Innovating the Everyday

For a long time, I was the girl walking around with my head down, literally reading a book while I was walking, or sifting through the backlog of 67,234 emails that are currently lingering on my phone.  And a few years ago, it wouldn’t have surprised me if you caught me trying to simultaneously eat lunch during that same interval that I allotted to walking.  But I thought it was time to put an end to the grilled cheese on-the-go the day that I choked on my sandwich while running to catch the warm-up in my entrepreneurship class in the dungeon otherwise known as the Princeton engineering quad.  Why? Well, for many reasons.  I thought that by keeping myself chained to the items on my to-do list and isolating myself just enough to safely live in my own head, my laser focus would help me to get ahead. 

If I was able to remain aloof enough to grant myself immunity from the many things that could possibly distract me, I was convinced that I would be unstoppable.  If I took the time to eat lunch with friends, maybe their problems would become my problems – which would inevitably be a distraction; if I dared to give myself more than ten minutes of free time each day, how could I possibly rationalize the opportunity cost of the time that I wasted watching a TV show or taking a walk with a friend? Every minute of every day was allotted to a slot in my intricate daily schedule.  I had goals to reach, which inevitably came with countless items to check off my to-do list. And any time spent otherwise, any slight deviation from my plan was unacceptable.  I mean, it would set me back – right?  Wrong. 

I was afraid.  Afraid of a world that I had no idea how to be a part of.  Afraid of where my mind might wander if I took my head out of a book and actually looked at the world around me.  Afraid that if I popped my sheltered bubble, I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Afraid of the unknown.  Afraid of allowing myself to question if the goals that I was working towards resembled what I really wanted.  Afraid that if I let people get too close to me, they might be disappointed when they discovered the real me.  Afraid to step outside the box, to color outside the lines.  And afraid to ultimately build the world that I wanted to live in, rather than accepting the world that I was a part of.

Honestly, for a long time, I didn’t know that there was another option – that there was another way to see the world.  Rather than questioning the assumptions in the world around me, I was on autopilot.  But over time, I became inherently curious. I realized that as much as I loved books, the people who wrote them were often attempting to answer questions to problems that had already been identified.  They were analyzing an event of the past, writing about a problem that had already been solved, rather than innovating in the moment.  I used to assume that the world was written in pen, but it turns out that it’s actually written in pencil.  Everything around us is constantly changing, and the most amazing thing about it is that not only are we able to witness change, but we can catalyze change.  And singlehandedly, each of us has the power to make a mark on the world that we live in. 

When I started to think differently, I was afraid that in many ways, I was falling off track - that I was deviating from the perfect plan that I had set for myself.  But I soon realized that maybe I had to lose myself to find myself.  I started to ask ‘why’ when a teacher was teaching a lesson, rather than nodding my head ‘yes’ when I actually had no idea what was going on.  I stopped trying to memorize the answers, and I started to ask questions – about why certain things in our world operated the way they did, about how things came into being, about the problems that I saw in the world around me.  Instead of walking with my head in a book, trying to cram things into my brain, I discovered it was more beneficial to open my eyes, and to let my mind take it all in. 

As I started to really look at the various aspects of my day-to-day life instead of just going through the motions, I began to discover problems everywhere I turned – in the coffee shop, at the airport, on the sidewalk, in the classroom.  In many ways, I felt like I had been living the first two decades of my life entirely blind, assuming that I could only get ahead by riding out the waves that other people had set in motion.  But as it turns out, mobility stems from divergence – by identifying problems and building solutions to the very aspects of life that the majority of people are too ‘focused’ to identify in the first place. 

I think that many people see entrepreneurship as something that requires a big solution to a big problem.  And while our views of innovation are inevitably colored by the big success stories that we read about in the news, there is another type of entrepreneurship that I like to call ‘innovating the everyday.’ While some designers and innovators may sit in a room for days on end, trying to invent a solution to an arguably fabricated problem, you don’t have to build the hottest new tech app or create a multi-billion dollar company in order to think differently, to implement change.  In more ways than one, the world that we live in is not perfect.  There are plenty of processes that we go through every day that we simply accept as a societal convention; and rather than asking ourselves how we can improve upon these aspects of our lives, we often just let them be.  Instead of trying to innovate in an area where we see the biggest market gap, or trying to create things for other people, we can arguably identify the best problems and build some of the best solutions through simply trying to improve upon our own lives.

When you design things for yourself, not only are you beginning to build the world that you want to live in; but it is typically the case that a problem that you have is a problem that many other people have encountered as well. Therefore through simply having a critical eye, the process of identifying problems will come naturally.  Every time that you begin to think to yourself ‘this is annoying’ or ‘this is so inefficient,’ I challenge you to take that thought to the next level.  Why is this inefficient? How could this process be improved? If you were reimagining the design of the system, what would you do differently? Instead of taking the five minutes that you spend each morning on the subway to think about how uncomfortable and hot and squished you are, think about how the system could be changed in a way that could improve its efficiency.  Because if you look around, I’m sure that you are not the only one who is feeling what you are feeling or thinking what you are thinking.