Reposted from http://finlit.biz
This blog post was inspired by a friend of mine who asked, "Can you give me three ways I can improve in the area of innovation?"
1. We now live in the information age, where it seems everyone, everywhere is creating something new. More people on the planet have access to more information than ever before. With organizations like Khan Academy and Standford, promoting online education, people are capable of learning at much faster rates. Even this blog post is a sign that anyone anywhere can now create for the world to see. "You no longer have to create something new, there is already enough creation as it is. You can now add a new perspective to relate existing creations."
For instance, Aristotle came up with the four temperaments thousands of years ago: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy. We see these same redundant temperaments in a myriad of other personality tests: BANK (Action, Nurturing, Blueprint, Knowledge), DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance), STAR (Action, Relationships, Stability/Structure, Theory/Technical), Workology (General, Cheerleader, Mediator, Number Cruncher).
Rather than re-creating that wheel, why not tie it into other theories. For example, to resolve conflict you might Compete (Fight), Collaborate, Accomodate or Avoid (Flight). In the middle of these is compromise. Do you see how conflict resolution is related to personality type?
Likewise, Gary Chapman has a book called the "Five Love Languages" in which he introduces ways of expressing and receiving love: Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Acts of Service and Gifts. Another great book, by Gary Smalley, is "The DNA of Relationships", in which he introduces core fears people have. We could tie these two books together and make hypothesis. For instance, if someone was abandoned as a child, perhaps their greatest fear would be abandonment. This would probably lead to a need to spend quality time with people to confirm they are loved. You could begin to tie in fears with love languages and even possibly relate those to personality types. Do you see how fun this could get? And that is just relating three books! How much more information is out there?
2. "You don't have to be good at everything, you can recruit people who are good at everything." According to Jim Collins, who wrote, "From Good, to Great", the best leaders in the world, find a cause or mission and recruit people towards that cause.
If you are great at detail and follow through, why not partner with someone who can't get their bearings but is constantly coming up with new ideas. If you can help them see one of their dreams to fruition, your collaboration will be innovative.
3. "There is something that you can do that no one else in the world can do." Many people spend to much time focusing on their weaknesses. Take this as a rule of thumb: Spend 80 percent of the time developing your strengths. That will keep you accelerating. Spend 20 percent of your time developing your weaknesses. That will keep you from being slowed down.
I had a good friend of mine tell me about his son who in middle school competed nationally as a runner. Apparently, at the national level, there is much more interest in tri-atheletes. So my friends son learned how to swim. He was an amazing runner, a pretty good biker and a terrible swimmer. He would place in the twenties because his swim time was so slow. What he ended up doing was spending a little bit of time to get his swim time up to average. This minor change caused him to jump from placing in the twenties to within the top five!
Do what you love. Do what you were meant to do. Just spend some time once in a while checking your blind spots to make sure they aren't preventing you from achieving your full potential.
When you focus on your strengths, and focus on becoming the best in the world, you will naturally seem innovative and creative, simply because you stand in a class of your own.
