Ever thought — How do I become innovative?

I have

Omar Ismail
9 min readJan 18, 2014

What makes innovative people? What does it actually mean to be innovative? These kinds of questions require you to think deeply on a whole range of issues. I want to state some fundamental beliefs I engrained in who I am. I don’t believe the creativity is some mystical quality only a select few possess. I don’t believe that the innovative minds are these people that were chosen to live on Mount Olympus. I don’t believe Steve Jobs was this prophet chosen by God. I believe creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, are all skills that can be acquired through various means. I will explain later. Lets take a look at a few people.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in Stanford, at 25 years old, when they started Google. Interestingly enough, Google was the 17th search engine to have been created. Larry and Sergey were probably two out of maybe fifty (just a guess) people in the entire world who even knew how to index the web. Knowledge.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak set out to make Apple, they were at an interesting point. Woz was again, one of the few people in the entire world who had the knowledge to build a computer.

If you had read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, you would know very well that Bill Gates had a computer when he was 13, and accumulated 10,000 hours by the time he went to college. It is completely logical to drop out when you know as much (or maybe more) than your professors. Again, only a handful of people in the world could have started Microsoft.

Let me make myself perfectly clear: I am not undermining or demeaning what these individuals did. These are people I look up to and learn a ton from. I am only pointing out a critical component of being innovative. People want to be at the forefront of innovation. You know what lies at the forefront of innovation? Knowledge. Tom Preston-Warner, was able to make GitHub because of his knowledge of Git. Git was new at the time, and he was one of few Ruby developers who was using it as a tool for the company he worked with.

Again, I am not simplifying what these people did. I am only stating that they could have only done what they did because of the knowledge they had. The forefront of knowledge is where innovation happens because the only way to be innovative is to have the set of knowledge that can push the limits of what has been done. However, knowledge alone is clearly not enough.

Lets take a look at Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox. He was 26 when he started Dropbox. He had graduated with a computer science degree and had been a python developer for a couple of years before venturing out into his start-up. The idea for Dropbox came because he was on the bus from Boston to New York, and forgot his flash drive. Why does anyone need to carry a flashdrive? It woud be easier if I can just store my files on the internet. There were about 6-8 companies doing the exact same thing Dropbox started doing. So why did Dropbox succeed? Its design. Same reason why Apple succeeds today: design. Simplicity, intuitiveness, design. Dropbox, like Apple, like Google, were built with design in mind.

When Marissa Mayer, current CEO of Yahoo, was at Google in its early days, she commented on how the first user tests were very unconventional. When people were presented with the first page of Google, they actually waited for about a minute doing nothing before they were asked why they weren’t interacting with the website. They were waiting for other stuff to come on the screen. Google was the 17th search engine. The founders had the knowledge that few people in the world had. Google was created with simplicity, intuitiveness, and great design. To put files into a folder on Dropbox is as simple as click and drag.

One thing about software is that its a pain to use. Have you ever been asked to install something on your computer? I’m sure you cringed because of the likelihood that something will go wrong. What makes Apple computers great is that you get a laptop, press the power button, and there is no installation. It is simple, it is easy to use.

Drew Houston wasn’t unique like Sergey/Larry were. There were many other developers who could build what he built. Similarly, many other developers could build a facebook or twitter. In fact, many Ruby on Rails tutorials have you build a twitter clone. Drew Houston not only built something that was useful for people, but he also made it incredible simple and easy to use. He designed the product with the user experience as the target. He had enough knowledge and skill to build something when the idea called for it. His idea succeeded, not just because he had the knowledge and skill, but because he went above and beyond to create a simple and intuitive product.

Which now brings me to my point of entrepreneurship and creativity. The idea for dropbox isnt necessarily a revolutionary idea. Going to the moon in the 1960's, or trying to bring internet to the world today, is not necessairly a revolutionary idea. They are a way of thinking! Ideas are simply a manifestation of the way you think. If you look at the world, and have in mind, “how can I make it better”, “where can we make peoples lives better,” “whats missing that I can improve”, then an idea manifesting isn’t really that difficult. If you look at everything you do on a day to day basis, and always seek to make things better (for yourself or for others), you will probably think of an idea or two.

