How Curiosity Will Ignite Your Inner Innovator

Creativity Tuesday.

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[00:00:00] Izolda: Hey there and welcome to the innovative mindset podcast. My name is Izolda Trakhtenberg, I’m super happy that you’re here and I’m also happy to talk to you about creativity today. Creativity, Tuesdays are going to be a thing from now on, and I’m really excited to do this in part, because I want to really get down into the nitty-gritty of the four CS that’s creativity, compassion.

[00:00:28] Collaboration and curiosity and curiosity and creativity, they go together. And I actually looked up the exact definition of curiosity in the dictionary, and it’s really very simple. It is the desire to learn or know about something being inquisitive. And so the question then becomes. What is curiosity’s role in creativity?

[00:00:56] Curiosity is the thing that gives you the need to follow the thread of [00:01:00] an idea. Right? So if we think of creativity as following the spark of the idea, the, the, the notion that you decide you want to do something, curiosity is the need to know about it, or to learn about it, to see where it’s going to go.

[00:01:15] So that need to follow the thread of an idea because. Really important. But before that you don’t want to discount the idea or the thought when it pops up, instead of. You can get curious as to why it bubbled up in the first place, what it is and if applicable, what problem it solves. If your idea’s creative in nature, it can go one of three ways.

[00:01:39] It can simply exist and be part of the world’s stories. It might be a painting or a piece of music or an interpretive dance or performance art that adds to the human experience and the human condition. Right? If you, if you decide to write a book or a short story or a poem, it is part of that human experience.

[00:01:58] And it becomes [00:02:00] an excellent opportunity to get creative and curious about what that notion is trying to tell you if you’re an artist of some sort and, you know, I believe that we’re all artists in one way or another, you’ll need to figure out for yourself whether or not this idea, this seed of creativity is something you want to pursue.

[00:02:17] If you’re curious, of course you want to pursue it. You might have to rearrange your schedule or figure out a way to pursue it, but pursue it. Yet you have to figure out for yourself whether or not it meets one of the other two criteria. The next criterion is you might be interested in making an impact.

[00:02:38] You might be interested with this idea in sort of affecting people or situations or the world at large. You might want to get them thinking or doing things differently. The last has. Driven creators and innovators and adventurers for ever. I’ll have a lot to say about this, but, but this [00:03:00] one is super important.

[00:03:02] Let’s look at why. And here’s what I mean by that. If you are a creative and you have a mission, if you’re trying to solve a particular problem, all of a sudden you slide into. Being an innovator, right? To me, an innovator is a creative person with a mission. And so you might want to solve the problem to make things easier or to help, right?

[00:03:34] You want them, you might want to make money and making money is great. No question. But there can be something infinitely, more satisfying because you’re compassionate about something or you’re solving a problem to help yourself. But also others. The inventor of the, uh, electric washing machine remains unknown.

[00:03:53] The actual person, various people hold patents for various parts of it and various advances. But let’s [00:04:00] look at the notion of going from beating clothes against rocks, to putting them in a drum and rolling them around to putting in paddles inside the drum so that the clothes get agitated even more and get cleaner to all of the various types and iterations until we come to the modern washing machine, then pretty much do everything.

[00:04:22] And here’s, here’s an example of why this kind of innovation and creativity can be a really beautiful thing as far as helping others and, or solving a problem. I was standing in line the other day at, uh, the kitchen bus at union square and in Manhattan, uh, they were, they’re giving out free slices of vegan cheese pizza, and I was waiting to get my slice of vegan cheese.

[00:04:48] Cause they’ve released a new vegan mozzarella and it’s fabulous. And I started talking to the woman in line behind me. Then she was upset because there’s too much technology. She said, it’s too much. It’s going too [00:05:00] fast. And then she said something I found very interesting. She said, Technology’s going to take all our jobs.

