Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone! How is your week going?
Today I actually just want to keep going with the creative thinking series. If you hate these, let me know, but I’ve really enjoyed the book and figured I could highlight some of the cool thoughts.
This week I’m going to give you two short quotes I thought were cool, and then I’ll explain their context.
This first quote will make sense at the end, but I wanted to put it here first. This is the takeaway for the whole article and their whole point in this chapter:
“The next time you see something quirky, keep an open mind.”
The following quote is a little more powerful and thought-provoking, and it comes from the one and only Mark Twain:
“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.”
The context of this whole piece is a simple story about a new revolutionary product. Ok, not revolutionary, but it was creative, solved an issue, and had a huge market.
It started with two people in Japan who noticed something strange about the person in front of them.
They were wearing mismatched shoes. One pink and one yellow (or something like that).
I vibe with that because when I was a kid I always wanted to wear mismatched socks. I’d even force my mom to wear mismatched socks to the point of crying if she refused.
Anyways, these two people who saw that person in mismatched shoes could have just dismissed it as “quirky,” and then moved on with life.
But they didn’t.
They kept digging, they kept an open mind, and they realized there is a market for it. They figured out that people liked wearing mismatched shoes, but that there was a problem…
That same person with a right pink show and a left yellow shoe, also had a yellow right shoe and a pink left shoe sitting at home.
They had to buy 2 pairs of shoes just to have this fashion statement.
Well, I’m sure you know what happened next, and if you’ve been in a shoe store recently I’m sure you’ve seen a few pairs of shoes you can buy with mismatched colors or at least mismatched shoelace colors.
And that’s the whole takeaway.
When we encounter things that are “quirky” don’t dismiss them immediately. Don’t assume you know everything. Keep an open mind, think about it, and try to discover/learn something new.
I love that Mark Twain quote for this. I feel like when I see quirky things I don’t understand, I assume I do understand. But when we approach the world with a child-like wonder, we can learn and grow so much more. I don’t want to pretend like I know, I want to be honest that I don’t know, and then learn.