Let me tell you a story. One day I was going to a seminar at Harvard Medical school about neurology(I don’t go to Harvard). I was late and trying to find a parking spot. They were going to close the doors after a certain point, so time was of the essence. In trying to find a parking spot, I was thinking “there has to be an easier way to find a freakin parking spot (a meter).” I was holding my phone in my hand to see the time, and lo and behold, an idea came. Wouldn’t it be great to attach a GPS or some signal to every meter/parking spot in the city, and build an app that would locate the nearest parking spot to you? Make my life easier! Build something that will not only make my life easier, but will make every driver’s, in every city, life easier!

Sure, I am sharing my idea. But in all honestly, ideas are worthless. Heck some of you may be reading it and think to take the idea. Go ahead. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. If you can use that idea, and build the entire system, go through VC funding, and actually build an application that is simple, intuitive, and designed for a great user experience, please do it. An idea is just imaginative thinking and what can make the world a better place. When I was a child I was complaining to my dad that the mobile phone didnt have good internet. “Wouldnt it be cool if we had hot air balloons that could communicate with satellites and get internet to the world!?” Google is doing it slightly different, but very much the same.

Now let me clarify. Ideas have much intrinsic worth. The more you think of ideas, the more creative you get. They make you feel better. You are thinking creatively. That is all good. No problem. The point i am making is simply that if you do nothing with your “grand idea”, then what is it truly worth besides from personal intrinsic value?

I want to restate my fundamental belief. The only difference between the person sitting next to me at this cafe and myself is which one of us has a greater mind and uses our 24 hours better. The only difference between Warren Buffet and myself is mind and time. Which brings me to another point.

The mind is the single greatest aspect of human life. Everything happens in the mind. I’ll go on to say that a great mind uses time wisely, so really the only difference between humans is the mind. And I do not believe that some people have a special mind and I don’t. So it begs the question, how do you build a great mind. Knowledge. How do you attain knowledge? Learning. How do you learn? That is reserved for a different post.

There is this big debate on whether you can teach people to be creative or to be entrepreneurial. Okay…thats pretty foolish. The fact that you are trying to teach people is the problem. You would do a lot better to tell someone to go read biographies of great people, study case studies of creative products, learn to be resourceful, learn to code, break down and dissect what these great people are doing, at first mimic, then do your own thing. Take from others and put your own touch to it. No one in the world has the same exact experiences that you have, and for that very fact, you are unique. So enhance that uniqueness and add your touch to it. You teach yourself to be creative. You teach yourself to be an entrepreneur. You do that by learning from and analyzing other people, companies, product, history, etc. You build your mind with understanding all of these, and I guarantee you, in due time, given you enhance your knowledge and skill, you will be innovative.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal”. — Picasso

I believe I will be very innovative in the future for a couple of reasons. I read a lot of non-fiction books to seek an understanding of the world. I also read a lot of articles and read up on biographies. Currently, I am reading a book a week, and this is one of many ways that I am building and enhancing my mind. Reading about design, education, companies, biographies; reading about the world produces a greater mind and you gain inspiration from everything and everyone your reading/learning/ about. The mind works with associations, and creativity works the same way. Creativity is simply taking components of different ideas/topics and trying to combine them in a unique way to produce something different. Think about artists. It is a common misconception that only artists are creative. Thats complete crap. Software engineers, mechanical engineers, doctors, medical researchers, heck maybe even lawyers, are all creative professions. The reason why an artist is creative is because an artist has a canvas, and has a bunch of different colors that he wants to put on his canvas. That is the foundation. The point of creativity happens when the artist takes different colors in different quantities and combines them in a unique way to produce a piece of art. This the exact same thing software engineers do when they take different pieces of technologies and combine them together to produce something unique in their own canvas. Creativity is the art (no pun intended) if taking different components and combining them in a unique way to produce something different. It is a way of looking at the world, similar to being an entrepreneur . I am currently learning to code, and aim to enhance my technical knowledge so that I can be at the forefront of innovation.

This post isn’t to talk about myself. Its honestly irrelevant who I am. There is so much to write in a single essay. I didn’t even touch up on other skills, such as public speaking, communication, negotiation, hussle, courage, etc. In order to have an innovative future is to do everything you can today in order to set yourself up, so that when that point of frustration happens where you think of a really cool idea that will be helpful to a ton of people, you have the requisite skill-set and knowledge and understanding to make it happen.

“These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” — Abigail Adams

Unlisted

--

--