My Idea Of Innovation

Today, I want to talk about myself a little bit. I am not really a "long" dark Nigerian, a Yoruba or a "decentralized" enthusiast even though that is what I seem to be. I am just me. I hate stereotypic labeling because no human totally fits a stereotype. There is no complete woman, there is no complete man. We are all a combination of different behavioral tendencies that fit into different categories.

Image Source: HERE

There are things about us that don't exactly fit our gender while there are other things that fit us and the stereotype the world gives us perfectly. We are all part-man, part-woman, our psychology might fling more to a certain direction but in the real sense of it, it's hard to be 100% in any aspect. Also, no one is a complete representation of anything, we are just who we are. A complicated bunch of socially and genetically influenced behavioural tendencies.

All my life, I have been free-minded and carefree,, and I have suffered well for it because we live in a world of rules and "dis-legal" laws, I am refering to laws that were created out of the blues. Anyone who doesn't obey those rules would most likely be outcasted from the societies that hold such rules dear.

If all laws , rules and way of life were right, the world would be a Utopia, the chaos in the world is a signal that we are actually wrong about most things

I love innovation, and from what I have discovered, innovation is not for the law-ful , you can not make something great by completely obeying established rules. You have to be really out-of-mind, literally and un-literally to make things that solve human problems as most human problems come from being in-elastic rules and idealogies that are erroneously discordant to the way the world is meant to operate.

Let me digress a litle bit. One of the most neglected fields of human science: philosophy , is the most important foundation of human existence. The philosophy a man keeps about life strongly determines how far he goes.

The world has isseus because there are still some erroneus philosophies held by people.

The un-writen philosophy of compulsory academic education is one of such, the philosophy of having all the "money in the world(exagerated)" before you get married is one of them, the philosophy of indifferent feminism is one of them. The philosophy of mis-understood failure is one of them. The philosophy of "your money determines your worth" is one of them. So what are philosophies, they are what I call Humanly Generated Laws, just like CGI (Computer Generated Images), they look so real, but they are not and never would be.

Humans beings generally become really scared when someeone aims to break a certain "dis-legal" rule, it sends a message of impending failure to their psychology but it also gets them really interested in you because you are about to do what they couldn't do but wish to. That is why anytime anyone want to do something unusual for the purpose of achieving something great, people will ask you to be careful, people will say things like "are you sure you know what you are doing", "are you certain you are not wasting your life doing this?", some will even say "you are just wasting your time, you will surely fail, some people have done it before you and they failed" but that will never stop them form asking from time to time "how is it going, now with what you said you'll do" even though it might be in a bid to mock you if you failed. That is very similar to what Jesus did, he broke the norms, the pharisees possibly gave him a smirk of "You will fail" but they were very much interested in him, more reason for His persecution.

So what's my point, being "unlaw-ful" in the "dis-legal" sense of it, is the perfect route of innovation.

Innovation is all about "dis-legal" lawlessness and this is the reason why once a trial at breaking the rules becomes successful, the process of achieving such a thing becomes a law. Everybody warns you about breaking it but now they have made it a law, a standard becuase you were succesful doing it. Examples of this is very evident in every phase of life.

One of the greatest inventions that have stunned my mind is the discovery of the benzene structure by Friedrich August Kekulé. As at then, the rule in organic chemistry was that an organic compound can only have a double or single bond but here was benzene, an organic compound that has neither.

So the law-breaking question was ,what kind of bond does benzene have ? Kekule could not answer that question until he had a dream where he saw a atoms and molecules comming together to form a snake that was bitting its own tail, that was wheren he knew that benzene actually had both bonds but rather than be stable, the bonds were alternating in a cyclic form, literally bitting their own tail.

Image Source: HERE Benzene Alternating Single And Double Bond Structure

Now, you might say that was spiritual, I disagree a little bit athough there could be a possibility of spiritual help .

Dreams are like remnants (or residues) of brainy reactions. I believe ,at night, , when the brain is at rest, it does not stop working , it rather starts to re-arrange the once distored thoughts in our mind into a more perfect cluster that can make some real meaning. one of the ways you can know this ,is if you try to write your dreams down every morning you wake, you will began to discover how powerful your brain is. You will learn to understand that your brain is a machine that simply works for the purpose of productive mental analysis ,using the knowledge you have as input and a well-structured analysis as output. that is why, your intuition will be less-productive if your are not well informed.

So what am I saying? the things in the world that are yet to made or discovered are all bounded by the existing laws that bothers and borders the recesses of the human mind.

Image Source: HERE August Kekulé Born in 1829

The story of Kekule's discovery of benzene cyclic/alternating bonds structure makes plain how a stereotypic mind is a failing mind. the moment you think things have to be doen like this for things to happen someway, you have just started failing. But here is the twist, we are failures in a way. All of us are where we are because of what we have done.I believe that telling oneself the blantant truth is the first step to greatness. Self-Lying is the most harmful form of deception. That kind of lie in which you tell yourself something wrong in a bid to make yourself believe what is not true, so you could be free from the pangs of regrets.

So are we suppose to break all laws to achieve greatness?

No, if you do that, You will be broken beyond measure but, i propose, that we all leave out room for innovation. I probably didn't mention this earlier: People who obey all those "dis-legal" laws are always succesful people , at least on the short run but the truth is that they never achive anything ground-breaking. They build their worlds on another person's foundation without caring how the "basis" were made, because they are working with the tides but then, no one will remember you unless you try to go against the tides at least for once.

Jesus is more known for walking on water but less known, for doing normal things like walking on normal ground surface, even though he seemed to do that more. Why? because that was when he broke the law and was yet successful.

Image Source: HERE

So what are you saying?

I am saying that when you need to achieve something profound and unsual (most especially artistically and scientifically) and the road seems all blocked, break the law and climb over the fence.

One of the best books I have read is "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson . It clearly talks about Steve Jobs, Apple, NEXT , PIXAR , INDIA, ZEN-BUDDISM , ACID-DROPPING and much more . I definitely learned a lot about how to create amazing products, I learned how to assemble "the best" and make them do "the great". Above all, I learned about the confusion that comes with finding one's strength.

Image Source: HERE

The most important thing or should I say, the most interesting part of Steve Jobs as a book is the craziness and confusion of steve jobs himself. He didnt grow up knwoing what he trully wanted except for the fact that from childhood , he seemed like a design and perfection freak but he sure did struggle to find himself and he indeed broke a lot of rules, to find his own rule.

MY CONCLUSION:

You might think I am trying to say we should break laws but I am saying the exact opposite. The laws and rules that men follow are really not the entirety of the rule that governs the universe. Some of them are misinformed rules. Some of them are impure rules propagated and nutured by induced popular beliefs. Some rules have not even been unravelled yet. When a law is erroneous, anything you do in accordance with that law will fall apart eventually. So I am saying that whatever You do, always know that the law you follow has a possiblity of being wrong. So be ready to break that law if things are now working as expected.

I am just saying "Be boundless in your approach to life".