January is when up to half of the population sets some kind of goals or ‘resolutions’ for the coming year and it’s the start of what will, for many of those people, be a journey of frustration and failure.
It doesn’t have to be this way. By this, I mean the perception of failure part. Human beings are culturally and maybe biologically set to look at things like changes in seasons or life anniversaries (e.g., birthdays) as times to reflect. Whether it was a festival, religious event, harvest, or moon phase we humans often will find meaning or space to reflect on where we are in the world and make plans for how to make more of what we want and less of what we don’t.
This is what innovation is all about.
The journey between where we are and the new that we wish to create to the next is what this experiment — another new — is all about. It’s a more personalized version of what innovation is about. These are going to be more first-person accounts of what it means to do innovation and to be an innovator.
Most of us are innovators — we get upset with the status quo and want to make things better. That’s a very natural, but difficult job to undertake. This year I posted my 500th article on Censemaking. It took a little more than 10 years and through many insights, setbacks, victories, and explorations I was able to find myself a voice about what innovation was and what it has meant to me.
While Censemaking continues this is a more personal look. It’s about the person behind the articles and the journey of what it means to innovate day in and out with the aim of providing support to those seeking to become innovators or at least better ones. By better, it means knowing what you know and what you don’t and being Ok with that and learning how to make yourself the best you can by knowing what you want and who you are. That means your ‘greatness’ as an innovator will be different than mine no matter what kind of shared experience, skills, knowledge, and outlook we have.
That’s the beauty of it all.
Something new for what is next. - Cameron
Photo by Sven Pieren on Unsplash