I just started reading a fantastic book, and it makes the point that innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum (despite the fact that many people think it does):

“We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of the detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them into some new shape.”

What do you envision when you think about innovation? Do you picture the mythologized solitary genius brainstorming in isolation, or do you picture a enthusiastic observer and tinkerer interacting with the world around them and seeing what comes of it?

Most of the time people like to think of innovation being limited to the first kind of person rather than the second, but the reality is, innovation happens in a context. Not in a vacuum.

If you’re struggling to come up with a new idea, maybe the solution isn’t to push yourself deeper into isolated thought and disconnected experimentation. Maybe the solution is to connect with the people and the world you — and see what problems need to be solved, what traditions need to be transformed, and ideas need to be added to.