Only the people who risk are truly free

The key to inventiveness is your willingness to invest uneconomically in the seeds of your idea and risk failure.

This is one of the reasons true originality is such a rarity. Because forces like prudence, rationality and shame prevent creative individuals from sticking themselves out there and making things nobody asked them to make.

There’s nothing evolutionarily advantageous about that kind of behavior. The reptilian brain knows it’s the first step towards our bloody demise.

First we spend too much time and money and effort on our crazy new project, and soon we’re shunned from the tribe for being impractical with our resources, and before we know it, we go out of business, go broke, and die alone in a ditch. Awaiting the buzzards to pick at our rotting flesh.

It sounds dramatic, but that’s effectively what our caveman instincts are telling us.

All the more reason to double down on investing uneconomically in the seeds of our idea.

Now, not to the degree that we dedicate every waking hour of our days to our project, or deplete our kid’s college fund buying too many supplies. But there’s something galvanizing about committing in the form of a capital outlay, either financial or economical.

Because it means we’re serious. We’re going all in and putting something on the line for our idea.

When I started working on my latest software product, I probably spent a good hundred hours just fleshing out the idea on paper. That was already a risky amount of time and labor for an idea that might fail.

And next, to bring the plan to life, there were design and development costs. The total investment was about four thousand dollars.

Now, that’s not outrageous, but it’s not nothing either. I’ve spent far more on far less.

And while that chunk of change wouldn’t drain my savings, it was still significant enough to feel like the project had emotional and economic weight behind it. There’s another risk.

Sure enough, we finished our new product in six months. The software wasn’t pretty, wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. I invented the damn thing. The word became flesh. There was nothing else like it in the marketplace. And I was more energized and liberated than I had been in years.

Hell, even if we never got a single subscriber, it still would have been something I felt deeply proud of.

Isn’t that worth the risk?

This is the creative person’s hero’s journey. Betting on ourselves isn’t a guaranteed win, but at least it’s an asset we understand.

Besides, if we don’t invest in our business, how can we expect anybody else to? Nobody saves their way to prosperity. We have make a psychological jump into the unknown, even if that means spending a few hundred hours or a few thousand dollars.

Are you spending significant money on creative experimentation?

Good, keep it up.

Are you investing real cash in tinker projects with no concrete end user in sight?

Perfect, that’s the spirit.

Are there certain expenses for which you’re price insensitive and absorb a disproportionate amount of your income?

Well done.

These are the habits of innovators.

The key is making sure your capital outlay, either in the form of time, money, labor, whatever, is significant enough that you really feel it. Think of it as the difference between wearing sweatpants and wearing jeans.

If you gain ten pounds from eating an unhealthy diet, sweatpants will only stretch to accommodate your new weight, and your brain will never register the difference.

But wearing jeans will make you feel the pinch. And that discomfort will motivate you take positive action.

That’s how creative people need to think about risk. They have to be willing to invest uneconomically enough that they feel the pinch. Accepting the fact that they might very well fail and be humiliated, and move forward nonetheless.

There’s a wonderful passage from my favorite songwriting book on this theme. The guitar teacher reminds students:

Every time you risk something, you’re rewarded. Maybe not in the way you expected, maybe not in any way you could have imagined. But every risk is rewarded all the same, maybe with new knowledge, new experience, new confidence, or something else entirely. What else are we here for, if not to risk? Isn’t that what makes life worth living?

Go make that psychological jump into the unknown. Overinvest in the seed of your idea, even if people think you’re crazy.

Doing so won’t guarantee success, but not doing so will almost certainly guarantee failure.

Do you spend significant time, money and labor on creative experimentation?