Curiosity, Creativity, and Inspiration
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
— Albert Einstein
Earlier today, I was sitting by my pool having my morning Earl Grey and a video came up in my YouTube feed — “Imagine if… a celebration of the life and legacy of Sir Ken Robinson”. Having been a huge fan of Sir Ken’s for many years and being heartbroken at his loss to cancer last year, I decided to watch.
If you don’t know who Sir Ken is, I *strongly* urge you to watch his TED talks, lectures on YouTube, read his books, etc. To give a small taste of who he was, here is the statement posted to his website:
Sir Ken Robinson PhD died peacefully yesterday, 21st August 2020, surrounded by family after a short battle with cancer.
A New York Times bestselling author, he led national and international projects on creative and cultural education across the world, unlocking and igniting the creative energy of people and organisations. Sir Ken was the most watched speaker in TED’s history, with his 2006 talk ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ being viewed online over 60 million times and seen by an estimated 380 million people in 160 countries.
He was named as one of Time/Fortune/CNN’s ‘Principal Voices’; acclaimed by Fast Company magazine as one of ‘the world’s elite thinkers on creativity and innovation’ and ranked in the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top business thinkers. In 2003, he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts.
Now, it turns out the Imagine-if video is over 11 hours long, so I’ve only watched some of it so far, though I do plan to see the whole thing over the coming days. But watching part of it turned into exploring other topics and even re-watching (for maybe the 10th time) Sir Ken’s original TED talk. Basically, I was allowing myself a rare opportunity to put aside work and to-do lists to just explore inspirational topics and people. I definitely need to do this more often.
As an aside, Simon Sinek is another incredibly inspiring speaker/author and Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture should be required viewing for everyone. There are, of course, many more amazing speakers, but several posts could be spent just talking about each one of them and we’ve got this post to get on with.
I came inside to get something to drink and my 17 year-old daughter asked what I had been doing. When I told her, she said “sounds boring”. I was dumbfounded. It appears that Sir Ken was right — schools kill creativity. My daughter is very smart — 5.6 GPA, graduating a year early, etc. — but the thought of sitting by the pool being inspired is her definition of boredom.
Now, I’m not picking on my daughter, but rather this is something I see way too often — a lack of curiosity, of creativity, of inspiration.
I spent several years at Amazon Web Services and, while there, interviewed many candidates (I stopped counting at 50). My focus was never on technical abilities. I mean, if you didn’t know about the internet, you’d certainly have a tough road ahead, but this wasn’t my focus. Amazon has a core set of Leadership Principles and, for me, the most critical one for success is Learn and be Curious. I can teach you about machine learning but teaching someone to be curious is far harder.
And I’m not the only one that feels this way about curiosity, creativity, and inspiration.
Education is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of the fire.
— WB Yeats
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
— Albert Einstein
Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
— Sir Ken Robinson
All children are born artists.
The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
— Pablo Picasso
Never lose the childlike wonder.
— Randy Pausch
Now stop for a minute and think. Really think.
Are you a curious person?
Do you look at the world in wonder and awe?
How much time do you spend on creativity?
When was the last time you were truly inspired — or better yet, inspired someone else?
In the world of business, these traits, along with the willingness to fail, are everything.
Sure, many jobs simply require doing what you’re told, but that’s not how progress is made and it’s certainly a lot less fun.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
— Steve Jobs
So here’s my challenge to you.
Seek out inspiration and try to be curious and creative every day.
Be an inspiration to others and help them realize their potential.
Strive to be one of the crazy ones that change the world…
