Creating a Myth

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Inno­va­tion puts for­ward the notion that peo­ple love a good sto­ry and that many cel­e­brat­ed inno­va­tors have told sto­ries that over­sim­pli­fy or even ignore the truth that inno­va­tion requires a lot of work. Peo­ple love the sto­ry of a cre­ator observ­ing an odd con­flu­ence of events which caus­es an epiphany, which there­after leads to an inven­tion no one had thought of previously.

These sto­ries elim­i­nate the uncom­fort­able idea that a cre­ator or inven­tor is some­how bet­ter than the rest of us. Any­one could have been sit­ting under a tree to see an apple fall and dis­cov­er grav­i­ty, right? Any­one could want to help his wife trade knick-knacks online and decide to cre­ate a web­site to make that eas­i­er, lat­er becom­ing the wild­ly suc­cess­ful eBay.

Sto­ries like these are rarely true, and even those that con­tain some ele­ment of truth fail to char­ac­ter­ize the real­i­ty behind the cre­ation or dis­cov­ery. The iron­ic fact is that often the truth is, on reflec­tion, more com­fort­ing to the lis­ten­er. They are sto­ries of hard work that any­one real­ly could have done, pro­vid­ed with suf­fi­cient moti­va­tion. As Edi­son wrote, one per­cent inspi­ra­tion and nine­ty-nine per­cent per­spi­ra­tion. The Wright Broth­ers weren’t the first to imag­ine pow­ered flight, just the first to suc­ceed. That required tremen­dous know-how and count­less failed attempts. Prob­a­bly the thing that dis­tin­guish­es the Wrights the most is perserver­ence in the face of repeat­ed fail­ure. Many of us would have giv­en up. It is the will and the desire an the tenac­i­ty that dis­tin­guish­es cre­ators and inventors.

End­less hours in a lab­o­ra­to­ry nev­er make a com­pelling anec­dote to be told at din­ner par­ties, so sto­ries are cre­at­ed. Whether by inten­tion or not, a sort of pub­lic rela­tions leg­end cir­cu­lates or else no one can wrap their minds around the new product.

I’ve been think­ing a lot late­ly about how to con­struct the sto­ry of my art­work, so that I can present the tech­nique in a neat and tidy way that does­n’t drown peo­ple in details. I’m like­ly too close to the process to be the one who can come up with such a sto­ry, but I’m real­ly all I’ve got as far as that is con­cerned. Peo­ple ask me how I thought to make images out of lines, and the true sto­ry is not of a sin­gle epipha­nies, but of sev­er­al small­er break­through moments with a lot of less-than-sat­is­fac­to­ry exper­i­men­ta­tion over the peri­od of almost two decades. I don’t know how I’ll be able to dis­till that into an acci­den­tal «you got your choco­late in my peanut but­ter» moment, but I think I have to come up with something.