#ChangeJourneys
This article is about ‘Fast Company Innovation* Festival’ (#FCNY) I recently joined, a movie called ‘It’s Kind Of A Funny Story’ (#IFS) I just watched, a book called ‘Wabi-Sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers’ (#WabiSabi)* I just finished…And I spiced it up with life learnings that I cultivated over the years…
I will give you practical tips to hack your life for growth, building up on my previous writing ‘Design Your Life Like A Start Up’. (P.S: See the little glossary for * at the bottom of this article.)
We don’t have the time to live everything we want to live in one lifetime, right? So we need to hack it sometimes to test, iterate and grow! Here is the one and only Hacking Tip: FACE IT!
1. Face Your Stomach Ache: What are the lessons of the universe?
2. Face Your Capabilities: Knowing what we know, how should we act?
3. Face Your Dreams & Unique Measures: What objects/ motifs/ juxtapositions express our understanding of the universe, or create that understanding in others?
4. Face Your Unity: What is the universe like?
- Face Your Stomach Ache.
#WabiSabi: What are the lessons of the universe?
Everything that hurts you is a great compass. I’m talking about your feelings. Your ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ moments…Stress coming from your work, your school, your parents, your issues, your fears, your past mistakes or future challenges… Yes, life can be overwhelming and we all fail…
In #IFS, you see the story of 16-year-old Craig, who after having a nervous breakdown out of school and first love stress, he signes himself into a mental health clinic, learns about life love and the pressures of growing up. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have that to some extent. But I know many people who denies or hides it. It gets scary seeing the age of people having breakdowns go down and more people lose it like in #IFS. It is scary to see homeless people on the streets of NYC because it reminds of how it feels sometimes; Pressure, stress, anxiety bubbling up. And we never let it out freely. We just keep it inside. We are scared to see, to face and share our pain points. Without facing them, there is no way we can fix, learn and grow from them.
Ready to lose years of carefully cultivated invisibility? Let me start; I used to (and still sometimes) feel like I am not good enough in many dimensions of my life…And as soon as I think like that, I even felt worse with the guilt of everything that I had in my life, all the privileges such as being healthy… Like Graig in #IFS saying ‘It’d be self indulgent not to appreciate what I have.’ I started feeling comfortable with my not so perfect self because I had to at some point, and I started from learning from my mistakes and making new ones. It felt fresh, it felt alive. Each time this approach unchains my creativity, my confidence and that itself becomes an inspiration to others.
In #FCNY ‘The Creativity of Giving’ session Christy Turlington Burns from Every Mother Counts suggests; ‘Find out the cause what makes you cry, thats what you need to do in life.’ She founded the nonprofit as a result of suffering her own serious complication during childbirth. Instead of holding up to her difficult story as a victim, she is leading this movement to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother, everywhere.
#HYL: Channel all your pain, fear, stress into a solution which can help others going through the same things with you or even better prevent people from that.
Ava Duvernay who teamed up with Oprah Winfrey ‘OWN Network’ shares her personal challenge to cope with series of difficulties when Oprah told her; ‘Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you.’
Sounds wise but what does it really mean? It means; things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be. Ava Duvernay adds; ‘Everything we do has born out of failures’. So it’s the sign for you to watch out your ache, your pain to follow it!
Troy Carter in #FCNY ‘Why Innovation Means Everything?’ session says; ‘My past failures is a room I visit and learn, but I chose not to stay there.’ Get out of that room and keep its door open to visit each time you want to remember the precious lessons you got out of it.
#HYL: You don’t have to play the fear game or chicken out each time when you hurt. Play your fears to navigate your own game! Take notes of your fears and try one thing that s cares you everyday, step by step.
2. Face Your Capabilities:
#WabiSabi: Knowing what we know, how should we act?
I thought I could fly when I was a little girl, like many children believe. I also believed I could bring back passed away ones including my grandfather, my first bird pet and dinosours. After many weeks and months and years, I realised there are things I cant do. That realisation was painful. What I now know is universe works in an interesting way, what you think as a weakness can be a blessing as in this case you learn how to appreciate life and loved ones when they are with you.
