All of us have heard about that elusive quality called “originality.” However, while it is still something that remains extremely desired, calling a person an “original” can as well bring up meanings of strangeness or weirdness.
Therefore, is there originality without originals?
These book chapters explore means in which you can be non-conformist and original without being rejected, and some of the originals who have defied the status quo and drove innovation all through history.
Chapter 1 – Originality is your solution to a rewarding profession.
Check any kind dictionary and you will see that originality is written as the quality of possessing a unique or singular character. However, what’s is the meaning of an original? In this present setting, originals are people who not just imagine novel concepts and change the status quo; however, they are also people that take the action to make their exceptional vision become a reality.
Even the tiniest things can recognize an original. Economist Michael Housman found out in his research that a specific percentage of customer service workers remained in their works far longer than other people. Looking for hints, he found an astonishing association between how long someone remained in their job and their selection of an internet browser. It seems insane, right?
Understand this: workers who installed browsers besides the default Internet Explorer were not just more likely to remain in their works; also, they were more likely to take action, challenge difficulties and look for new answers. Eventually, the inclination to install Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome was tied to problem-solving skills that, in turn, enables these workers to remain in their jobs an average of 15% more.
For other workers who basically made use of built-in browsers, they tackled their duties in the same conformist manner as they used the internet. They used the standards provided to them and they couldn’t solve difficulties, which ultimately made them tired of their works.
If you wish to endure in the working field, your best stake is to become an original. The good news is that anybody can do it. Although not every one of us might have been able to establish our own companies, write a musical masterpiece or change the course of history with an inspiring speech, everyone one of us possess unique ideas with the potential to develop our communities, our relationships, and our work
Putting new ideas in the world needs will and bravery not to back down when you want that change to occur. The first thing to do to become an original is defeating your fear of taking initiative and supporting your own ideas. How can you do that? You will see in the following chapters.
Chapter 2 – Quantity brings about quality when it comes to producing brilliants ideas.
Legend describes that when Isaac Newton a physicist was resting under a tree, an apple fell down and fell on his head. In a flash of brilliance, Newton was motivated to create his law of universal gravitation. Unluckily, brilliant ideas such as this don’t regularly fall off from trees; new ideas need hard work.
When we talk of idea creation, what’s more significant–quality or quantity? Ultimately, they’re both equally significant, particularly because quantity creates the path for quality in brainstorming. Dean Simonton a Psychologist, well-known for his study of creative productivity, revealed in his research that extremely creative people don’t really create better ideas; instead, they only create more of them.
By making a bigger volume of work, they had a greater chance of creating a small handful of great ideas. For example, Picasso’s whole body of work comprises numerous rugs and prints, 1,800 paintings, 2,800 ceramics, 1,200 sculptures, and over 12,000 drawings. And still, just a little number of these pieces provided Picasso his accomplishment and reputation as an international art icon.
Meaning, when we talk about quantity and quality, you can’t possess one without the other!
Another of Simonton’s discoveries revealed that even geniuses can’t say which of their ideas will become everlasting classics and which ones will fail. Therefore, once again, the more you create the better. Simonton discovered that Beethoven assessed his work pretty differently than later experts did. Comparing letters where Beethoven graded 70 of his own compositions with the assessments of modern critics, Simonton calculated that Beethoven had disagreed with them approximately 33% of the time!
Producing ideas and numerous ideas is the first step to opening your creative potential. However, you mustn’t view your brain as a creativity factory, producing original ideas the manner cars are produced on an assembly line.
To make brilliant ideas, we have to take it slow. That could signify taking an alternative route and procrastinating, or only creating the time here and there to relax under a tree!
Chapter 3 – Procrastination can do creative wonders when you utilize it cleverly.
As we told procrastinating, is your productivity’s arch-nemesis; however, is this truly true?
Leaving things to the very last minute enables us to be more creative by forcing us to improvise. Would you have thought that the most popular speech of Martin Luther King Jr. was the outcome of procrastination? King was scheduled to deliver a speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; however, he didn’t even begin to write the speech until a day before at night.
