Category: creativity

How Simultaneous Invention Shows that Progress is Inevitable

There seem to be an increasing awareness that simultaneous invention is more the rule than the exception. This means that when society reaches a certain stage of technological development, certain inventions become inevitable – and this tends to happen more and more often. This excellent Quartz post ‘Simultaneous invention’ summarizes this awareness, that can be complemented by Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker ‘In the Air’.

“The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances. There may be those who see in these pulsing events only a meaningless play of capricious fortuitousness; but there will be others to whom they reveal a glimpse of a great and inspiring inevitability which rises as far above the accidents of personality.” It would be the availability of scientific knowledge, and its continuous increase, that would create this inevitability.

We need to accept that invention results from building on others’ ideas and findings, and that as more and more people devote time and effort to invention, more and more inventions will be simultaneous in several places and contexts.

Of course, as the Quartz article remarks, this creates an increasing issue with the concept of Intellectual Property – why give the benefit of temporary monopoly to the first that publishes? Isn’t that rather detrimental to society and not as beneficial as conventional theory exposes (the benefit being the publication of the patent)?

Those questions are at the core of the future of Intellectual Property law and should not be underestimated.

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How Virtual Creatures Invade Our Connections and our World

Virtual creatures start to be everywhere in our environment: major instagram influencers are hired by leading brands that are in fact virtual, virtual news anchor presenters appear. Maybe your next connection on your preferred social network will be virtual? Tough times for starlets, like exposed in this post ‘Brands Are Creating Virtual Influencers, Which Could Make the Kardashians a Thing of the Past‘.

Lilmiquela, a famous virtual Instagram influencer

Virtual creatures may look safer and more docile: no risk of personal crisis and unprofessional behaviors outside the screen, and full control of the behavior on screen. They can be made as attractive as needed, and may be fully adapted to the audience – many of those virtual influencers are colored.

At the same time of course we’re losing a certain dose of humanity, making interactions with those influencers and brands even more… virtual and distant from our day-to-day life. Those won’t have the same day-to-day issues and challenges we face as humans. Also, their perfection will look even more unapproachable for us poor imperfect humans.

I believe this trend is here to stay and will even be enhanced further with AI bots coupled with virtual creatures. It will also be harder to distinguish those virtual connections. Another reason to stay grounded in our humanity and being less influenced by the perfect pictures we find of others on social networks!

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How the Japanese Concept of Ikigai Increases Life Satisfaction

The concept of Ikigai has been floating around the web lately, like in this Medium article ‘Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life‘. It seems to be a japanese concept aimed at locating the area at the intersection of what you love doing, what you are good at, what you can be compensated against, and what the world needs. Compared to other models, it is this last addition which makes the approach special.

The addition of values and seeking activities that the world needs is an interesting change to the more classical model of finding the soft spot between passion, career and capability. It definitely gives an interesting spin to the exercise of finding out where to locate what we are currently doing as our main activity.

As to whether finding one’s Ikigai is the best way to prolong life, that’s a stretched conclusion which we’ll not investigate further, although this claim obviously creates interesting reflections.

How close are you to your Ikigai?

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How to Decide When To Persist or to Quit

Following up from the previous post ‘How the “Entrepreneur Struggle Myth” May Becomes Excessive‘, the issue of when to quit on an entrepreneurial endeavor comes up front from the fact that struggling too much may be detrimental.

In the previously mentioned excellent piece “No More “Struggle Porn”” by Nat Eliason, he explains that “Working hard is great, but struggle porn has a dangerous side effect: not quitting. When you believe the normal state of affairs is to feel like you’re struggling to make progress, you’ll be less likely to quit something that isn’t going anywhere.”

This is complemented by a great post by Tim Berry, ‘You Have to Know When to Quit‘, based on the same piece. And of course he refers to the excellent little book by Seth Godin ‘the Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)‘. I love Tim Berry’s simple explanation of the choices in an entrepreneurial or creative venture: “There’s no virtue to persistence when it means running your head into walls forever. Before you worry about persistence, that startup has to have some real value to offer, something that people want to buy, something they want or need. And it has to get the offer to enough people. It has to survive competition. It has to know when to stick to consistency, and when to pivot. So persistence is simply what’s left over when all the other reasons for failure have been ruled out.”

Therefore, be persistent and work hard but only when you see progress and some pre-conditions are met that demonstrate that your project has some chances to become something workable!

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How the “Entrepreneur Struggle Myth” May Becomes Excessive

Following up in our myth-busting spree after our previous post ‘How Waking Up Early Is a Myth and May Not Be the Success Recipe‘, let’s turn to the masochist myth of the fact that entrepreneurs must suffer to be successful. In this excellent disruptive piece “No More “Struggle Porn”“, Nat Eliason busts a myth established by prominent bestselling authors and entrepreneurs.

As Nat Eliason explains, “There are [always] two messages being sent. The first, the obvious one, is “Entrepreneurship is hard, work hard and you can succeed.” Nothing new or wrong with this. The issue is the second layer, the message underneath much of what [bestselling authors] broadcast: struggling is good.”

As he explains, “Entrepreneurs devour this message like doughnuts at a WeWork because most of them are failing.”. It gives a reason for the situation, while in many cases it is probably down to poor luck and circumstances, and not the lack of hard work. “Struggling and hustling become success proxies unsuccessful people can brag about to give themselves the dopamine hit they would otherwise get from, you know, actually succeeding at something.”

So if you catch yourself to complain too much that you’re struggling, it might be because you’d need to try something else. Watch out! I must say this piece has given me a lot to think about….

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How Having a Real Lunch Break Is Important

Following up from the previous post ‘How Breaks Are Essential for Personal Productivity‘, what about the lunch break? How important is it for productivity? Here again Daniel Pink’s book ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘ comes to the rescue.

