August 2

Here’s to the crazy ones

I think thinking little late a lot lately about what’s the difference between old and new. At St Lukes,  there’s a challenge to do things differently.  That’s really fun in a sense, but the problem is that new is often uncomfortable.

I have these old pair of plastic glasses that I love. Putting them on is like a pair of old tracksuit pants. They are comfortable, worn, and they look okay on my face. It’s the same style I’ve worn for a while and they’re just easy. I can go to sleep in them and not worry about breaking them.

Problem is that I can’t really see in them.

Doing the same thing the same old way is kind of like this. It’s comfortable, worn, but easy. You don’t have to worry about it. Some times it’s hard work. Hard effort, but easy in thinking. Because after a while doing the same thing you become expert.  And expert becomes easy.

And like my glasses, you can fall asleep in it. And you sometimes can’t see in it.

My point: when you’re trying something new and you’re sitting on the cutting edge, it feels uncomfortable, and sometimes like you have no idea what you’re doing.

The problem with this is that you are actually feeling constantly like a novice. You’re pushing yourself beyond your knowledge and having to research things, to search for ideas and to string those ideas together into new ideas and then figure out how to apply them. And then this brings new questions, new ideas.

So, you constantly feel like you’re no longer expert. And that in itself is hard. Every day you feel like a first year teacher scraping together ideas on the bottom of a barrel.

And it’s tiring.

It’s why week 2 feels like week 8.

So, in the words of Apple….Here’s to the crazy ones. The innovators. The rebels. The troublemakers. While some may see them as troublemakers, we see them as genius.  Because those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.

Let’s challenge ourselves to go out into the deep…even if it means getting sand in uncomfortable places.