Don’t Think Like a Peasant
Sometimes it seems like everything has already been done. This world seems ridiculously over-connected, over-supplied with everything we could ever need, every social media, every product, service, and business model, every app. Every market is overrun with suppliers, innovators, designers, creators; every niche that seemed novel is packed full of competitive overachievers.
This is an illusion created largely by, ironically enough, social media and the viral nature of all things pop.
There are gaps. There are gaps in connectivity, gaps in technology, gaps in communication, a million “problems” left unsolved, or solved improperly, or ignored completely. In fact, there are not just gaps, it is one big gap, a void, but when we focus on what already exists, what has already been done, what others have created, we are blinded to the invisible need, the seed of demand that hasn’t yet sprouted, a creative solution to a problem that the masses don’t recognize.
It is the same old world, because the masses are largely the same old masses. There are a few innovators who seem to set the course. Then, the fancy new media go to work publicizing and spreading new ideas, new technology, new worldview. And finally the followers follow.
Why would you bother to be creative? Why would you waste your time and energy devising solutions for problems people don’t even know they have? Why would you bother to find a new way to connect people, start a new group, organization, or business model? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel when “it’s already been done?”
“It’s already been done” is peasant-mind.
The truth is…There’s not always an app for that.
In fact, when we are brave enough to be ourselves in a world of pop-clones, we begin to discover just how many apps are missing, just how many oceans haven’t been explored, how many ideas are only seeds. Infinite ideas, to be exact.
It’s the assumption that someone else has it covered that leads us to follow, thinking other people know better what the world needs, thinking we don’t have enough knowledge, enough creativity, enough sophistication, enough resources to innovate. This is the voice of peasant-mind. You can ignore it’s lazy bend toward the status quo and imagine again.
What if you believed that what life has expressed so far — what has been created, designed, written, manifested — is not even a fraction of the potential of our collective creativity? What if the world of a billion shitty apps is not even the tip of the creative iceberg? What if, in order to tap that massive black void of potential, you had to be 100% yourself? Forget about followers and following, and what the internet thinks of you, and just go be you? Forget about what your mother and father wanted from you, what society judges you to be, what your culture says you must do; forget about the priest, forget about the administration, forget about Facebook.
I want encourage you to be completely yourself, and to express your creativity in whatever ways make your heart happy.
It’s not only ok…it’s necessary, it’s good, right, and beautiful, to drop all efforts to be the person you think you “should” be. It is such a relief to know that your only job is to be you; express you. Your work is to keep dropping things that you thought were you, but really aren’t. So you will waste less and less time trying to be someone else, and what is left at the end will be more pure, more true, more you.
And this is how we arrive at Innovation-mind; we simply drop Peasant-mind :)
We are naturally creative; natural problem-solvers, natural innovators. Once again, we are only blocked by misconceptions, wrong viewpoints. We are misguided to think that we have nothing to offer or that everything really valuable has already been done by much “better” people, or at least by people better equipped. Our contribution would somehow be substandard, repetitive, or amateurish.
Existence needs you. It doesn’t need you like your marriage needs you, like the society needs you, like your job needs you. It doesn’t need to you to obey, or conform, or follow, or buy, or fall in line. It needs you to be a lion, a subversive, a creative force of nature. It needs you to breakdown when you need to; honor feelings of desire, rage, and compassion; give yourself permission to be exactly as you are.
Existence needs you to be an individual.
Since we make assumptions anyway about the world we live in, choose to assume that you are valuable, and that your creative work has not been done, especially not in the unique way that you will do it. Assume that the individual is the most important and most powerful force in the world. And finally, assume that everything you do from a place of wholeness and personal power will be the perfect thing to do.