When I travel to the UK or the US I am always amazed how people take their lunch snack at their desk, almost not even standing up. Thus the lunch time is kept to a minimum and they can leave work earlier. In France and many other countries, a true lunch break is an essential part of the day and it is important to go somewhere out of the office to have a real meal.

According to Daniel Pink, having a good lunch break is essential for overall effectiveness. “Not just any lunch will do, however. The most powerful lunch breaks have two key ingredients — autonomy and detachment.” Therefore, it is important to be able to disconnect from work sufficiently.

Taking the time to have a real lunch break is thus confirmed as a good practice; this has consequences on employers’ policies as well: since a proper lunch break is correlated with improved effectiveness, why hesitate?

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How Breaks Are Essential for Personal Productivity

There seems to be an increasing body of research showing that breaks are essential for personal productivity and performance. A good overview is presented in the book by Daniel Pink ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘.

For example, it seems that “frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones . 18 DeskTime , a company that makes productivity – tracking software , says that “ what the most productive 10 % of our users have in common is their ability to take effective breaks””.

Also, “When […] students had a twenty – to thirty – minute break “ to eat , play , and chat ” before a test , their scores did not decline . In fact , they increased . As the researchers note , “ A break causes an improvement that is larger than the hourly study“.

Therefore, taking good breaks periodically is good for personal productivity – with the condition that those breaks really involve thinking about something else. When do you start?

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How the Lean Startup Approach Should Not Be Used In All Instances

In this Quartz post ‘“The Lean Startup” is an unproductive legend‘ the authors denounce the excessive ideological weight of the concept – both for startup founders, investors and educators.

According to them, “The Lean Startup ideology has sown a lot of confusion in cohort after cohort of my MIT students for a decade. The recipes have all the right sounding words and slogans. They seem to make so much sense, so how could they not work?“. And they quote a number of instances where this approach has not made sense, or where it has been used in situations where it was not applicable (such as the scaling up of a startup), or where people quoted the approach to justify inadequate actions.

I really believe that the Lean Startup approach is on something. The main message – that it is essential to listen to the customer the earliest possible (on the basis of a Minimum Viable Product) and not spend excessive resources to develop what we believe is the best product – is needed and important.

Of course like any approach it has a domain of application and can’t be applied to all circumstances in life. This is not a reason to throw it in the trash: like any approach, let’s use it within its domain of validity and let’s be wise enough to recognize when it is not applicable.

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How Starting Something Often Takes Longer Than Doing It

In his post ‘But why does it take so long?‘, Seth Godin states that “Persuading ourselves to move forward can take even longer [than doing, coordinating, persuading, pathfinding…]”

I find this observation very much to the point: although building something takes time, for the vast majority of people, just deciding to start takes even more time (and sometimes an infinite duration as they never get to start).

It is only by trying many things that one finds what works for himself and for the world. Therefore, losing excessive time deciding to start is probably the number one issue why people don’t manage to achieve what they aspire to.

Don’t spend too much time overthinking about what you want to start. Just start it. Start it small, start it slow but start. That’s the key.

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How Dramatic The Effect of Our Daily Physiological Rhythm Is

Following our previous post ‘How We Can Choose The Best Timing for Certain Activities‘  and the excellent book by Daniel Pink ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘, one of the issues which come out is the dramatic influence of our daily rhythm on our activities.

In particular, Daniel Pink exposes several dramatic examples of poor decision-making in the afternoon. And that many cognitive tasks should better be done in the morning. “Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days . Across many domains , the trough represents a danger zone for productivity , ethics , and health.”

“In short , all of us experience the day in three stages — a peak , a trough , and a rebound . And about three – quarters of us ( larks and third birds ) experience it in that order . But about one in four people , those whose genes or age make them night owls , experience the day in something closer to the reverse order — recovery, trough, peak .”

Of course I was aware of the effect of our circadian rhythm, but what struck me is how significant that can be: “these daily fluctuations are more extreme than we realize . The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol“. Food for thought!

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How We Can Choose The Best Timing for Certain Activities

In the excellent book ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘, Daniel Pink investigates the importance of Timing in what happens in our lives.

The take of the book is that “Timing , we believe , is an art. I will show that timing is really a science — an emerging body of multifaceted , multidisciplinary research that offers fresh insights into the human condition and useful guidance on working smarter and living better.”

The book covers timing issues at different time scales: day, week, month, year and even decades. It shows that certain timing issues can be predicted, linked to our physiology. Some others can be predicted thanks to our psychology (for example, “Negotiators with a deadline are far more likely to reach an agreement than those without a deadline — and that agreement comes disproportionately at the very end of the allotted time“.

I was a bit frustrated by the fact that the role of luck in timing was not sufficiently developed when it comes to the timing of single events of major importance in our lives. However the guidance given on the part of timing we can control – when best to take decisions, learn, be creative makes it a worthwhile read.

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How To Do Your Best and then Let Go

Robin Sharma writes “Do your best then let go—and let life do the rest“. This strikes a chord with me as I have notoriously difficulties to let go after I have done my best.

I struggle mainly on two issues.

First, there is always this difficulty of knowing how much doing your best is really doing your best. There is always the risk of stopping too early, and not really doing anything remarkable; and there is the risk of spending too much time and effort to optimise the last bit, which is not really effective. Where should we stop ‘making our best’?

Second, I have difficulties being patient and letting go, waiting for the world to notice and to respond. Generally the response is good, but how much effort should be made in broadcasting our work, showing how we have made our best?

For the first aspect – where should we stop- it is probably a question of experience and knowing what the average person delivers in this context. On the second aspect – how to let go, well, I have to learn to be patient and reap better what the world returns.

What about you? How good are you at deciding when you have done your best and then letting go?

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