Perhaps you are, perhaps you are not.  I do believe there is great value however in experimenting and innovating in life especially when it comes to working your mind for new ideas.

Work and Play

Many people when they think of innovation they associate it with business and perhaps their work environment since that is typically where you hear the word and see headlines and articles about it.  More than likely, your work already has elements of innovation in it especially if you work in technology and other industries where it is common.  However, you should not define your work to have innovation or not, as it can very easily be an individual thing, not specific to a workplace, industry or certain environment.

Innovation is about expanding things, building on others ideas, answering curiosities, converting restless fascination into something new that can be created, and it’s about acting on or developing inspirations.  These are all things that an individual can do independently of an organization.  Are you ready to stop waiting for your organization to push innovation from the top, and are what are you doing about it in your own life and work?

Your free time has even more room in it to be innovative than when you are being paid.  Work usually involved a high degree of following tasks and responsibilities that someone else has set out for you, so you do not always have the freedom you need to be at your creative best. There is always some room for it, but let’s face it, not every workplace is the most experimental and creative support environment.  That can’t be said about your own time, your play time.  The time you have to choose whatever you like in life and it’s in this play time that you can really be innovative and experimental.

Memory and Brain Mapping

A wonderful thing about innovation and experimentation is that it helps to quickly build more synapses in your mind deepening your brain maps for creative thinking and experimentation.  Exploring new methods and learning from that (as does most learning) reshapes the mind to strengthen and develop the connections and associations you have with those activities and thoughts, which over time, continue to build on themselves.

There are many things you can do to be learning when you innovate.  As you make change and create new things, you will be learning, mapping the mind and strengthening your memory.  Memory and brain mapping may not be directly visible or understood, but they strengthen quickly with creative work, when building things directly and when learning anything new.  Interestingly, visual mind maps and memory exercises have a similar effect and so they go hand in hand with innovation and experimentation since you learn in the process.

Discovering Activities and Hobbies

Discovering only comes by exploration.  Discovery is also a part of personal development that I hope if you are reading this, is something you have often found yourself doing already.  The act of change, seeking and exploration allow you to find things you are naturally good at as well as simply new areas to learn that may not come so naturally.

Experimentation requires some level of spontaneity and an open mind.  This will lead you to be in new situations, continuous questions and curiosity. Putting curiosity to work will typically lead to new experiences in work and play and it will have you finding new activities, new things to learn and hobbies that peak your interest.

Tuning Your Life Enjoyment

These new activities and hobbies will lead to much more than just new things to do.  It allows you to find and connect with new friends in activities you might not have ever discovered otherwise.  It helps you uncover passions that would never be found without the exploration and courage to get there and it allows you to have enjoyment in life that could have otherwise been lost in a pool of complacency.

There is much value in tuning your life with the help of new discoveries and it lets you ultimately bring a bit more happiness to your life and gain more enjoyable past time.  I’m certainly not saying you can’t find this without innovation and experimentation, but it certainly helps to know many more of the things you enjoy so you can pick and choose the ones that true are the most valuable to you and your life.  They could be major life changes as a result, yet they could also be very minor.

Traits to Develop and Expand

There are so many ways to be innovative and more experimental, it is not a matter of do you have it or not, everyone does.  The question you should ask is where do you have it and how can you use it more.  Here are some of the traits you could rely on to be more innovative and experimental methods in your life:

• Curious – explore what is around you, ask questions, dig deeper
• Rebellious – challenge and question the status quo
• Willing to take risks – keeps complacency at bay to reach out of your comfort zone
• Adventurous – enjoy the unknown and some ambiguity
• Playful / Childlike – asking questions and simply having fun with things lets you be more creative
• Accept Failures – any kind of experimentation will have what seem like failures.  Accept them and move on to the next one
• Imaginative – being experimental in your mind and your ideas
• Flexible/adaptive – open to change and able to adapt
• Thrive on Chaos – some unknowns and discoveries can only be found from unseen and even unwanted events.  Find them in chaos with others get frustrated or over burdened
• Connector – build new relationships quickly and with varying combinations of diversity
• Perceptive – aware and reflective on the environment around you; pondering; contemplative
• Committed to learning – continually seeking growth and knowledge
• Persevering – willing to keep driving forward despite the odds and hardships and able to learn from the experience

