Innovation-Try Things your self

Step 2 :Try Things Yourself

Scott Berkun’s second step in innovation

Asking questions is one thing, but trying to answer them is another. There is no substitute for firsthand experience when creating things. The unique aspects of who you are, including qualities you may not like about yourself, are an asset when it comes to creative thinking. No one can see the world exactly the way that you do.

This means that if you can experience, watch, or make something yourself, you may discover lessons and make observations that other people failed to notice. Those observations are the seeds of innovation: You might see an old idea or tool in a way no one else in your family, business, or city has before, and if you follow it, an innovation might be yours.

Remember that the knowledge we have today about the universe did not come from magic books that have been sitting around waiting for us since the dawn of time. It came from curious people who not only asked questions, but followed them to places others weren’t willing to go.

Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of DNA, followed hunches and made guesses to answer their questions, spending hours in labs doing things their professors thought were not only unscientific, but a giant waste of time. Even Socrates, the greatest philosopher of the Western world, was against the idea of writing things down in books. Had his pupil Plato not picked up on the innovation known as writing, and wrote down Socrates’s story himself, we wouldn’t know either of their names, much less the Socratic method for learning that many universities base their teachings on today.

Progress depends on people thinking independently and following their curiosity as far as they can, including doing things others around them refuse to try.