A lot of Innovation Comes Down to A lot of Destroying
Imagine that you spent an entire year building a beautiful home in the woods. Your dream home. Each day you woke-up early, chopped down some trees, shaped your wood, and laid piece by piece to build your home. It wasn’t easy work, but you enjoyed it. All day long, you built and built, slowly putting together your dream home and at the end of the year you’re finally finished!
But, all of a sudden, you take another look and you realize that this isn’t your dream home. You have an entirely new idea for an even better, bigger, and stronger home… even though you know that you can “get by” with the current home.
So what do you do? Do you say “ahh.. oh well.. let me just keep this home since it took me a year to build, even though I’m not 100% satisfied” OR do you say “let me destroy this current home and build the one that I really want! So what if it took me a year to build, the new home will be worth it!”
These are the decisions any creative, innovative, and disruptive person has to make throughout their journey. Will you have the guts to totally destroy one of your concepts for an even better one when the time comes? Will you have the courage to turn your back on something that is only “okay and decent” for something that is “magnificent and amazing” ? Will you be willing to risk it all to pursue what your heart is telling you to do?
Don’t be scared to destroy. A forest fire is natures way of promoting new — greener — growth. A fever is a way of purging your body of a virus. When you break a bone it comes back stronger. You see, advancements and creativity come from destruction in so many ways.
Can you dig that?
3 Comments
Marcel
October 4th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Absolutely true!
It´s awsome to keep asking myself, why not? =D
Especialy here, in South America… there´s much to be done!
Victor
October 5th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Hey Dave, those are some scary thoughts man, especially if you’ve got so much time and emotion invested into the project…but it can be exiting at the same time. I guess we have to step out of our comfort zone and constantly keep growing. Even if it’s not an entirely new business, changing things up in order to promote growth and development is always good, even if it means destroying ideas that are holding us back. Lets detach our pride for a second and allow ourselves move on to bigger and better things. I’m not sure who said it, but they said it well: if your not growing, you’re dying.
Sometimes growing hurts, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes our thoughts of failure and destruction are just in our head. And we don’t have to push through them; we could just let them go. It’s possible to detach our selves from our own head and from our thoughts. We can release them and just simply be; it’s just another point of view, except not so cluttered with crap. lol…I can probably take some of that advice right about now.
lawrence
October 5th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
i love that image…i can stare at it for quite a bit, and conceive life and business
Leave a Comment