Let’s talk about 3 ways to be innovative and how we there is no better time to be innovative than today.

Transcript Below:

Welcome to How to Build a Tent. The show’s not about tank-building, but how to make you successful. Today, we’re going to talk about advice a philosophy teacher of mine gave me about all you need to be successful. Before we get into that, I want to let you know we’re part of the CrossPolitic network. Go over to crosspolitic.com, become a member. You can also reach out to me with any questions, comments, show suggestions at HowToBuildATent on Twitter or Instagram. Give me a follow, show me some love, and you can e-mail me at matthowtobuildatent.com as well. Please share this show with a friend, someone who would be interested in furthering their career or starting a business, anything like that, would be really appreciated to help grow the show and just would really appreciate your support.

So, what did my philosophy professor tell me is all you need to be successful? He said, “Imagination and curiosity. If you have imagination and you have curiosity, you’re going to be successful at whatever you do.” Now I think that is leaving out a few critical things. Mainly, 1.) Is hard work, but I like that advice. It is really helpful to have an imagination. It’s really helpful to be curious about things. So, we’re going to dive into that today. What is imagination? What is curiosity?

And first I want to talk about hard work because successful people never had a problem with laziness or if they did have that problem, they overcame it. Successful people are hardworking people. Usually, the problem for them is finding the balance between what to be working hard at. They have a drive, they want to give 100%, and they usually push everything else away, but prioritization and understanding what is important in life is really helpful: God, your family, etc. Successful people aren’t lazy people. I love that verse in Ecclesiastes 10:18 – says because of laziness, the roof caves in, and because of idle hands, the house leaks. That’s such a great picture of what it’s like to be lazy. Your roof caves in, and you have leaky houses. If you have an imagination and curiosity, but you don’t have hard work to implement the ideas that you come up with, you’re going to have a collapsed roof.

So, what does it mean to have curiosity? Do you care about how something works or do you just care that it works? People that want to know about business processes, software, hardware, engines, those are the people that tear apart the engines just to see how it works even though something’s not wrong. That is what curiosity looks like, someone who wants to know the code of software how efficient is this process? What could be better? What could we do better to be more efficient? Those are the thoughts of a curious person, and that is something that can be practiced. You can intentionally be curious. You can force yourself to ask questions. You’re an intelligent person. It might not come naturally to you, but I believe it’s a discipline that you can learn, how to be more curious, how to wonder about things, how to examine things, to take time and to really appreciate how some things function, how something was built. That is what curiosity looks like. Successful people want to know how things work.

The reason that being curious is a great attribute to have to be successful is because you can’t fix things if you didn’t know how it worked, to begin with. You don’t know how to fix something or what it should be if you come upon a process that’s broken or a product that’s broken. If my refrigerator breaks, I have no idea how to fix it because I don’t know what it looks like to be fixed. I don’t know what it looks like in working order. I need to get a refrigerator