“The man with a new idea is a crank… until it succeeds” – Mark Twain

A wise man once told me that there is a high price to new ideas.  I thought he was talking about venture capital!  No, he was talking about the cost of innovation.  It takes great balls of fire to innovate, when it’s easier to do what we have always done in order to succeed.   True innovation is the riskiest risk there is, to use terrible English, because when you are ‘out there’ in the deepest depths (there I go again) of the blue ocean, there is nothing to hold on to.  I am not talking about your small and slow gradual innovations, I am talking about innovations that change things.  The punctuations, the extended uncut directors editions that remodel the ending so it’s new.  I am in a metaphorical mindset at the moment, I should pen a Tom Peters’ guru book … I might just sell two copies. I have a self-created reference for describing this process I call it: Engaging Concepts.   It’s the forefront of innovation, the grey bits inbetween the new stuff where thought and reality congeal for the first time.  It’s a bloody scary place, with very little predictability or repeatability.

The high price of new ideas

New ideas come with a price.  There is adjustment period, rejection or acceptance but there is also a chance for improvement.   There are a few people I know who I would put in the Mark Twain category.  These are people I like to call thought innovators.  You don’t find their papers in the Academy of Management Review, or Management Information Systems Quarterly, no you find them in a shed, outside or putting out their radical ideas into the community somewhere else.  It’s as if people who are thought leaders get punished until enough people come around.  Does this make them special?  No, it does not.  It does make them worth listening to, if you can filter out the strange things they say and the weirdness of their lives.

So where does the cost come in?

The cost comes in when we realise the risk.  Risk management is all about minimising or eliminating risk, it’s not really about innovation.  You have to take tremendous risks sometimes to innovate.  You have to say, ‘to hell with this we have to try it and see what happens – we can’t know the variables in this case’.  I think most of the great innovations were risky and may have even failed.  You know what?  They did it.  They paid the high price of risk of catastrophic failure and now life is better… in short!

New ideas are often risky, sometimes stupid and other times downright crazy… and there is that.  However, as Twain noticed the title of ‘crank’ and ‘genuis’ are one good idea away!

For a while now I have been thinking about the bigger picture.  When I think about the bigger picture I usually think for a long time about things that most people find boring.  Here are two things I have been thinking about recently:

1. Did I imagine most of my life up to this point

2. If 1. is so how much of it is delusion and how much of it could I call ‘reality’.

At this point you may be thinking, what the hell is he talking about?  But bear with me whilst I type this and work out what is I am trying to say.  Let’s elaborate on what a delusion is… no I am not quoting Dawkins.

a mistaken belief

If I believe that what I believe is not true then I am mistaken?  If I am deluded, then I am believing something that is not so.  Yet in most things I have ever done I have found myself believing things that weren’t true simply because it was reasonable for me to do so.  It was the best explanation I had at the time.  I call this, as of now, 10:25pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the wonder of delusion.  So why is a delusion a wonderful thing.

Two reasons:

1. It is the doorway to another meaning – all delusions if they are followed through to their natural conclusion are often shattered.  This means when my delusions fade or change shape as I perpetually reinterpret them, I recreate myself and thereby determine new beliefs.  These new beliefs, if they ‘anchor in me’ create a new template.  Hopefully it is an improved version of my old belief.   That is, I have learned.  Delusions are strong, and not to be mocked.  But, in starting a sentence with a conjunction I am being serious, you need to challenge your beliefs to see if they are real.   But what of faith?  Faith that is not tested is not faith, it is merely the assumption of faith or a shell of faith.  To have faith means you believe because of something, not blindly ‘my parents told me this,’ your faith may be ancestral, logical (athiest), didactic (fundamentalists) or it could be in the fabled spaghetti monster.  A delusion therefore is the point of entry through which we engage, it is the doorway to something grand.

2. Not all delusions are good and they don’t always lead to better things.  As something can be wonderfully good, or wonderfully bad a delusion can be horribly bad.  Yet, it’s a wonder people believe in things that drive them all the way to harm.  The right thing to do is to understand.  It’s not to make stupid arguments based on rationalism.  No, the answer lies in meaning.  The question is – delusion – why?  Interpretation – why?  I have no idea.   Yet, in all the beauty of the world (and I have seen one of the wonders – the Great Barrier Reef), there is nothing so amazing about delusions.  Whole societies are built around them, fashion is made and sold on the back of delusions, men and women with ‘delusions of grandeur’ romp through out cities becoming successful entrepreneurs.   Delusions drive us, they make us act.  It’s wonderful!

Back to my original statements.  Yes, I have imagined my life up to this point, it’s precisely where I ended up.  Did my imagination include writing this blog post, I doubt it.  Yet, if I could sense the inward forces of delusion, could I harness them in such a way to solve my problems?  Are they the sum total of my problems?  Strategically, in this ‘Dickian’ rant (referring to the late Philip K. Dick not the only kind – take your mind out of the gutter!), what am I saying?  I don’t know.   Reality is not really an elusive idea.  It’s my experience, it’s what happens, it’s phenomena.  What I think about what happens are the delusions, and herein lies the kicker, they urge me to act.  Funny, how the delusions I have, the actions I take are cosmically interlinked to make up the sum total of fraility, insanity and random acts of shouting that is… me.   Yet as I ponder this, I sense my delusional candicacy is well beyond the capacity of myself.    Is God deluding me?   After all, Faith is the evidence of things NOT seen –> but seen somehow.  Sensed?  Felt?  Discerned?  Reasoned?