The capabilities that we have and we deny on the other hand, need a more tactical approach. We have the responsibility to discover them and use them. Otherwise it’d not be any different than the case of a fireman, standing up and watching a house burn in the fire without doing anything. The fire of your dreams that only involve you are no different than the problems of the world affecting millions. Every minute counts.
In #IFS, the health centre was full of misfits, people who could not cope with their issues as the rest of the world ‘seem to’ (!) do easily. Even in that case you see inspiring stories of what one can do, to change many lives, by simply paying attention and taking a step.
#HYL: You need your capabilities, your friends need them, your community need them, world needs to use your capabilities. So pay attention to your and others’ needs, use your relevant tools; open your bag, try them and grow them!
3. Face Your Dreams with Your Own Unique Measures:
#WabiSabi: What objects/ motifs/ juxtapositions express our understanding of the universe, or create that understanding in others?
Growing up means taking yourself and your dreams to the center stage of your life. Dream things that scare you, that you think you can not handle, that give you the butterflies and make you look forward to.
Many of us don’t give ourselves the permission to dream. It is too risky and we say things like, ‘I might fail!’. This keeps us locked into the fear of danger zone. Give yourself credit!
#HYL: Your job and mission as a dreamer is not to be derailed by unsupportive people; most essentially, you must not take things personally. 1-Stay away from those people who drains your energy and stick with the best people if you want to be the best! 2-Invest on your personal development. Take courses, read books, collect information and connect with support groups.
#HYL: An exercise from #IFS; When was the last time you remember being really happy, totally care free? A moment, a day in life that made time feel different, like there is more of it? Innovation* comes from the people who really enjoys what they’re doing. Screw the application to a job, a school if the idea of being a student or an employee of that institute makes you unhappy. Go and work for a cause that will tick you.
Designing Your Own Unique Measures;
Approaching yourself and your work with thoughtfulness is challenging. You’re going against the grain. Your tools of measurement should be also different from others. Here are couple of examples I was impressed in #FCNY;
Blake Mycoskie from TOMS was raising his concerns about only 50% of their purchases have a continuation on Tom’s web site for their customers to join their infamous movement; One for One (each pair of shoes purchased = a pair of shoes for a child in need.) He also added it’s ultimately about inspiring other companies to bring purpose into their business models.
He announced — the TOMS Social Entrepreneurship Fund — to help early-stage social startups get off the ground. His success factors are:
1-It has a core social mission (as opposed to a corporate responsibility arm).
2-The founders are crazy about what they’re doing.
Leila Janah; CEO of Sama Foundation was one of the panelists in Business That Matters panel. Sama Group use technology and social business to improve access of people living in poverty to dignified work, medical treatments, and digital skills training. Janah raised the question of why social business is not evaluated as other business is, but there were obvious challenges tied to their target groups because they did not have any jobs or assets that were registered. So Sama came up with their Effective altruism metrics-some unconventional measurement such as converting sugar to fiber in low income family breakfasts.
Serena Williams in Nike’s Playbook session says ‘My success is to feed the little girl inside me & to be an inspiration to other women to succeed.’ That’s how you become number 1 in your field.
Todd Park, White House tech adviser, together with DJ Patil has been transforming the world’s biggest bureaucracy into a lean startup. And as in all start up cases, he needed to attract the best talents to succeed. Todd says; ‘Best people I work are the ones who fundamentally couldn’t stand the idea of the world not having what they are building. That gives them a level of endurance, focus, and intensity that they would never have had if they were just focused on the stock options.’ The talent retention metric all of a sudden ties up to having ‘purposeful business’ which gives me hope and courage for the future.
Bill Nye has been one of the most colorful personalities of #FCNY as well as he was inspirational with his approach; ‘If we had the goal of humans on Mars by 2023, we would just do it and society would have expectations of success.’
