I’m Not A Maverick. I am A Human Being. We live in a sorry time on planet earth where names like Maverick and Creative are most often used as subtle insults … accusations of being unreliable, unpredictable and not a team player.
Everything we have in this modern, hi-tech world comes from creative mavericks, forging new paths ahead when the old ones got tired and worn out. Every device, every process, every nice new thing we have was invented by, what to all accounts are, a bunch of weirdo losers who don’t play well with others.
Shouldn’t we be celebrating this instead of naming and shaming?
It’s like having Woman’s Day. All that is, is an indictment of how shabbily our society treats women. We should not be celebrating that, we should be acting to change it.
Creativity is not a nice to have, an add-on, something that comes out the basement courtesy of a few weirdos we are too scared to introduce to our friends. It is the root of our intelligence, our problem solving AND pattern recognition ability. It is how we find the road from A to B and beyond.
These skills are to be celebrated, not demonised.
So while I love writing for The Maverick Paradox Magazine and love that the whole stable of Maverick Paradox channels exists … I also hate it. I hate that how and who I am is still shameful to many people. I hate that I have experienced shame for just doing what I am good at … and so have many highly creative people.
The rest of the rank and file are ALSO creative, but their problem solving, ideation and innovation goes under the radar somehow … the results are desirable, monetiseable, measurable and that’s OK.
But how did they get to the results? By doing what I do … but not calling it that.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson: these people are changing the face of our society with their ideas. I don’t hear anyone criticising them for being creative. But that is what they are. And while we are mostly happy to call these people Mavericks, we are also flocking to buy their products.
There’s cognitive dissonance here, there’s a radical intellectual disconnect. We want to own the bling, the good stuff, the shiny shiny … but we don’t want to embrace HOW that gets made in ourselves. It’s all fine, just not in MY house, it seems.
But like all denialism, it masks a hypocrisy, a convenient lie.
We are all creative. And our creativity is what will change this world for the better. The moment we stop ostracising people as Mavericks or Creatives and start embracing our own power to create, the sooner we will stop relying on toothless politicians at pointless events like Cop26 and start solving our problems ourselves.
Because it’s all quite easy. Forget legislation to ban gas, plastic, methane etc. Just stop using it ourselves. Find new ways to do what we want and need to do without benefitting from these environmentally threatening things.
But with creativity and innovation comes responsibility … for our actions, for our results.
Is that why so many of us still choose to claim we are not creative?