Of all of her five years of life, perhaps the last thirty minutes had been the longest for her to live through.  Frustration had begun half an hour earlier and had been slowly building.  Now the the frustration had risen to the level of a pressure cooker, evidencing itself by the pained look on her very red face and the tears welling up below her eyes.  As parents we knew she was in no mortal peril, but from our own childhood recollections we knew the pain from her frustration was very real to her.  We watched in suffering silence as time and again the ball whisked lazily unaffected past the bat, seemingly indifferent to the dedication and the energy she invested into each swing.  By then her level of emotion had blocked the value of any suggestions we were making.  Her determined quest to beat the ball had become equal to to her to slaying the most terrible of her comic book dragons.  This was tense stuff for us at the time, and quite frankly it wasn’t looking promising for the home team.

You can imagine how were elated we were then when her cousin, younger by a few days and watching from a different vantage, offered the minor correction to finally connect ball to bat.  “Aim a little higher,” were her cautious words of intended encouragement.  That moment time moved in slow motion.  Our daughter’s upper arm moved almost imperceptibly more than before, her raised elbow caught the gleam of the summer sun, and the bat followed a plane only two inches higher.  For a moment the ball lay quietly motionless in mid air, pressed against the face of the iridescent green plastic bat. The sound alone told us she had done it, even before our eyes found the unexpectedly vacant space behind our daughter.  We scanned our heads around trying to take in a new reality.  There in the warm hazy air of the summer day, the ball seemed to take the time to stretch out its arms in the sky before lazily falling to the ground.  From at least a Dad’s perspective, it fell to the ground a very satisfying distance away.  Moments later our daughter and her cousin had returned to where we had been sitting.  The sky was a little bluer, the air was a bit sweeter.  We were giddy.  She mindlessly played with the ball in her palms like a Labrador puppy ensuring that it had adequate slathering of saliva before dropping the trophy at our feet.  “You did it!” we whaled and hugged, “Great job you two.”

Now I can’t say with certainty that the temperature actually dropped to freezing, nor can I recall if cartoon steam actually poured from our daughters ears before the tears ran down her cheeks, but in that instant we knew things had changed.  Various emotions surged in competition to take possession of her face; Shock, betrayal, anger and perhaps a smattering of disgust.  We only had the most fleeting of moments to ask ourselves what had we done before a tiny finger was aimed between the eyes of her cousin and the trembling words, “What did she do?” made it past our daughter’s quivering lips.  And there it was; A foundational life question.  In an instant we had moved beyond a batted ball or the smart advice from a childhood peer.  Unknowingly her question was foundational to all moments of inspired creativity and brilliance. Her life question to us was a seemingly simple one, “What credit for success is owed to the Muse?”  Her question has been with me ever since that day.

What credit to the Muse?

Wikipedians tell us the ‘Muses’ in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature are the goddesses or spirits who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge contained in poetic lyrics and myths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse

What an interesting time it must have been for someone creative, innovative, or one of the other wonderful terms we have for those who are modernly credited with inspiration.  How natural it must have seemed to credit something so undefinable as inspiration to a supernatural source.  How comforting to attribute a lack of inspiration to want of the help of a muse, and still allow personal ownership of the hard work it takes to bring an inspiration to fruition.  New York Times best-selling, and notably first time author, Elizabeth Gilbert talks of the pressure to be “brilliant” in what would be her second book. She uses her circumstance of prior success and now potential peril at having to repeat that success when she speaks of the ancient notion of a “genius” as being an external force like a muse.  That someone or something with whom she shares the credit and also the burden of creativity.  [See Elizabeth Gilbert in the OnTheShelf.com video post The Burden of Genius]

Gilbert’s perspective distinctly inspired me.  She was not my external genius, nor did she reach me in the form of a Greek Muse.  She was a genuine inspiration to me, however, and is deserving of some shared credit.  Gilbert’s ideas caused me to think about others who perhaps deserve inspiration credit for much of my work.  When I first set fingers to keyboard this post was originally to be entitled, An Ode to Shelia.  An account of how a brief email from a relative of mine inspired this whole site, OnTheShelf.com/journals/.  Shelia was the muse of my creative work, and for that she deserves both some credit and an expression of my appreciation.

Shelia’s Ode

This brief ode to Shelia takes the form of a chorus of my appreciation to all of those who inspire me to personally aspire to be even just slightly better at each thing I do, each time I do it.  In leadership contexts we describe this reaching to do each thing a little better each time we do them as continuous improvement, but we have few words to describe those who inspire our action.  In life we occasionally call these people mentors, but more commonly they go unnamed with their ode’s unsung.  It is my contention here that these people are our modern day muses, as fleeting and ethereal as any inspiring apparition and equally worthy of praise and my appreciation.  And so to Shelia.

