In ovation

A few months ago I attend­ed a day-long class led by Scott Berkun, author of *The Myths of Inno­va­tion*. Includ­ed in the tuition was a bag full of O’Reil­ly and Asso­ciates schwag, in which they were kind enough to include a copy of Mr Berkun’s book. The class was inter­est­ing and full of per­spec­tive-chal­leng­ing exer­cis­es, and hey, what’s not to like? The sub­ject mat­ter is excit­ing; who does­n’t want to inno­vate? All the cool kids are doing it!

Of course, not every­one actu­al­ly inno­vates. Not every­one wants to be an inno­va­tor for that mat­ter, but every­one wants to be seen as an inno­va­tor. As soon as you begin to be con­cerned about what oth­er peo­ple think, the sto­ries — or myths — begin. So it’s no sur­prise that we have so many myths about inno­va­tion. Any­one who wants to actu­al­ly inno­vate (and heck, any­one who wants to more effec­tive­ly fool peo­ple into think­ing she or he is inno­vat­ing) would do well to sep­a­rate the myth from the reality.

For­tu­nate­ly, Scott Berkun wrote this book about the myths of inno­va­tion, clev­er­ly titled *The Myths of Inno­va­tion*. We can read it with­out going through all the messy research and work involved in col­lect­ing and com­pil­ing the infor­ma­tion our­selves. And it’s a good thing, too, because if we want to learn to be an inno­va­tor (or just look like one) we won’t have time to do all that work that some­one else has done before.

The book is clever and fun­ny, and at the same time takes its sub­ject mat­ter seri­ous­ly. It would be too easy to write a book that tears down cre­ators and inven­tors, and knocks them down to human size. It would sim­i­lar­ly be too easy to write a book that idol­ized the inven­tors of the past — we’d have to look no fur­ther than their own press releas­es. In expos­ing the myths, Berkun sly­ly exposed some of the com­mon ele­ments and fea­tures of inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. Per­haps the book does look at Edi­son, Michelan­ge­lo, and the Wright Broth­ers as more human than their leg­ends would have us think, but once the veil is stripped away their accom­plish­ments seem all the more remark­able, if dif­fer­ent and more com­pli­cat­ed than it pre­vi­ous­ly seemed.

I did­n’t get more than 11 pages into it before Berkun men­tioned Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­ly­i’s book [*Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Invention*]([canonical-url:2010/04/13/go-flow] ‘Go with the flow’), a book I start­ed before I read *The Myths of Inno­va­tion* and still have yet to fin­ish. Despite not hav­ing fin­ished the book, these ref­er­ences told me right away that Berkun was on the right track. Their two books have decid­ed­ly dif­fer­ent focus, but have the under­ly­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty that they decon­struct cre­ative process­es in order to demys­ti­fy them.

Every­one knows Edis­on’s oft-quot­ed «one per­cent inspi­ra­tion, nine­ty-nine per­cent per­spi­ra­tion» adage, but how often we seek after that elu­sive one per­cent with­out attempt­ing to deci­pher the nine­ty-nine! Thank­ful­ly, there are peo­ple like Scott Berkun who are will­ing and able to set the record straight. We’ve all got that one per­cent; inspi­ra­tion is a near­ly uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ence. The real ques­tions are how we are to go about the oth­er nine­ty-nine and which of our inspi­ra­tions are we to follow.