Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

I had never heard the phrase below until a year or so ago, when my business partner offered it as encouragement for both of us. At the time, we were trying to psych ourselves up for the long, ongoing task of finding investors. 

Apparently he had seen it applied to the founders of Google. They had, someone had written, “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” 

And that is what you need. That is certainly what an entrepreneur needs. I remember feeling relieved that someone else out there believed you had to stick to your vision.

But some parts of impossible are harder to disregard than others. I’ve found that it’s a lot less difficult to trust my idea that it is to overcome other people’s fear of the unknown. 

And that fear is the arch-enemy of creativity.

Why do we have an endless array of products, shows, public policies and styles that amount to the same old thing over and over again? You know?  Sitcoms with the same seven plots (and reality shows with only one),  clothes that simply echo earlier decades, the same campaign rhetoric election after election – the slavish replication of notable successes in anything, even though the replications by definition lack the (sometimes microscopic) creative spark that made the original successful?

Our country has been nearly paralyzed by this constant recycling of the trite, boring and ineffective.  And it’s because so many people are terrified of the new.  Especially people who pretend to be leaders.

This affects me as an entrepreneur in two ways: It’s exactly why I decided to create a business that would help people learn about and appreciate creativity and innovation, including their own; and it also means that my project is the kind that people with the power to help are most likely to shy away from.

I understand that those with money and influence don’t want to waste it on something they aren’t sure will be successful. They don’t want to take a risk on a model that hasn’t been proved yet, preferably many times over. But that means the ideas they’re willing to back are old and trite, not fresh and adventurous.  

So they leave all of us with strategies and industries and processes and products that either work poorly or not at all because they’re outmoded or weren’t that clever to begin with.

Where is their vision?      

Fortunately, some people somehow find ways to do what they believe needs to be done anyway, pushing the frontiers and showing the world what it has to gain from thinking differently. Eventually, we at Geniocity hope to be among them. In the meantime, here’s a story a friend passed along to me about one of the staff geniuses at Google who’s revolutionizing the web.  click here  Impossible?