Thoughts About Innovation

"An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work." ~Dean Kamen

I actually love the thought of innovation and how it can change our lives. But I also love the way that the good people over at Despair.com make us step back and think about what we are doing or saying.

Years ago, there were many more people employed delivering milk to your doorstep, building cars, typing up stock purchase orders, and cleaning your windshield at the gas pump. But innovation has pretty much done away with these and many other types of jobs.

With most certainty, I am not saying we should go back in time to the horse and carriage days with crank phones on the kitchen wall. There is something to be said for moving ourselves, humans, forward in life.

What we should accept is quite a bit of innovation begins to make much of what we get paid to do, irrelevant. And what that means is that you need to be aware of it and to make changes in your life and careeer to remain relevant. With eBooks, Smartphones, more and more automation along with advances in artificial intelligence, we as humans have to find other purposeful ways to stay engaged.

Of course new innovations will create new types of opportunities for jobs. You simply have to be will to adapt and change in order to take advantage of those opportunities. so one day you might be shaking the hand of an android, and not the smartphone kind...but then again, maybe it will be.