Creatives

In the last few weeks I have been amazed at the creative powers of many of our friends, as well as people across the entire world.  Now, I'm not really talking about people who make the really big discoveries, like curing polio, or cancer, whenever that happens.  Those people and their discoveries are phenomenal in their own right, no question, but I am talking about the creative people who are around us every single day.  The woodworker, the welder, the writer, the photographer -  these and so many others take normal situations and change them or see the incredible in them.  If you want to know what this looks like, take a look at Pinterest or a website like Wood Whisperer.  People are doing some amazing things.

This is one of the things I love the most about what I get to do each day for a living.  I live in a state where people figure out how to do things with a more "hands on" approach than other places.  We have our share of engineers, designers, and draftsmen, but I am continually amazed at how many times I visit a customer and they are upgrading a product in the shop.  This isn't necessarily through computer assisted design (which we do use) but through the tried and tested method of fitting something and then seeing if it works.  One of my favorite examples of this was during a visit to GE Commercial Credit a few years ago.  They had a machine that they lovingly called "The Rubber Band Machine."  This piece of equipment sliced all of the edges off an envelope, discard the envelope itself and orient the contents of the letter in an exact pattern.  Pretty amazing, right?  Well, the amazing part was that when the people there were talking about the machine, they admitted it had been created because someone wanted a machine to cut the end off an envelope.  The rest developed over time and with ingenuity as they continued to say, "Well, if it can do that, can it ..."?  What they ended up with was a machine that could do everything.

As I said above, I get to meet these people every day, and with almost no exceptions, they are the most down-to-earth, grounded folks I have ever known.  I remember meeting a man who developed a filtering system that would separate nearly anything, and the reason he had done it was because everyone told him there was nothing on the market that could do this.  He needed to accomplish this task, so he went after it and in the end had a system others couldn't believe worked.  Earlier this week, I had the chance to go to Iowa State and listen to some young creatives talking about their passion and what they were going to do with it.  Their plans were bold and audacious and I believe many of them will accomplish these plans.  In the middle of this comes the challenge that I have to take to heart, and if you are in my age group, you may want to listen as well.

I have reached an age where I have come to believe that I know what will work and what won't.  This is based upon years of trial and error and watching others succeed and fail.  And, I have a strong enough belief in myself that I really think that I know.  Yet really, in this time in which we are living - with all of the creative people and resources around us, there is no limit other than that which we set for ourselves.  I know this intellectually, however knowing this in my gut is sometimes completely different.  This is the challenge.  I have to stop myself from being the one who crushes new ideas and potential by telling some of these younger people that what they are trying to do will not succeed.  In the presentations I saw earlier this week, there are a couple of ideas that I don't think stand a chance of surviving, but there was a time when I probably would not have believed broadband Internet would exist in most homes or that you could carry computers around in your hand.  I am still a child of a time when a computer filled an entire room and was so hot that you could not be in that same room.  That wasn't so very long ago, either.

So my challenge, and I would invite you to join me if you can, is to support new ideas when we see them.  In meetings I will not be the one who says, "That won't work."  I will be the one who encourages new approaches and suggests that we should take a look.  Often times, if an idea is given some room and time to bloom, it will do just that.  There are so many people right now with fantastic and creative ideas that just need a chance to get going.  Let's do what we can to help these folks along.  Who knows, one of them may help to solve world hunger or global warming.

Everybody keep after it.  We need the new ideas and the willingness to chase them.