communication

To Invest And To Innovate Today: Open Question

I was thinking about two key words: "to invest” and “to innovate” so I decided to check in the dictionary. I took the Oxford Advanced Dictionary (7th Edition) and found the meaning of “to invest”:

To buy properties, shares in a company in the hope of making a profit. To spend time, energy, effort on something that you think is good or useful.

I verified the same word (verb) on Thesaurus and this is what I found:

Expend money with the expectation of achieving a profit or material result by putting it into financial schemes, shares, or property, or by using it to develop a commercial venture.

This is what Thesaurus says about “Investment”:

Act of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result.

I finally checked the meaning of “To innovate" in the Oxford Advanced Dictionary (7th Edition) to find this:

To introduce new things, ideas or ways of doing something.

This is what Thesaurus says about “To innovate":

Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.

It seems that “investing” and “investment” are both activities that generate an expected worthwhile result, that create something useful, that develop something possibly good. While “innovation” is the ability of the investor to profitably use elements that are available in his/her daily life to redesign, to reimagine and to improve the reality. My final thought is that the true essense of “innovation” is made primarily by the act of reimagining, rethinking our simple daily reality in a much more meaningful way. The use and the deployment of technology (software, connections, hardware, ...) should remain be the secondary element which serves and supports the act of thinking and reimagining a new meaningful way of life. If this is so, I wonder why so many companies are buying technology just to continue to do business, to produce things, to provide services in the same old way? What would be your answer?

Our passions will propel a new age of prosperity

If you read through these quotes that I found in different books, posts, articles and speaches, I suppose you will easily guess what I mean by “passions that will propel a new age of prosperity”.

• In the book “Crush it!”, by Gary Vaynerchuk you read: “Love your family, work super hard, live your passion.” The book is entirely developed around the idea: “Do what makes you happy, keep it simple, work hard, look ahead.”
• In the book “Enchantment”, by Guy Kawasaki one fundamental concept emerges: “New business are created from people trying to make the world a better place with new ideas which they fulfill by pursuing and developing their passions.”
• In the book “The art of the start”, by Guy Kawasaky you find this quote from Ludwig van Beethoven: “I never thought of composing music for the fame and the glory. What’s inside my heart must come out; this is why I am composing music.”
• Steve Jobs during his famous commencement speach at Stanford said: “[...] Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. [...] And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. [...] Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
• In the article “The best investment you can make”, by Umair Haque published on the blog of the Harward Business Review you read: “The best investment you can make isn’t gold. It’s the people you love, the dreams you have and living a life that matters. [...] the safest investments of all are the human, the social and the emotional ones.”
• In the book “The new capitalist manifesto”, by Umair Haque acknowledges “[...] my insight matters less than your vision, ambition and passion.”

The list could go on, but I am sure the underlying concept is becoming clear: if we want to make the world a better place, things have to change first in our hearts. The place where our dreams, ideals, intuitions, inner voices, ideas and ultimately where our most authentic passions are living. This is not just a naive vision of our society, but rather a very different way of feeling and living that brings those who deeply share it, to feel like misfits. In fact when we come to realize that “the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling” how would it be possible not to feel a misfit in a world that does not understand the “difference between maximizing consumption and maximizing quality of life”? The starting spark must come from each and everyone of us, from our will to build a sustainable future where “prosperity is not what one has, but what one is capable of”. Within this renewed context we’ll be able to develop the art of living our life paths “meaningfully well” as opposed to “pursuing opulence”.