King’s iconic “I have a dream” line was partly unprepared –Mahalia Jackson a gospel singer cried out during King’s speech, pleading with him, “Tell them of the dream, Martin! Tell them of the dream!” King left his script and started to speak candidly about his motivating vision of the American future.
King’s speech is an excellent illustration of the Zeigarnik effect. The occurrence, named after Bluma Zeigarnik a Russian psychologist, explains the manner that our mind remains open to new ideas and understanding, even after we try to complete a job and give up. Basically, King’s uncompleted speech made room for his brain to bring up brilliant speeches.
For great originals, procrastination is an essential tactic. It enables them to make slow progress while remaining open to a variety of opportunities. Another illustration of history’s creative procrastinators is Leonardo da Vinci. In 1503, he started painting the Mona Lisa, then left the project before going back to the painting some years after. The Mona Lisa was eventually finished in 1519, 16 years after!
Historian William Pannapacker considers that this enabled da Vinci to procrastinate in a deliberate manner, testing optical illusions and new painting methods. Without this testing, and the procrastination that made the room for it, we may never have gotten the Mona Lisa or other excellent works by original thinkers.
Chapter 4 – Accepting your weaknesses during a pitch will bring you more assistance.
Have you ever had a less-than-encouraging answer to what you believed was your greatest idea yet? Be certain, it’s not usually because your idea is pointless! There are a few common causes behind refusals.
One thing is that, stating a view that threatens to disturb the status quo can serve as a threat to your business profession and your network as well. A huge study done across nonprofit, retail, service and manufacturing companies showed that the more often workers talked about their ideas and worries to their bosses, the less likely they were to get promotions and raises over a two-year period.
This is somewhat a disturbing vogue! Therefore, what can you do to make people agree with your ideas? Weirdly enough, your best choice is to state to people why they should not agree with your suggestions. Begin by being open about the weaknesses of your projects; this will make the audience amaze and reveal to them that you’re a trustworthy person irrespective of the circumstances.
This is exactly what entrepreneur couple Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman did when they were presenting “Babble” their online parenting magazine and blog network to potential sponsors. To their audience’s big surprise, Griscom was straightforward and mentioned that their website’s user engagement was lower than they’d anticipated, 40% of the news on their platform was preoccupied with apparently pointless celebrity gossip and their back end needed key update.
Although it seems like they were shooting themselves in the foot, investors were enticed by their method. They had trust in them, and Babble produced a profit of $3.3 million in funding before being bought by Disney in 2011.
Chapter 5 – Make radical ideas conversant by putting them out there frequently and looking for common points of reference.
Do you consider yourself to look better in the mirror or in an actual photo? The majority of us would like the reflection we view in the bathroom. Our pictures can be cringeworthy and unpleasant. Why is this so? It is because we’re viewing ourselves from a strange position. It’s a usual human propensity to refuse things that we are not used to– even our own photos!
As you might have imagined, this offers another obstacle to dreaming up original ideas. However, there are approaches you can take to make even the most conventional colleague become comfortable with your unorthodox answers.
Exposure effect is just one of these, whereby repeating yourself will offer other people time to open up your ideas. Research reveals that when you expose people to new ideas more often, it will allow them to be more interested over time. Therefore, voice out and repeat yourself!
In other to make this simpler, make your ideas brief and snappy, mix them with other ideas to display their various applications and be ready to continue pushing your solutions for as long as it is needed. Persevere, and you’ll be amazed by how your colleagues’ responses get better!
Another beneficial approach for making new ideas look less controversial is to structure them in an accustomed context. When the idea for the animated classic The Lion King was initially pitched to Disney, at first, producers lost interest because of its dark plot.
However, during a meeting between scriptwriters and Disney executives, CEO Michael Eisner and producer Maureen Donley changed things around by emphasizing the film’s resemblances to Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet. This was adequate to convince the producers, who were very more interested as soon as the unconventional plot was tied to a common point of reference.