Evidence is what we want.  Facts.  Facts.  Facts.  The fact is, Holmes might say, the fact is elementary.  It is inductively discerned.  Why, you ponder on the delusions of men and women and you gaze.  A case in point: ambition.  The greatest delusion of them all.  We work so hard, to get promoted, we use people.  It’s a fact of working (there I go again) that you have to sell your soul to get ahead.  If I wanted to research Simulacra (simulations of reality) like I wanted to originally do you think any University on earth would support me?  I wanted to understand the simulations we create in organisations… the routines, the fakeness, the politicalness, without having to resort to drilling down.  No, I wanted to use this bizarre French construction to understand our delusions.   Instead I picked Soft Systems Methodology.  Why?  I can’t even remember!

What matters really?

Children? Career? Money? Housing? Pants?  What matters is what matters because you think it matters.  Are you a conservative voter?  Are you a liberal voter?  Are you a swinger voter… those terms are delusions… designed to get you to BELIEVE something.  Then your faith evidence causes you to act.  You act on it and then you make choices.  Herbert Simon was one smart dude, but he missed a key point about human beings.  They don’t think in linear patterns, they don’t define problems logically, they create answers because they want to solve things they find interesting to solve.   What matters is what matters.  We solve ‘what matters’.

Ambition: The driving force of your death and ultimate loss of legacy

When you die and the maggots come for a meal (unless you are burned) guess what?  People might be sad for a while.  When we buried my wife’s great grandfather there were about six people at his funeral.  Now, he was a nice man but guess what… I don’t remember him all that much.  All I remember is that I got into an argument with my wife right after he died.  To this day I can’t even remember what about!  Ok, I am wondering off track but here’s the point: what legacy?  What purpose? What destiny?  DELUSIONS!  I can’t tell you the amount of people I have met you are in the late 60’s that still don’t understand what life is about.  I don’t know and it’s frustrating.  I thought relegion had an answer… it just gave me more questions.  Too many to answer?

Ambition is the greatest delusion of all. ‘The man’ has you believing that you can work for a living and be happy.  Now, I know of people who work and are happy but they often do not know why.   They work, they live, they die.  There life does have meaning, of course it does.  Go to graveyard, look at the tombstones, the people there are dead.   They once worked their whole lives to get a house, or to feed their family, or to live a life.  You know what, they are dead.  DEAD DEAD DEAD.  The illusion of purpose and meaning has escaped them, they no longer have to wade through the slush pile of delusions looking for the key to unlock the reason for their own existence.  They have found nothing in the grave because they are gone.  Ambition got them to death.  Your job has meaning, it does, it means you’re not yet dead.  When you retire you can sit around thinking about how great it was to have the falsehood of purpose in your brain as you thought about your next promotion.  There comes a time when it stops meaning.  What then?  Another delusion?

Underbelly: A case in point

Of the things I have watched, there can be nothing more brutal and delusional as the gangster life portrayed in Underbelly or the Sopranos.  We can shoot whoever we like, take all the drugs we want, buy prostitutes etc.  It’s delusion.  Old hollywood movies are best at this.  They delude us with a sense of how wonderful life was in the ‘good old days’.  You don’t think people had sex problems back then?  Of course they did, they had a boatload of sex problems!  Hollywood has deluded you into thinking life was simpler back then.  It wasn’t.  It caused a lot of the problems we have today, if you follow the ideals of cause and effect and generative mechanisms.  Each generation created a knock on effect for the next to interpret and act upon.  Beliefs are very powerful things, they appear (to me) to exist.  They are causal.  The effect my actions, create havoc in my life and force me to believe nonsense I know isn’t true.

In ending this, if you read this far, can I say well done.  The mind that produced this is highly flammible and likely to implode, given time.  Maybe I have been reading too much short fiction (Steinbeck, James and Trollope – I should put that book away it’s not helping me) BUT I do feel deluded so… everything’s fine.  Act normal I might notice.

Wow.  I have written 300 obscure rants from many different directions.  As I look back on the last two years I have been at this (I know two years), I can say it’s been worthwhile experience for me.  I usually don’t stick with things long enough to find out whether are worth it or not, and to be honest it’s a bloody miracle I managed to get a PhD!

That said, this has been fun.   There are some amazing things I have learned about writing for different audiences, not using big obscure words, dealing with dickhead flamers and so on.  Yet, the biggest lesson I learned was how to be me.  Just do it.  Is that sense I think:

The internet is more like a flea market than a niche market

I have posted on just about everything over the last two years.  I have to take issue with the idea of posting content for a niche.  I know, this blog hardly breaks any records. But I am proud to say that I have 79 people who read my feed (okay so I know a few of those people) and 170 odd unique visits a day.  When you think about it, that’s a real lot of people.  1126 this month so far as a matter of fact.  Now, when I started I was talking about business mainly, but I found I also wanted to talk about personal development.  So I switched to that.  Then I switched back, then I switched back again!  After about the 150th post I realised what I should have known all along.  I am very different.  I need to be me, or just bugger off.  If I am 170 people interesting, then so be it!   I will be me, and to hell with the Bob’s of this world who don’t like what I write.

