Innovation Blog

The Greatest Innovation Of All:  Your Life — We Can All Be Bill Gates

By Shlomo Maital

  

 Bill & Melinda Gates (Foundation) 

 

 In an amusing Op-Ed piece this morning (March 15)  in NYT, Zick Rubin writes about how a psychology website wikia.com reported his death (“Zick Rubin, 1944-1997”) – prematurely, recalling Mark Twain’s famous comment to a journalist “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” (usually misstated as “..reports of my death are premature”).  Rubin had to struggle to correct this.  But what is most interesting is that Rubin writes of how he ended a great career as Harvard psychology professor and in midlife became a media lawyer!  He was literally reborn.

    The greatest innovation many of us will face is within our own lives. We will need to reinvent ourselves in midlife, at least once.  But how?    According to Strenger and Ruttenberg *:  Avoid two extremes.  Myth One: “the myth that midlife marks the onset of decline”. It doesn’t. Your cumulative wisdom will far outweigh your physical decline.  Myth Two: “the myth of magical transformation through vision and willpower”.  You probably cannot become a concert pianist, even if you do practice 20,000 hours.  

   Use the ‘adjacent possible’.  What do I know now that could be useful in a new but related activity (adjacent to what I do now, but far enough to be interesting and challenging)?  And what am I passionate about, to drive the energy I need for this transformation?

   I know a great many successful managers and entrepreneurs who find new meaning in their second lives, through social activities – using their skills and wisdom to tackle social ills and problems, after building global companies and shaping world-changing innovations.  Social entrepreneurship is ‘adjacent’,  it is ‘possible’, but also new and challenging enough to energize.   Bill Gates is an example. He is using his wealth and his Foundation, along with organizational and innovative skills,  to tackle such problems as malaria, child immunization and developing a TB vaccine. 

* Carlo Strenger & Arie Ruttenberg, “The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change”, Harvard Business Review,  Feb. 2008