The Lion King proceeded to become 1994’s highest-grossing movie and it got two Academy Awards. This illustration shows how great ideas can turn into a reality when their novelty is balanced with conversant elements to gain support.
Chapter 6 – The greatest collaborators are the people that love to show that you are mistaken.
Irrespective of what you’re chasing, if you only pay attention to people who commend you, you most likely won’t reach really far. It might not be pleasant; however, at times you require a little bit of criticism to assist you to develop and improve.
This was shown in a key experiment conducted by a psychologist named Charlan Nemeth. Groups of participants were told to employ one of three likely job applicants. The first applicant, John, was described as possessing the best quality set for the job.
Even at that, some of the participants displayed a preference for the less skilled applicant named Ringo. However, when some participants debated in favor of the third applicant, George, the probability that the participants would eventually employ the best-skilled candidate multiplied. How can we understand this?
By putting a minority view into the mix that is different from the two leading opinions, the agreement is disturbed. Then, group members are driven to judge the matter for themselves and not basically follow what others are thinking. This is a great approach to stop groupthink and motivate everyone to share their actual views.
Groupthink happens when people put in groups prioritize evading disagreement and reaching an agreement over making the best decision possible. This notion, created by psychologist Lester Irving Janis a Yale research, is the basic issue in poor team decision making. Another method to stop groupthink obstructing your own creativity is to surround yourself with people that will question your ideas regularly.
This was the approach applied by Ben Kohlmann, part of the people that established the Chief of Naval Operations’ Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) when his team started to work on new ideas for the navy. They succeeded in making a full range of creative answers and were even the first people to take a 3D printer on a ship to print spare parts should in case a thing damaged while at sea.
This creativity wouldn’t have happened without the strong group dynamic that occurred due to Kohlmann’s calculated decision making. He picked junior officers with a track history of facing a punishment as a consequence of confronting authority. Although these entire officers had their own upbringings and aims, uniting their disrupting mindset with a shared goal formed the perfect setting for creativity.
Chapter 7 – Learn to camouflage your ideas to acquire the allies you require.
Although you might already have a group of people who share the exact goals and values as you, it’s not certain that they’ll back up your ideas. If you wish to get reliable supporters, you have to win over your colleagues by hitting the appropriate tone in your messaging. The ploy is not to become overly extreme; however, to also make people fascinated.
Although we have a tendency to reason that shared goals are what makes a team united, research has demonstrated that the opposite is right. Judith White and Ellen Langer the Dartmouth College psychologists prove this discovery through the theory of horizontal hostility; this is a kind of bias that arises in relationships between members of the exact minority group.
For example, the most committed members of radical political groups have a tendency to attack one other more than they challenge impersonators and betrayers within their group, even though they share the common set of core values.
You can evade horizontal hostility in your team by ensuring that your ideas look a bit less radical. For you to this, you’ll require a camouflage – or even a Trojan horse! Nevertheless, the goal is, not to persuade people to change their behavior completely; however, to connect with the values you already realize they have faith in.
The creator of wireless power solutions for charging electronic equipment named Meredith Perry, got small support when she presented her ideas to her physics professors and engineers for the first time. All of them totally agreed that it was basically not possible at that time to charge electronic devices with waves moving through the air. Therefore, what did Perry do? She replaced her strategies and made use of a Trojan horse.
By camouflaging her idea and saying to people that she basically wanted to make a transducer and not one that transferred power wirelessly, she got lots of more support: her idea was fascinating; however, not extremely impossible. Collaborators and funders were very more eager to collaborate with her, and Perry was able to make her devices and company, uBeam, which at the present offers innovative wireless charging solutions.
As we understand, it’s not sufficient to have just creative ideas alone – you need to understand how to discover the appropriate supporters and collaborators to turn them into a reality.
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam M. Grant Book Review
Release your creative potential by making many ideas and sharing your greatest ideas with other people. To enhance your creativity more, you should surround yourself with disruptive thinkers and let them feel relaxed about sharing their views. Learn how to make your original idea look conversant, accessible and captivating to acquire the support you require, and you’ll be prepared to change your unique ideas into real-world answers.
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