So as for the niche?  I don’t have one.  You could frame this blog in such a way that it had a niche market and I could write enough about something to warrant 30 posts or so.  But you know what? My niche is that I want to think about everything.  So here is a list of things that I have talked about so far:

1. Real Estate
2. Problem Solving
3. Creativity
4. Relationships
5. Personal Development
6. Learning
7. Thinking
8. Education
9. Work
10. And a whole lot more

And you will be pleased to know that Google likes these posts the most:

1. It’s OK to Fail (oh the irony)
2. 7 signs of a failing relationship
3. Developing a sense of self-worth
4. 4 Ways to come with cool ideas
5. Living from the heart

Now there is a theme there… living from the heart, knowing your worth and such and such.  But I didn’t set out to write that.  It emerged through my voice as I blogged and blogged and BLOGGED!  Sometimes if you set out to achieve something such as writing a ‘finance’ blog, you may find after the 40th post that you don’t really want to go in that direction anymore.  For God’s sake… CHANGE! There is so much ’sameness’ in life.  So many things that are normal.  Be the odd one out.  Do something differnet.  Hey, why not THAT’S SUPER!

The future

Should I build a niche?  I don’t think so.  If I did I would feel a cold restriction.  I (and I alone probably!) think that writing should not be bounded.  I am not against genre fiction for example, but it’s sad that so much fiction is ‘horror’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘action’.  Isn’t life a mixture of these things?  I think our writing should earnestly reflect what we do in a meaningful way, it should capture drama, horror and science fiction (ok maybe not this – I am a fan). In the future I will keep going and writing about things that interest me.  It will be rambling, but I am sure in there somewhere will be some coherence!  At least I hope so. To my small amount of readers.   Thank you.  I am very humbled by the fact that you glance at my feeds occassionaly and I am impressed by your discipline and support. 

Recently I watched this video with landscape photographer Alain Briot.  He takes an interesting view on goal setting by saying that we should set low-expectations more frequently that set big goals less frequently.   I think during times when personal growth is required, perhaps the best way to tackle it is to make serious choices about what actions to take.  This tricks your mind into focusing on the small picture, while you gradually build the bigger picture.  Nothing new… just interesting I thought. For example, we could give into pressure and quit or we could make the way slowly by changing our expectations.

Changing your expectations

The beautiful thing about that video is that you don’t need to think beyond what it says in order to do it.  All you really need is to set a very small goal and then once you achieve that set a slighter bigger one.  My main problem is that I have set stupid goals and not got there and then got discouraged.  Perhaps it’s easier to set a smaller goal, achieve it then do the next thing.  There is however a catch with this way of thinking.

The catch

As it says in the video you need to make sure that you can do what you can, if it’s a small thing.  For example, Alain speaks of how when he was working as a grad student that he could exchange doing that for making money in photography.  The older you get, the harder this seems to be.  Nevermind, people keep telling me that it’s never too late to start.  But start what you say?  Well you have find the music in you and build on it.  Watch for my up-coming post on craftmanship that will deal with this.

Rather than say a lot more I would encourage you to watch the video (at least the first 10 minutes anyway – to get the gist) and reflect on what you are doing now.  The usual excuses apply of course… children to feed, rent/mortgage to pay.  This is why I have to think about sidebusinesses and the like!  However, keep an open mind as you watch this, the sheer brilliance of simplicity is very interesting.

Okay so I have not weighed into the micro-debate surrounding the new Chris Anderson Book.  You know why… it hasn’t really made me angry enough or pushed me into making comments.  If you are interested there is an excellent analysis of the issue at Techdirt.  This morning as I was navigating my RSS feeds I found an interesting article from Novelr.com.  They had a free link to Scribd hosting the new Chris Andersen book for free… this is what I got:

Am I the only one seeing the irony here? Free! but only in the US. So it’s free 300 million people but for 5.7 Billion it’s unfree. This kind of thing has happened to those out of the States before and it continues to happen. I suppose I could coin the metaphor Free! (with restrictions).

I have been teaching the Long Tail as part of a university course for a while now and was thinking about using this in class too. Now, it’s probably going to cost me a small fortune to ship the book to Australia. I am not complaining I choose to live in the greatest country and state on earth, my choice and hey I love it here.  For those in the US who are smart enough to use this offer by all means should.  I think it’s odd that the statement the book is probably making (haven’t read it can’t comment) is being thwarted here by the very medium it’s proporting supports the production of free material! You know what… to hell with this I am just going to use a proxy server and download it for free anyway.

As a final comment the only thing I can say is what I learned from my students in Information Policy and Governance this semester. The largest consumer of Porn is China… now who has the great firewall? Hmm… no wonder piracy is so rampant with such silly restrictions as these. Now if you will excuse me, I must go download something illegal… just to clear my head.