How to Innovate Your Motivation

Not to be missed: A special focus on How to Innovate and Restoring the American Dream on CNN, Fareed Zakaria's GPS (Global Public Square). http://www.cnn.com/gps

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by author Steven Johnson is one of the featured books.  I found his presentation fascinating from a historical point of view, being a history buff. I also found the dramatic uptick in  innovation correlating with the drastic boom in population. 

Did you realize that the world population was relatively stagnant (at approximately 1 1/2 billion people) for thousands of years until the 1930's.  Between the 1930's and the present the world population has increased to 6.92 billion people (according to the US Census Bureau).

The sheer population that we have to deal with in the 21st century puts the  modern business person into a crush of competition that our great-grandparents never had to deal with, but it also avails us to an unbelievably huge potential market that our ancestors could never imagine. 

If you told your great-grandparents that they could open a shop from your living room, selling things they themselves didn't have to manufacture, and this shop would generate money from customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from customers all over the world, they would think you were absolutely, positively insane.

So, next time, you're being pessimistic, feeling down about yourself and giving yourself the speech that there are no opportunities in this world and no way out of your present situation, think of the comparison between the business world available to you versus the business opportunities available to the average person in the early 1900's.  It's enough to motivate me and I hope it's enough to motivate you.