Google Plus has got to be one the most recent and interesting applications of technology for social media anyway.  It lets the user control the connections how they see fit instead of putting connections into a system that is forced upon them.  It will certainly shift the way people think about social ‘circles’ (no pun intended).  I watch many technologies in 3D graphics as well for rendering technologies, distributed computing an social rendering for large computational work.  As a 3D artist, I love the idea of using a wider social circle to create graphics and capabilities in that.

Trends are not something I recommend at all actually.  I strive to recognize individualism and would rather see more people following their own ideas and carrying through on those ideas.  There are enough people following the masses and mindlessly living among social influence.  Trends are really only out there to be broken, so if anything, I’d steer away from them, especially if you hope to build leadership confidence.  One societal trend however, is that collaboration on new ideas and new systems is making the speed of adopting change shorter than ever as people are able to connect with link minded folks more easily and build on each others’ ideas.  It’s hard to label that as a trend, but instead of a way the masses can collaborate when connected to do so.

3.  What’s your favorite magazine?

I’m very interested in responsible building and living and the magazine, Home Power has been one of my favorites for some time.  It is a magazine that provides a window to the best creation, design and new innovations that more and more people are finally getting value from and making things more readily available.

4.  What is your favorite book that you would recommend to people?

TED.com, by far.  Inspiring speakers, leaders, design, technology and entertainment.  There are literally hundreds of incredible presentations and technology messages to learn from and I owe a lot to the presenters and leaders that contribute that I have learned from.

For me, life lessons, learnings and spirituality are all based from the Bible so it is the ONLY book you really need.  However, I understand that spiritual bias doesn’t suit everyone but I do belief that the many great spiritual books of the world (including other great teachings) so offer the most value for life.  If I had to pick something recent from other well known authors, perhaps “Win Friends and Influence People” by Carnegie would be the most valuable if applied. As with any book, reading it does nothing, application of the content is what counts so I’d instead recommend that people make a habit not to read more, but to study what they read and put at least one thing into practice from what is learned.

7.  What’s the most frustrating customer experience you recently had? And how could it have been improved?

Definitely would have to be at a restaurant (Boston Pizza actually) where I had a terrible waitress that yelled across a table of 10 people instead of waiting around to take orders individually, then my meal was missed so they had to rush it after everyone else was already eating that I was with, then the rushed order was wrong and they didn’t bring the correct meal, then they billed me for the wrong meal, (the one I didn’t order) and they had no way to add two orders together into a single payment (my wife and I), so the whole experience was really bad.  They did nothing to fix it without me asking and they made excuses instead of apologizing for the mistake or offering anything in return for all the problems.  I guess they didn’t understand how to think about the service from the customer’s perspective, since they got so much of it wrong.  It was very frustrating.

8.  What was the best customer experience you recently had?

A sporting goods store locally named Mountain Equipment Coop is and has been over and over my most memorable customer experiences due to quality service staff, fast checkout tills, and great return policies and warranty coverage.  I recently went in to buy a sleeping bag for backpacking and had my mind set on a certain bag per price ratio I thought was ideal.  In the store however, it only took a few minutes from one of the staff in camping to find out I really wanted a super light and small bag, since I would be packing it on trips on my mountain unicycle.  He showed me another bag that was colder temperature rating, half the weight and one third the pack volume, with obviously more cost, but worth the price in size and weight.  He did not hesitate to rip one out of its plastic bag for me to check its size in a tent on the floor, and pack it into some tiny compression bag to prove it was as small as advertised.  Needless to say, it only took a few minutes to select it and I am very happy he knew his stuff so I didn’t have to find out the hard way how much larger the other ones where I was looking at.