Keep Calm and Build Stuff
For a large part of the past decade, I’ve dedicated my life to two journeys: becoming a more mindful person, and creating value through digital innovation. Through the journey, I’ve learned how widely applicable mindfulness is how much of it is required in innovation.
When hearing about mindfulness, what comes to mind?
Do you think of Deepak Chopra, proclaiming that your soul is boundless and made up of light particles from distant dead stars? Do you think of Tibetan Buddhists and the arduous hours of practice they undertake? Or most common in modern times, do you think of popular science articles that claim that mindfulness will make you happier, more productive, even richer!
Whatever you think of, you likely don’t connect the dots between the process of innovation and the requisite amount of mindfulness needed to do it well.
Accept Reality As It Is
You don’t need to attend a 10-day silent meditation retreat to know the basics of mindfulness. You don’t need to study all of Buddha’s teaching to know the core. Even Buddha himself might say that the philosophy is simple. But he’d likely continue to go on to say that the practice is hard.
Even if it’s a challenge, there’s a few ways to begin incorporating it into your day as an innovator.
Per dhamma.org, one of the many organizers of the infamous 10-day retreats:
Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation.
In other words, start by respecting reality as it is.
Translating this to innovation, this is akin to understanding your operating environment before taking action. It means deeply understanding your customer, your competitive landscape, your constraints, etc. With reality in mind, your actions can be constructive and tangible.
One of the most notable innovation frameworks, the lean startup methodology, emphasizes the need to root in reality when describing it’s core concept — the build-measure-learn feedback loop:
The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.
In the loop, learning is akin to reflecting on objective outcomes. Asking yourself the hard question of is this working? Is this monetizing as expected? Are users doing what I thought they’d do? In the process, you’re respecting reality and working with it to build your vision to what the world might need. The point is, as an innovator your job is to see things as they really are.
Detached
When bringing something to life, it’s easy to get overly attached to your creation or idea. I’m sure that we can all recall the ragged inventor at your co-working space who’s full of enthusiasm, but just can’t bring himself to bring his product to market because of the fear of judgment.
This fear leads to years of anguish about the question — to pursue or not pursue, to launch or not to launch. With this paralysis, the anguish eventually leads to regret.
According to our good friend, Deepak Chopra, some ways that attachment can manifest include:
- Anxiety
- Fear
- Anger
- Jealousy
- Hopelessness
- Sadness
- Disconnection
- Pride
- Vanity
In the same article, Chopra goes on to say:
True detachment allows for deep involvement — because of the lack of attachment to outcome.
That last part is crucial is simply letting go of our anxiety or fear about what could happen. The insight is that it’s more productive to be focused on the process, rather than the outcome (the book, Thinking In Bets, really brings this to light).
Why? Because there are so many things out of your control. Firstly, there’s the thing I brought up earlier — reality. You simply can’t ignore that, you have to respect it. You have to be able to work through the process of innovation, respecting there are events out of your control. This keeps you immersed in the work, which is what you can affect.
Putting it in your work, there are A LOT of innovation frameworks, but to return to our original example of the lean startup
The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get the desired product to customers’ hands faster. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to new product development.
Using this process or any other removes the feelings of fear, anxiety, or judgment and gets you to continue moving forward to being a feedback loop towards success. This is the beauty of being detached — making progress.
So, if you feel stuck, get detached from the outcome, and focus on the process. You’ll get a lot further and can iterate from there.
The Power In Pause
Of all things mindfulness, the pause and breath are the most common and easiest to use of all techniques. It gets you grounded and brings your reality back into focus. It helps you to see things as they are and get detached from anxiety and fear.
As the magazine, Mindful, puts it, the pause is important because it helps us by:
Taking a step back from the rush of activity held demonstrable value giving a bit of breathing room to make more deliberate and well-thought-out choices.
Even further, it goes on to say emphasize that a pause is almost as a good as meditation session:
Rather than having an “inflexible” 30 minutes for a formal meditation session — and then not keeping it because of other priorities — just taking a few moments to pause, and liberally sprinkling those moments throughout my day, was the perfect solution.
When going through the process of building something new, stopping for a breath gets overlooked. Why? Because we’re caught up in the excitement and exuberance of change. But, in the process of enacting change, there will always be obstacles, challenges, or just moments where we feel uncertain as we enter the unknown.
The act of pausing can take a lot of forms as we do this — simply breathing before a big presentation that could be about motivating others or telling a cohesive story, or even before diving into some hard truth research that will give you clarity about what to do. The pause is the tool that lets you take in the reality of the situation and focus on the process, rather than getting lost in thoughts of wrong or right.
How Will You Apply Mindfulness?
Mindfulness techniques are easy to understand. But, when you’re swept away by the energy and excitement of creating something new, they are easy to overlook.
My two cents — start small by just pausing.
