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Crossing borders can be exciting and productive times. Not just found in travel but also for transitions. Graduations, promotions, changes of venue, and jobs all represent changing points of view. And you do not even have to go anywhere physically to change your point of view. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Individuals born in the latter years of the baby boom (1957-64) held an average of 12.4 jobs from ages 18 to 54, with the average worker currently holding ten different positions before age forty, One thing is certain, we are all in a fairly constant state of flux. And according to the wisdom literature, this has always been the case.

Creative outliers take risks, are willing to be different and divergent, and can also be impulsive as well as be willing to dare to fail. This means we cross a lot of borders, and do not like to stay in silos. We frequently find ourselves at the edges of established fields because that is where all of the action is and where all of the change occurs. 

The current trend of rolling up industries where large entities purchase smaller ones, often as a means to acquire innovation or talent, can get into trouble due to the culture clashes between the acquirers and the acquired.  The current pandemic is also wreaking havoc organizationally as well as economically, making it very difficult for many enterprises to continue previously successful behaviors.  

Perhaps this is a good time for creative outliers to show society where to go and what to do, for clearly the decision-makers of the world are a bit fuzzy about what makes sense. There is clearly a gap between innovators who believe they have some ideas about what to do and decision-makers who are vainly attempting to de-risk everything.

In short, these dangerous times are Transition Opportunities where creative outliers can transition into becoming innovators by having their insights adopted.  This is not very likely to occur by creatives telling decision-makers what to do, which means it is an excellent time to model innovative behavior.

Right now, most of the decision-makers in the world are fairly clueless about how to create a new hybrid virtual and in-person workplace. Some may attempt to leap into a virtual future, and some may attempt to return to the in-person past. Both of these approaches will fail as people need to be in touch with each other, but economically, virtual organizations’ advantages are too large to ignore.

If you have some creative ideas about where we should go forth together in a hybrid manner, now is the time to go out and do it and show the rest of the world what tomorrow will look and feel and sound like. Dare to fail. Take some chances. The barriers to entry for starting something up are lower than they have ever been. 

As a former Apple engineer, I have found myself having to defend an unintuitive yet apparently very wise practice called cannibalizing our product line. The basic premise is the past is always going to be consumed by the future.  Our old products will be made obsolete by new products entering into the market. This can result in a lot of obsolete inventory everywhere in the supply chain pipeline which is not a particularly profitable way to conduct business but was also considered simply a cost of doing business. 

At Apple eventually, the thought occurred, that if a company could cannibalize its own product line then we would know when it was coming and plan for it thereby saving a ton of money by reducing inventory and WIP (work in progress). In fact, it gives one a competitive advantage which is now well understood in tech industries.

Have you ever considered this is not only true about products but could apply to much more? It could apply to processes and even relationships, including one’s relationship with themselves. The new You obsoletes the old You.  

Yes, we all tell stories constructed mostly of memories but sometimes also containing wishful thinking. Sometimes these are stories we tell ourselves and sometimes they are stories we tell others but the recounting of memories does alter them. Apparently, your memory is like the telephone game, where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling. Similarly, each time you recall an event, your brain distorts it. Research supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS1025697 and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health grant T32 NS047987 supports this.

It is now clear that we are cannibalizing our own past, simply recalling it. This happens involuntarily with no effort on our part. As I am approaching my seventieth year, and have told my stories to myself and others, I can not help but wonder how much of what I think happened actually happened the way I currently recall it. I guess this is simply a cost of doing the business of living for we are not the same person today as we were years ago. When we reread a book or watch a movie or listen to a piece of music from our past, we can not help bringing our present selves to the occasion, and therefore the possibility of a new interpretation.  If you are a particularly creative and imaginative person does this mean your recollections are somewhat more suspect? Or is this an opportunity?  

If this can be a constructive act for businesses, I can not help but wonder if it could also be a constructive approach to bettering ourselves. As it does seem clear that our past is going to be cannibalized by our future, could this be done in such a way as to better our future not through deliberate exaggeration or self-aggrandizement but by consciously somewhat altering our past to support our present?  How can we tell if we are telling ourselves stories that are true? Or at least mostly true? 

Very long-term relationships are extremely helpful here. Of course, when reminiscing with people you have known for a long time you will discover differences in your recollections of circumstances. These differences can be quite large or fairly tiny.  But if you have a good fortune as I do of many long-term relationships it is possible to reconstruct a perhaps more accurate story about your shared past(s).  Journaling can also be a useful reference to return to.

As an Involuntary Innovator and therefore a creative outlier, I can not help but to think it is not only a business that can consciously cannibalize its past but so can people. I have not yet determined what to do with this awareness but since blogging is like journaling the understanding of this insight can be tracked and I intend to do so, for we are involuntarily altering our pasts in the retelling of our stories simply by recalling a memory.  

