What is the ‘magic sauce’ that seems to turbo boost the wealth trajectory of a few special people?
Perhaps the most over-used cliche concerning creativity is ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Be that as it may, I think it’s a tremendously useful English adage. However, there are examples all around us of inventions that were not birthed out of a furnace of necessity but were instead the offspring of great fun and playfulness.
I mulled over inventiveness, that unparalleled source of human advancement and wealth creation, last week because of a bona fide invention by an old friend of mine, retired teacher and sports iconoclast Lim Sze Choong.
Lim imagined, conceptualised and eventually secured a global patent on a new type of ping pong bat.
I don’t personally know anybody else who owns a worldwide patent on anything so that accomplishment by itself is worth mentioning.
In a little while I’ll tell you some more about Lim’s invention, the startling Oblique Bat. But first, I’d like you to assess how inventive you believe you are today or could be tomorrow.
Importance of creativity
When you’re ready, please use a 1 to 10 linear scale. Here’s what you do...
Give yourself a ‘1’ if you’ve never had an original thought in your entire life and a ‘10’ if Thomas Edison could have learnt so much from you!
I tend to be rather tough on myself in most areas of life. However, when I confess to you here that I ranked myself a ‘4’ on my own inventiveness scale, I’m not feigning modesty.
Actually, I wanted to give myself a ‘3’ but since I did come up with that 10-point Inventiveness Self-Assessment Scale all by myself, I thought that warranted a one-point bump.
The reason creativity is so important to us all is simple:
Our world often reserves its biggest rewards for those who bring something new into it; something like a better mousetrap or perhaps even Lim’s fatigue-reducing Oblique Bat that grants ping pong players an extended reach while reducing wrist stress.
And what about those benefits of creativity that are literally out of this world? Consider mining drones meant to extract resources from the Asteroid Belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter or Elon Musk’s outrageous dreams of colonising Mars with people from our generation!
Of course we’ve all heard of inventors who died in poverty but I suspect a lot more non-inventors perish in impecunious obscurity than the creative ones among us.
Speaking of professional creativity, in the narrow confines of my profession as a licensed financial planner, there are two teaching models I have created, crafted and honed to help regular people better grasp vital personal finance lessons. They are the ‘Rajen Devadason LIBERTY Blueprint’ and the ‘Rajen Devadason Blueprint for Financial Freedom’. (You’re welcome to Google both search parameters.)
In truth, there are huge stores of God-given creativity deep inside each of us — or at least there were when we were children. If we can figure out a way to hang onto those stores as we first crawl toward, then reach and finally race through adulthood, our lives will be enriched by a thick infusion of significance because we would have made our tiny corner of Earth a little brighter for other people. Furthermore and ideally, doing so can sometimes lead to us growing richer.
In a strange confluence of characters and events, a famous, more senior Malaysian alumnus of my university, King’s College London, Tan Sri Dr Augustine Ong, is the founder and president of MINDS (the Malaysian Invention and Design Society) and a global authority on palm oil. I tend to catch up with him infrequently at gatherings of King’s alumni.
Ong launched Lim’s Oblique Bat in Seremban yesterday at a dedicated Oblique Challenge contest open to participants of all ages and ping pong skill levels. (You may learn more about Lim and his beloved bat here: www.minds.net.my/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Newsletter-April-2018.pdf)
To non-ping pong players, such a sporting event may seem a trivial and an unnecessary distraction from the FIFA World Cup. Yet the excitement I have detected in Lim’s voice and demeanour as his event drew near reminded me not everything in life can be boiled down to dollars and cents.
Happier, richer and better
It was the one-time head of research at General Motors and consummate inventor Charles Kettering who observed: “Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.”
I know I’ll never be as brainy, creative or inventive as my smarter friends Lim Sze Choong and Augustine Ong. But that doesn’t mean I can’t expand my tiny capacity for originality and inspiration a wee bit in the years ahead.
Furthermore, I’m sure I can ratchet up my lifetime capacity for people-helping and — quite naturally — wealth-building through reading. That, by the way, is the main reason I ordered from Amazon a copy of James O’Loghlin’s book Innovation is a State of Mind.
Bottomline: I yearn to grow more creative in my life and work. I suspect you do, too. So, what will you do this week to inventively project onto the canvas of your life a happier, richer, better you?
© 2018 Rajen Devadason
Read his free articles at www.FreeCool Articles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com. You may follow him on Twitter @RajenDevadason