22nd March 2010
"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun."
—Mary Lou Cook
The future belongs to those who can work smart and not hard. Working hard is putting long hours of work and toiling. Working smart is producing enormous quantity of outcome with least effort. This is the difference between manual work and mental work. Those who work with hands are paid less than those work with their mind. Think of a person assembling a computer and another writing a software for the computer. Both may be putting in the same amount of work. But the software engineer is paid much more than the other person because he is using his mind and not his hand.
Once we accept this, we can understand the next stage of thinking conventionally and thinking creatively. People who think conventionally and rationally will be paid less than those who work creatively. Conventional thinking deals with methodology. This means, for producing this result, do that. Creativity is thinking drastically differently like, `why should I do that and why not this? Is this the only way to do it?'. Conventional thinking may avoid a problem. On the other hand only creative thinking will solve a problem.
The future will belong to those who can think differently to produce products and services in newer methods saving material and time. Log on to a search engine and see the picture of a computer in 1970s and compare the same with the latest palmtop computer. You will understand the meaning behind the above quotation.
N C Sridharan
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