Being an innovator is both a blessing and a curse. Innovators are constantly seeking to improve things by finding a better way. A questing personality is a blessing providing innovators with a source of personal pride, accomplishment, and exhilaration. At the same time an innovator’s job is never done. There is always a better way. A sense of perpetual incompleteness and never being satisfied torments most innovators I know. I think this blessing and curse dichotomy is the secret sauce that makes innovators tick. It motivates innovators to take personal risks, collaborate with unusual suspects to find a missing piece, and jump through incredible hoops seeking a better way. Innovators wouldn’t have it any other way.
There is always a better way. It doesn’t matter how innocuous or small a thing from everyday life it is. You can always tell an innovator because they fixate on addressing small things with the same child-like enthusiasm they readily deploy to large complex societal problems. It’s the little things that often get innovators the most riled up. I learned this lesson the hard way and share one of many personal examples. After a long career as a road warrior strategy consultant I found myself at home trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my career. One morning I came downstairs and opened the cupboard that housed breakfast cereal for our three children and found it filled with twelve half-opened cereal boxes. You know the one I am talking about. Tell me you can’t relate to this important dilemma. I fell into the trap and loudly proclaimed, isn’t there a better way to organize this cereal. The response was immediate and resounding, thanks for the input, now go find something else to do, preferably out of the house! I know my wife is groaning reading this thinking, no, not the cereal box story again. Can’t you come up with a new story for heaven’s sake? P.S. regarding the cereal box story, the children and the cereal boxes have left home and I miss them both terribly. Innovators can’t help themselves, no matter how small the challenge, there is always a better way and they are driven to find it.
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Author: Saul Kaplan
