A clever blog post title is a wonderful thing. What’s interesting is that I couldn’t improve on Adam Grant‘s book “Originals” title. In my previous post, I said that that book wasn’t for the individual looking for themselves. This one is, kind of.
The book begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw,
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
or as Max Planck said,
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
Thats’s it. 250 pages and a slew of references.
To be fair, to leave things there would trivialize the book.
There is an odd sense of wandering I got from this book. At one moment, it speaks to those who seek out the creatives. This felt like an art collector was speaking. At another, it focuses on the hardships of being a creative. Just when you think you’ve got a sense of that, there’s a shift to the economics of utilizing creatives and then thrust into the environment which produced them.
All of these chapters could have been the basis of books in their own right. At the end of the book I had the sense that I’d read a primer on the human equivalent of livestock breeding of prized but temperamental Mishima cattle.
I would recommend this book to technology leaders as a reminder of how the world advances (not improves, mind you, but advances) and how to leverage the creatives. I also recommend this book to those who swim against the current. Appreciate that creatives are looked upon by many as a rare resource to be cultivated and value-extracted. Know that although most people will never understand that drives you, these people server to keep us growing.
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