After a lovely Sunday spent with my wife, undeniably one of my most trusted and valued muses, I wrote a blog-post entitled The Memory Collector.  [Read the OnTheShelf.com post The Memory Collector]  At the time I had no blog space, so for my want of feedback I posted it to Facebook where, as you might have surmised, Shelia read it and commented.  It was not the genuinely appreciated acts of her actually reading my work nor her effort in commenting that so moved me.  Her inspiration was the term she used to describe my work.  “This was lovely,” she wrote.  “You should write more.” Her words offered no recitation of my labor (‘you must have spent a lot of time working on this’), but rather she offered  a few words that described my work as a thing which was, in her kind words, worth admiring.  I was quite taken by the thought that my idea had become a thing which could now exist.  In a way it was now on its own, and it could have an existence potentially beyond me.  It was a thrilling notion to have once again created a thing from an idea, but with it came a burden that to have such an existence it required a place to live.  This was the motivation for creating OnTheShelf.com as a place for my ideas.  It would be a place for those things which, in part I owe in part to my muses, to live on without me.    In this way it has become our museum.

The Burden of being Inspiring

As with many things in the complex nature of human interaction, there is a second edge to the sword of being someone’s inspiration.  As we can inspire without intention, so to can we crush inspiration from others without the realization that we have done so.  As parents, as managers, and when we act as mere sounding boards in conversations with others, we routinely have the opportunity to inspire.  All too often, however, we miss that mark of being a muse and we recklessly snuff the spark of inspiration.

I have the pleasure of working in a company filled with exceptionally smart people. I have experienced the contrast of working in intellectual wastelands, and I am thankful each day to have arrived at such as place.  My exhilaration is tempered, however.  As a company we suffer from regulating inspiration and exercising a prowess for killing innovation.  This is the cultural fluency in our dialog about innovation.  In the last few months alone I have listened to senior executives bestow the virtue of “copying the features” of other successful companies, I have listened to them describe part of our product creation workforce as “creatives” and the remainder as “non-creatives” (this was said to someone that the manager deemed a non-creative), and witnessed another leader comment that one should not speak truth to power until one had been with the company for “at least ten years.”  Each of these callous remarks killed ideas and dissuaded future inspiration and innovation from the recipients of those messages, and the people those recipients would no longer inspire.  In some cases their snuffing of innovation will have been their recipient’s final straw, an the case of those for whom this was one in along string of subtle rebukes this is merely an affirmation that they are simply not innovators.  Those messages were wrong, and at their best irresponsible.

Innovation is a team sport, and inspiring others should not be limited those that someone arbitrarily decides are or are not creative.  The beginning of a team opportunity to score does not start with the person that cracks the ball with the bat nor the one who puts the ball into the net.  There is a tendency to mistake group effort with the last mile scorer, the designer who ultimately dressed the concept well, or the programmer who produced good quality code on time.  The reality is that each, but no more so than any other, had the opportunity to foster tens of dozens of other ideas and use the best ones contribute to the best final success.  To the extent the executives in my example wantonly killed the start of a thousand ideas, they did so in the misconception that you can identify where a good idea starts from.  You simply can not.  It is impossible to tell what idea will be used as the stepping stone to create another, perhaps the latter one closer to a product the company can benefit from. When we kill good seeds of innovation and inspiration we fail to recognize that in nature we don’t evolve into exactly the next perfected version we need to survive, but rather a million good ideas are given room to grow and evolution takes it from there.  When we unnaturally select who will be selected to create our next great concepts, and extinguish the spark from everyone else, we are left with the least innovative and most repetitive producers.  We rob ourselves of improved results, but far more insidiously, we rob people of the inspiration to listen for their muses.  Individuals no longer presume they have the ability to create and so they stop listening for the seeds of ideas that may grow into truly wonderful things.  Eventually those seeds become scarce to a point of being exception and not the rule.  It is incumbent for each of us to look for opportunities to be inspiring and to help grow ideas from others.  Review by others is often enough of a reward.  When appropriate, a kind word of encouragement may change that person’s life or may even give birth to what will be the next seed of something wonderful.  We need not walk through our lives stomping on the ideas of others when encouragement is so easy and ultimately holds such incredible rewards.

A final salute to my muses

It has been several years since that summer day when the ball journeyed with new freedom into the sky.  The tears are dried and the moment has been nearly forgotten.  Perhaps we were remiss in not giving the muses their due. And so to the muses, I thank you for more than you may know.

To my niece who was the muse of that nearly forgotten day; To my daughter who inspired this post and a thousand things more; To my wife who inspires me beyond my measure; to Shelia for her effort in reviewing my work and in taking the time to encourage.

This is to those muses and perhaps to those future muses, both at my work and in my personal life, who encourage others to create through their support and inspiration. Yes it is time consuming work.  It is often that much more difficult to find ways to encourage others and to even teach processes which can produce innovation.  It is, however, what genuine leadership is all about.  For those like me who occasionally fail to reach their goal of being someone who inspires, I implore you to reexamine your biases, habits, expressions and understanding of inspiration and innovation.  The rewards for encouraging ideas from others are too great to not risk a bit of self-reflection.

While it is likely that no one may ever view my work and wonder if there was a genius inside or beside me, please know my pride of creation is shared with all of you who have encouraged, inspired, tolerated my early ideas and ultimately trusted me to listen to your ideas, each of them, good and bad.  Thank you for all you have done and I hope you will continue to do.