It can be difficult to know what has actually occurred, making our stories a bit suspect, but at least we can be aware that there is a range from affirmation recall to having some external evidence of the way things were. 

What is more important is how you want things to be in the future and how can one constructively and consciously make use of a story, while being mindful of potential flaws in our recollections. 

First, let’s begin with what does it mean to be an outlier, and before that, what is an outlier?  There are billions of individuals on this planet, and surely we are not all the same. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are rich, and some are poor. And some are creative, and some are less so.  And perhaps everyone is born creative, but society beats it out of most of us. We can not blame society and its institutions for this, as decision-makers have a primary responsibility to accommodate the majority. 

A brief, extremely lightweight statistical digression. 

We have all heard of the concept of a bell curve (or normal distribution of standard deviation).

This perfectly symmetrical statistical distribution represents the amount of variation in a set of values.

68% of humanity lives with one standard deviation of variation (also called one sigma).  95% within two and 99.7% live within three standard deviations.

Decision-makers are fairly happy if they can successfully serve 68% of humanity, and they are extremely happy if they can serve 95%. No one ever expects to satisfy the three standard deviation crowd of 99.7%.

Probably the majority of you are in the 5% beyond 2 standard deviations when it comes to curiosity and creativity, and this can get you in trouble because you are among the roughly 1 in 20 who are outliers who do not see the world from the same point of view as those firmly ensconced in the middle of the bell curve.

If you are three standard deviations away from the mean (or average), then you are roughly 3 out of a thousand people, and you have bigger problems because there is a pretty chance that many of the things and ideas that excite you may not even be visible or noticeable or understood by the mainstream.

This means every time you attempt to communicate what you are excited about, there is a reasonable chance you will be misunderstood. 

Welcome to the world of the creative outlier. These people may live more in possibilities than in probabilities which tends to get one in trouble with decision-makers whose responsibility may be to take care of the 68% majority in the center of the bell curve.

Assuming you still like being creative and would like to monetize this double-sided attribute sustainably, then it is time to become an innovator.  I define innovation as applied insight.  If a creative insight is never applied, then it is not an innovation. If you apply something that is not an insight, that too is not innovation. 

Being an innovator probably places you three standard deviations out of the mean, which means you have a couple of chances out of a thousand to be average, and with this comes both danger and opportunity, the two sides of crisis.  

Of course, almost every incredible success story has to do with getting on the opportunity side of a crisis. There is, however, risk involved, and this is something that decision-makers do not usually respond to favorably. This is why creativity is usually not a predictor of a smooth, simple, or routine life.

There are many ways to navigate the path of a creative outlier toward becoming an innovator, and some are decidedly more likely to yield better outcomes. This is a large part of the reason SVII was founded in Silicon Valley on June 16, 2005, where there were and still are an unusual number of three sigma people. And it is also why SVIII, the new international and virtual version of SVII, is in the process of coming into being now seventeen years later.   

Everyone tells stories. We have to because the amount of life impinging upon us is to great to absorb and stories allow us to focus on a subset of reality in order to be able to process it. Stories are not only how we communicate with each other but also how we communicate with ourselves.

Stories combine context and knowledge in an experiential data reduced digestible packages which sometimes become passable batons to permit us to communicate with each other over space and time as movies, operas, paintings and symphonies. And they usually have a beginning, middle and end again to make them digestible but reality is less linear and less predictable and less digestible than this. 

Reality is decidedly not linear, it is nonlinear and we all carry with us multiple endings, beginnings and middles to choose from. Is this the same as a multiverse? Or parallel universes? Probably because we need to reduce the complexity of the real world in order to process it for one thing is certain, the universe we live in is quite dimensionally vast and it is also dynamically adapting as are we and everything in our universe (or universes).

In fact often times differences of option come from looking at the same reality from more than one perspective. Some people are better than others at tolerating ambiguity (diversity?). Some people feel threatened or confused by too many options but they too have a legitimate point for there are those who are too comfortable with ambiguity and too uncertain of where they are in their worlds which can make it difficult to properly adapt too circumstances.

This is why stories are so important. They are a means of convergence on shared realities. They may be wrong or incorrect depending on which perspective is the reference. But in order for a society to operate there do have to be some shared stories, just as for each of us to operate we have to tell ourselves stories which are fairly consistent or we would be all over the place never converging upon realities that are useful to us because they can not be operated upon or within.

Think about it.

What stories are you telling yourself? And your friends? And your neighbors? And you poling places?

Remember although stories are powerful and necessary they may or may not be true. And they may or may not be true at some points in time but true at other points in time.

If you are a creative outlier, you may have stories that are not mainstream and that may get you in trouble. Be conscious of the stories you tel others and the stories you tell yourselves and remember stories do have a context within which they live. They are not absolute for they, like the universe are constantly adapting tot eh dimensions they are taking into account.