[00:05:06] And that actually gave me a wonderful opening. And I said, but what about the jobs nobody wants to do? Let’s take, for example, uh, uh, look at all of the garbage on these New York city streets. What if there were robots who went around and picked up all the trash, then people wouldn’t necessarily need to be the ones doing it.

[00:05:26] And robots would probably be doing a better job and they also wouldn’t necessarily mind. I, this is my own judgment here. I do not like the notion of being a, uh, a garbage picker-upper. They made, there may be people who love it, it’s it, it is not for me. And I imagine some jobs are not jobs. Any human is going to want to do so getting a robot or some other tech to do, it might be a beautiful thing.

[00:05:53] And her eyes lit up. Like it was Christmas morning. She said, you mean we’d have garbage pickup that worked. We wouldn’t [00:06:00] have bags and torn stuff all over the streets because robots are do it. I told her sure it was possible. I mean, maybe not today, but someday. And she loved the idea. She’d been thinking about all the jobs that would be lost, but she hadn’t been thinking about the fact that some of those jobs are jobs that we humans don’t want to do and robots wouldn’t mind doing it all.

[00:06:20] So that notion of. Solving problems and creativity becomes really. And she said you’ve changed my mind. And I was actually surprised about that, but she, she did, she, she asked a question that I thought was a Stute. She said, but how are those people going to make money? And I said, well, wouldn’t it be cool if they didn’t have to pick up garbage and were therefore freed up to follow a different path, maybe they want to be a writer.

[00:06:46] Maybe they want to drive a bus. Maybe they want to have their own business delivering roller skates or electric bikes to houses. So the people who want them don’t have to go hunting for them, but can just have. Delivered. I’m not sure what they could do, but it seems pretty limitless. [00:07:00] And I’m not saying everybody has to become an entrepreneur, but some of these jobs that we don’t really want to do, I’m assuming here, I admit they could be moved away through new inventions and new innovations.

[00:07:10] And then those people who’d been doing those jobs can do something else. And what that is, I’m not. And of course we’d have to look at the infrastructure of things like that. And of course, we would have to take care of the people whose jobs would no longer be to pick up garbage for example. But what if we made that change?

[00:07:27] What if we looked at this all a little differently? How cool would that be? If somebody is innovation, somebody’s creativity. Being driven by wanting to solve a problem, allowed people the freedom to pursue different kinds of work or pastimes, right. Anything that helps us save time. Because remember time is, is finite, right?

[00:07:53] We all only have so much time. And so if something comes along that allows you to save time, like [00:08:00] the dishwasher, for example, right? You doing dishes by hand is one thing, loading the dishwasher, having to do all the work and then just taking the dishes out and putting them away. That’s that’s an hour or so that’s saved, right?

[00:08:12] That’s that’s yours. And we don’t tend to think of it. If we have a dishwasher, we don’t tend to think of it as, as a big deal, but it’s a huge deal. Remember if you ever lived in a time where you didn’t have a dishwasher or a place where you didn’t have a dishwasher, it is a big deal. So, and there are still parts of the world, certainly where there are no dishwashers.

[00:08:31] So when we look at this sort of thing, when we look at the innovations that come in and help people save time, so that those people are then freed up to do other things. That’s a really big deal. And in fact, I was just talking to a couple of podcast guests who are going to be on the show soon about the little sun.

[00:08:51] Uh, it’s a, it’s a solar powered light. It’s called a little sun shaped like a flower. It’s really cute. And the reason this little [00:09:00] sun is a beautiful thing is because the person who and I can never remember his name, he’s an architect who lives in Iceland, but I just can’t remember his name. I’ll have to put it in the show notes, uh, Elias somebody, anyway, he invented this little solar powered light, and every time you buy one, they send.

[00:09:18] To somewhere in Africa that does not have a light infrastructure. They don’t have in indoor lighting. And so people who want to read at night or who want to do, do things at night after working, if they want to hang out and play a game or read or learn or study or work or work, even they can now do it because that little second.

