Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Sometimes the classics still hold up. Necessity is and will always be the mother of invention.
I found that Aesop, Plato, and Benjamin Jowett have all made the claim in their own words.
The Movies
I’ve made it known previously that I am not a huge fan of movies. See E-Impact 61.
I’m going to backtrack slightly. It happens to the best of us.
The thing I like about movies is the creativity and innovation. How many movies have been made about the future?
Here’s a few that I came up with:
Who doesn’t like the movies? Me, actually.
Back to the Future (obviously!), and the rest of the series
Star Wars
Total Recall
2001: A Space Odyssey
Bladerunner
Alien
Starship Troopers
Divergent
The Hunger Games
Hot Tub Time Machine (did I really go there?)
A simple internet search will yield hundreds.
I haven’t watched most of these (Star Wars included, sue me) but it’s clear that the future is something we are fascinated with. Come to think of it, why do we have history classes in school and not future classes?
Maybe it’s applied in science class.
I think movies teach us a lot (whether truthful or not). Speaking of history, I learned so much about dinosaurs as a result of Jurassic Park (have considered actually spending the money to see the new one).
The key point about what we see in the theater and invention is that films often predict the invention of things that we see as desires - and ultimately, necessities.
If life was lived in outer space, we would need a way to carry oxygen around and fly through the universe.
Build Something Great
I encourage you to build the next greatest thing. However, I am also a realist.
If you’re reading this, I don’t expect you to invest the first ever personal use space ship but tell me if you have an idea…
It’s important to find a productive place on the spectrum of innovation. You want to stay on the cutting edge of technology but you don’t want to be so far ahead that what you desire is not realistic.
You can’t build something great if your idea is not actually buildable.
The Switch Hitter
I don’t have too many regrets about my childhood athletic career (can you call it a career at age 9?). I wrote about a key moment in it in the September 8, 2020 edition of E-Impact if you want an example about the importance of team sports in my life.
As I grew older, baseball became more competitive and it was harder to hit the ball. You start playing tee ball (you hit the ball off of a tee), then you move to coach pitch (your coach throws the ball hoping you hit it), and finally a kid on the other team pitches (often with no accuracy).
I remember my batting average (BA) moving from .800 down to .400 and eventually to a more realistic number that you might see in professional baseball (.300). BA is calculated by dividing the number of hits you have by the number of at bats.
They say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports because professionals that are successful 30% (BA of .300) of the time are Hall of Famers. Even the best hitters don’t hit the ball on the “sweet spot” of the bat all the time. In fact, they do very infrequently. A player might have six hundred at bats in a season and only hit twenty-five home runs. It’s not scientific, but that’s only 4.2% of the time - not a lot of the “sweet spot”.
The struggle to stay consistent as a hitter is challenging with such a high failure rate and uncontrollable factors that contribute to your lack of success (weather, bad bounce, well placed fielder, etc.).
Some hitters are called switch-hitters because they bat from either side of the plate (the opposite of the arm the pitcher throws with). These players are uniquely ambidextrous and able to swing in both directions. They give themselves a better chance to hit the “sweet spot” in each at bat. Mickey Mantle is widely considered the best switch-hitter of all time.
I have always wondered what my baseball career would have been like had I been a switch hitter. I am ambidextrous in “regular” life so why didn’t I apply this in baseball. Mickey might have had a challenger.
I even hit righty when my dad first taught me how to swing. An early coach turned me around and I had some early success and never looked back. When I got to the point that kids were throwing curveballs, I struggled to hit them when coming from a left handed pitcher. Ugh! That ball would bend around from behind my back.
I am not saying I would be playing in Major League Baseball (MLB) now, but maybe I wouldn’t have stopped playing in high school.
There’s a “sweet spot” on a baseball bat and regardless of the side of the plate you bat from, it’s tough to time up your swing with the ball coming at you at 90 mph.
Finding the Sweet Spot
Luckily, creative thinking isn’t as immediate as a baseball at bat. It takes less than half a second for a pitch to reach home plate. I hope you give yourself more than that amount of time to think critically.
I think your success rate as a critical thinker is also way better than a hitters. You almost can’t go wrong. That’s the good news. But, the bad news is that everyone has great ideas.
How do you find the invention “sweet spot”.
If you apply this line of thought to The Impactmaker Movement, you have to assume that invention isn’t necessarily a form of technology, space travel, or paranormal processes. It could be much simpler.
We are often trying to solve problems that have been around for centuries. Our sweet spot lies at the point in which someone’s life is impacted positively.
You can’t solve world hunger without feeding one person and you can’t build a village without one home. This is important to consider because even the most attainable visions have to start simple.
Each individual benefactor of your efforts has their own necessity. Each underserved child has their own needs. You must identify the individual needs before scaling an impact project.
I am learning this from a professional perspective at the moment in my work at Initiate Impact. We have great ideas, but have to perfect the process for individual families first.
I have noticed that finding the sweet spot in impact work seems to be an exercise of pace. It means slowing down to be more efficient.
A strong leadership presence is necessary to push things forward but your sweet spot is normal not at the edge of your most innovative thoughts.
What is Really Needed?
We have a tendency to reach for the best option on the market. It’s very easy to research the best new phone, camera, or television that’s available. Yet, we don’t really need the latest technology.
Another concept that I will take from the business world is the MVP, or minimum viable product. It can be hard to settle for the MVP in many cases, but this is a great way to build momentum and learn from your choices.
Business owners who’ve found a big problem believe deeply that they can find the big solution - and that solution might be the ticket to the next ground breaking company. But the best innovators are able to take it one step at a time. They push hard enough so that there is a risk of failure (and it does happen) but they don’t push so hard that nothing happens for lack of capability.
So, I urge you to consider what is really needed in regards to the causes that you care most about.
Find the sweet spot between innovation and what’s already been perfected.
What Would Jobs Do?
I have spent time researching Steve Jobs for this blog, for my book (Personal Finance in a Public World), and for my business. It has been said that he was a tough person to work for and with, especially in the early years of Apple. I learned though, that he always focused on what would make people’s lives better and not necessarily what would make Apple more popular.
Is this in Cupertino, CA?
Jobs knew that most of an organizations pressure needed to be applied to the experience of the individual user. Overtime, Apple’s packaging, marketing, and presentation also focused on the end user but it started with the original developers.
The vision for what is now the most famous technology company in the world was not to be the most famous technology company in the world, but “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”
Just Contribute
The Impactmaker Movement only asks you to contribute to the cause. How can you make the world a better place to advance humankind?
If you change one person’s world, awesome!
If it scales to a world renown organization, that’s great too - but you can start at this point.
The more of us that innovate on simple terms, the more issues we’ll solve, and more people we’ll help. Scale will come by the volume of impactmakers and not the effectiveness of any one impactmaker.
Jobs also once said:
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Our invention is mothered by individual necessity.
Lead by solving individual problems and large scale success will follow.