mortensi: Anything you want, you got it

If you are used to complain because your job is full of non-senses, because you cannot express yourself, or more, your very life is boring, just take a pause and consider that winners find solutions, losers find excuses (and I am sure that both are good at doing it).

What if you already have all the ingredients you need to make your life, your job or your relationships with others more interesting? Yes it is, everything you need; right now and in your hands. It's not great novelty that in order to have an original idea one needs to dig within his own environment and find out how to mix things to obtain something new, something of value.

Think of Mac Gyver, you know for sure who am I talking about. Do you think he ever needed anything more than stuff at hand to fix things or to escape from any dangerous situation? No, the nice thing is that he was a master in re-arranging his close world to obtain new things, to invent tools and to solve situations brilliantly. So let's have a look at some contributions to show how this thing work.

Everyone is creative within his own workspace, tools and goals. This paradigm constitutes one of the basis of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) company: the "Closed World" condition. It dictates that, "when solving a problem or developing new products, one should strive to use only those resources that exist in the product (or system) itself, or in its immediate vicinity".

This approach is absolutely nothing new. James Webb Young wrote five steps for producing ideas in 1939 in his reference book for creative people from marketing, advertisement and other sectors of the industry. From his book: "The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material. The materials which must be gathered are of two kinds: they are specific; and they are general. Specific material are related to product and the people. General knowledge, about life and events.". So it's clear that the first step to come out with a new idea is to have a look at what is in the near environment and write it down. Collecting materials related to products and people is necessary condition to produce results starting from certain point and to produce an innovative value. But it's also needed general knowledge, and nothing can provide it except curiosity for life.

James Webb Young

Last but not least, there is the most entertaining and catchy proof that everything come from some other place through copy, transformation and combination. Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based film-maker has produced a short documentary split in chunks (a preview of the first chunk in this post) to show that modern works in the industry of entertainment are based on classical and successful productions. Song melodies, movie plots and the very aesthetics of these artistic productions are most of the times taken and inspired from somewhere else. To give a quick hint, just consider for a moment Quentin Tarantino's movies inspired in vintage scenarios or whichever of the countless cover singers re-interpreting classical hits.

So, when I say that if you want to change something in your life and feel innovation under your skin you already have got anything you want and need, I am not saying anything new.
Roy Orbison already said that.