Changing your metrics, communicating them and setting up the expectations accordingly is the fundamental to your innovation. In the end it’s not about conquering the world, it’s about doing the right thing. When done correctly, this creates the ultimate success.
4. Face Your Unity; From Individuals to Us As One
#WabiSabi: What is the universe like?
A conversation about the future is inseparable from a conversation about technology. The increasing role of and dependence on smart devices and the quickening march toward an absolute Internet of Things that simultaneously maps where we are and where we’re going — the world of tomorrow has never seemed so close to today.
The consumers decide for themselves, there are billions of individualised experiences out there. We see a trend of cutting out ‘experts’ or ‘middle man’ who are passing subjective judgments or unnecessary commissions. The openness and easy entrance inspire new people, masses. We see an acceleration of innovation, creativity, new ideas, new directions.
Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer of Metropolitan Museum of Art says handing over the keys to consumers and creators is their plan to bring new audiences; “You’re going to see more and more museums allowing people to [digitally] take art from the museum and do anything with it, to play with it. Opening up your collection and making it visible to the world I think is going to be more and more important as we go along.”
Douglas Rushkoff, who made the biggest impact on me in #FCNY defines his new book title ‘ Present Shock’ as; ‘the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies which thrown us into a new state of anxiety.’ He suggests we humans are not the medium for information; information is the medium for humans. We are the content- the message.
There comes the challenge of staying grounded and not fixating only on growth as in profit and more consumption measures; The real value is about how good and how sustainable your business is, how you can create healthy ecosystems, how you can circulate money & knowledge?
Get out of industrialism on digital steroids hamster circle and wake up to your meaning on this planet for the bigger circles now and future generations.
Once you become aware of a bigger system, you see there is only one way to stay as a part of it; act creatively and with integrity, to pursue a positive impact on society, your company, and to encourage collaboration among your teams.
#HYL: Connect with your inner light. Ask ‘Why?’ Lots of ‘Why’s’…Every sort of ‘Why’s’… ‘Why you’re doing what you’re doing?’ ‘Why did you set your/ your company’s goal like this?’ And decide whether your goal would matter for you, for your loved ones and for others after tghis is all over…When your department is closed or your company is shut down? Or if you were dead tomorrow? See if your answers satisfy you and if not still great; jump into your limitless creative adventure and discover your ‘why’!
Face it, live it, hack it! Like said in #IFS (And as Bob Dylan said); ‘If you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying…’. Innovation isn’t about talking, it’s about doing. So, get cracking, and begin your journey from accidental innovator to high-performance innovation leader. Of your own family…Of your organization…Of your community…In life!
#HYL: Say Thank You…You can get as big a your support group and your inspirations, that’s always bigger than what you can achieve alone.
Here comes my thanks for this article…Everybody who encouraged me o write more…And critics who made me think further…And my real muses; Mey & Mia. a.k.a M&M’s.
And special thanks to Turkish Airlines crew, who provided me the best of the service including suggesting to charge my Mac which might have costed me this article otherwise.
APPENDIX
- 2 Words Glossary:
Innovation:
1 : the introduction of something new,
2 : a new idea, method, or device : Novelty.
Innovation is the process through which value is created and delivered to a community of users in the form of a new solution. Here we have chosen to frame the definition of innovation as a word describing a process. It can also be used to describe a new product or service, which is the outcome of the innovation process, that delivers value to a community. In either case, the key elements of the definition are newness and value delivery. (From: Fast Company)
Wabi-Sabi: It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.Wabi-Sabi may exhibit the effects of accident, like a broken bowl glued back together again. Or they may show the results of just letting things happen by chance, like the irregular fabrics that are created by intentionally sabotaging the computer program of a textile loom. Wabi-Sabi things are intimate. They beckon: get close, touch, relate. They inspire a reduction of the physic distance between one thing and another thing; between people and things. Places in wabi-sabi, every single object seems to expand in importance in inverse proportion to its actual size.
