What reinforces and strengthens creativity?

This old Apple message is profound in many ways. It honours the people who do things differently, and profoundly crack through conventional wisdom.

Do we as a society support behaviours that encourage breaking through the things as they are? If yes, then why do we all pay the same taxes (more or less), are required to learn the same specific subjects in schools, etc. Why are there sanctions against going against the flow of accepted common sense, discipline and practice.

Cultural Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” Yes, we are all individuals, and yet, culture prevails in letting us know there is a right way to meet with success. Today, meeting with success seems to have a relationship with accessing new ideas and making new decisions that lead to behaving in alternative ways.

What makes the film clip’s creative Goliaths so outstanding?

• tenacity and resilience?
• social networks, marketing and media?
• plans and execution?
• originality?
• orientation to risk?
• attitude towards failure as a leverage for learning?
• passion for their beliefs?
• seeing things in new ways or interpreting data using new forms of analysis?

Yup, all contribute to bolstering personal creativity.

A poem for your inspiration.  Gordon Bonner presented it to me in the late 1970′s as a piece of wisdom with regards to how others may perceive new ideas.

The Calf-Path

by Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bellwethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made,
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed that zigzag calf about,
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They follow still his crooked way,
And lose one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.