on Allen. I reflect on a statement by the late Sir Ken Robinson who asserted that “we are educating people out of creativity’.