[00:09:39] Is solar powered. So you charge it during the day. And then in the evening you have light and in an area of the world where there isn’t that kind of artificial light happening. Uh, that’s a huge, huge deal. It saves people a lot of time and it actually doesn’t save them time. It gives them time. It [00:10:00] gives them time to be able to go ahead and.

[00:10:05] Do things that would otherwise be impossible. And so this notion of being creative, this guy’s an architect, the guy who started it, he’s an innovator because he’s doing it. You know, he’s being creative with a mission. He got curious about what, what kind of thing he could do to help people who don’t have a way of seeing at night?

[00:10:27] How cool is that? That, that he got curious about it and he didn’t stop. Right. When the idea came to him, what if I did that? What if I created something that would help people in parts of the world that don’t have artificial light for nighttime? What if I did something to help them see and he didn’t go, yeah, that’ll never work.

[00:10:45] Instead he went home. Okay, let me pay attention to this. Let me get curious about what I could do. And that brings me back to that notion of curiosity. What do we need to do? To [00:11:00] follow the curiosity to follow the idea. I mean, what do we need to do? How, how do we keep space? Well, being mindful about, or being aware that the idea has come and honoring that instant is really important.

[00:11:16] So here’s my mission for you. As I, as I said earlier, you know, I believe that we are all creative people. We are all innately possessive of our own unique creative genius. And so you have ideas, ideas come to you, and I’m going to ask you to either go to the idea document, and I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes that I developed.

[00:11:40] Uh, it’s it, it’s yours for the keeping, right? You can go to the idea document and add your ideas in, and it’s not my idea document. You would actually make a copy of it, grab it and use it to your heart’s content. It’s it will be yours. Cause you’ll make a copy. That’s going to be your personal copy, but it gives you the opportunity to jot down [00:12:00] your ideas and or you could keep a notebook, whatever it is you must for the next week.

[00:12:07] Jot down those ideas in the idea document or a little notebook or a piece of paper or on your phone and your notes app. However you do it. If an idea comes to you instead of going, no, no, no, I don’t have time for that right now instead go, okay. This idea came, whatever it is, it could be. I know what I want for dinner.

[00:12:25] It could be, I figured out how to do, uh, flying cars. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you, instead of going out, I don’t have time. Stop what you’re doing and note it down, jot it down, uh, recorded into your, into your voice memo app on your phone, whatever it is, note down, whatever ideas you have and at the end of the week, go through and listen to, or read your ideas and see if any of them have merit.

[00:12:58] If any of them [00:13:00] spike your curiosity. Having the idea and getting curious about it is the first, there are the first two steps of unleashing your inner. Ingenious innovator. And that is what we’re talking about here. Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens when the idea strikes from inspiration from without, or from your subconscious or from a dream doesn’t matter.

[00:13:25] But then you have the curiosity about it to see where it will take you and that desire to know or learn about something is what will propel you forward to make curiosity and creativity a bigger part of your. All righty. So you have your mission. I’m going to put the idea documents, uh, in the show notes, the I, the link for the idea document in the show notes, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s short episode.

[00:13:51] I am Izolda Trakhtenberg and I will be back tomorrow to talk about compassion. I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about the wild tomorrow fund and the. [00:14:00] Amazing people who run it. Uh, Wendy Hapgood was just on the show a few weeks ago. And I’m going to talk a little bit about what they’re trying to do and the difference between, uh, or actually the relationship between wildlife conservation and habitat reclamation, because compassion Wednesdays are just as important as creativity, Tuesdays and collaboration, Thursdays and mindfulness Fridays.

[00:14:24] So we’re going to have a whole bunch of different ways of looking at innovation and. I will talk to you tomorrow, but if you’re liking this episode, I would love it. If you would review the show, tell me what you’re thinking, and if you really love it, tell a friend until next time, this is his older reminding you to listen, learn, laugh, and love a whole lot.

 

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