Today I learned something incredibly important.
So I met up with James who runs hotornot.com. Wow – what unbridled creativity I saw! It was an awesome conversation he and I had. Not just for the content, but what it made me realize.
As we grow older, our brains get more and more shackled and we start thinking about what won’t work and what we can’t do. But the internet is not like that. I have seen so many things that I thought would never work suddenly spring into success!
And James just made me realized how shackled my brain was. I need to re-open my brain, my creativity, and my willingness to try lots of new things on my internet startup. It’s the only way to do something that others won’t have thought of and keep ahead of the innovation curve.
He also hired a bunch of Berkeley CS students. Not just for their energy and willingness to code all nite, but for their lack of brain constraints because they were young and untainted by the corporate world, and their youthful creative thinking on what could be cool and what could work. It was a way for him to not be limited and to generate new and interesting ideas, or ways of doing things.
No MRDs, no justifications to upper management. Just create and do.
It is a shame that larger corporations and our experiences (as we age) stifle this type of thinking and innovation. How do we all re-capture the child in ourselves and remove the shackles we have placed on our minds?
James, you just joined my list of HEROES. Dude, I wanna be like you.