Be more like babies and children
Be curious and innovate
The backyard of my childhood home is tiny compared to how I remember it. When I was young, I imagined the yard as an entire house. I laid bricks to separate the rooms and envisioned how each area of the house was to be used. There were bedrooms, and a kitchen, and a play room for I and my family to enjoy. And I imagined my favorite climbing tree was an extension of the house, wanting desperately to have a tree house. I spent many days playing in that imaginary house, using different tones of voice for different family members and friends, cooking for them using twigs and other scraps laying around the yard, and just being my idealized version of a homemaker.
This was before I had siblings, when I had to create playmates if my neighborhood friends were unavailable or before those relationships were formed. My dolls were a good stand-in, and my cat got roped into many adventures. Of course, my adult family members would indulge me, but they weren't able to fully immerse themselves in the world I had created.
But what if they could? What if adults adopted the mindset of children? We would be so much more innovative, much more curious, and probably experience much more joy.
My daughter is only six months old, but there are times when I'm certain she's using her imagination. She grabs ahold of her toys, manipulates their movements, and starts babbling to them. These instances usually occur when she does not have the ear of an adult—when she's in her car seat or stroller, when she first wakes up from a nap, or in her chair while I do the dishes. When left to her own devices, the few she has at her young age, she innovates. Her stuffed elephant, car seat toys, and giraffe teether provide interactive entertainment, or perhaps something more. Maybe, like the bricks in the backyard of my childhood home, they props in a world she has created.
There seems to be a severe lack of creativity in the modern world. Instead of creating new films, books are turned into movies and old stories get remade. Instead of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset, college graduates opt to work for someone else, executing the CEO's vision rather than their own. Leisure is spent passively consuming streaming shows, movies, and YouTube videos, taking the place of artistic endeavors, nurturing gardens, or creating music. Certainly, economics play a role in the seeming decline of creativity. After the 40- to 60- to 80-hour-work-week ends, exhaustion sets in, leaving little energy to maintain a household let alone take up a craft. And looming debt pushes many into that 80-hour-work-week in service of a boss.
Even if one has limited time that is not dedicated to making money, I would bet that their life would be more fulfilling if they were innovating rather than passively consuming what someone else has created. Instead of turning on a streaming service or grabbing for the smartphone, what if adults instead thought like a child? What if they looked around and started imagining what is possible then brought that vision to life? Even more, what if they nurtured their creativity into an innovative business?
My mom, when she was a young girl, started a rock shop in her grandparents dilapidated garage. Her and her friends collected geodes and other shiny rocks, including scraps from a nearby gravestone manufacturer, then sold them to the neighborhood kids. Today, you can find sellers on Ebay whose shops resemble my moms. Perhaps their goods are more refined, but the idea is the same: be curious, figure out what people like, and then provide those goods.
Sometimes I just sit back and watch my daughter interact with her toys, or whatever it is she has managed to get her hands on. She turns it in every which direction, stares at it for a while during the process of manipulation, puts it in her mouth, looks at it again, and starts babbling. I think to myself: "Oh, to be that curious. What it must be like to experience the world, and everything in it, for the very first time." Then I think: "I can adopt that mindset myself." Maybe not to the same extent, but I can be curious like her, and with her, and I can use a fresh view of the world to innovate.
I might have to work hard to shove aside my notions of how the world works, simply because of the amount of time I've lived in it, as well as how things within the world works. But if I stop passively consuming and spend more time actively observing and pondering, I can certainly get closer to her level of curiosity and imaginative thinking. I can look at a pile of bricks and imagine the perfect house, or a collection of shimmering rocks and see business potential. I can rekindle that childhood fire of ingenuity.