A chiropractor, a masseuse or masseur (spelling assisted by Google) can sometimes run fingers along your back and tell you right where a trigger point or muscle knot is. In a similar way, the smart person feels all over the surface of a problem for the right spot for further development. You can’t make a step forward if you do the same old thing too much. On the other hand, if you simply bust out, breaking rules, expectations and forms without a plan or reason, you will only earn yourself isolation or retaliation or censure.
It is not easy to find the points of a program or project open to advance. The right place has to be something for which you can think of an alternative. The alternative has to be more attractive, cheaper, faster, more productive of love, affection, laughter – there has to be something that makes the alternative seem worthwhile. As a source I have liked over the years notes, many programs or procedures have been around a while and have their current form because they won out against competing possibilities. That is just one reason why many possible alternatives would not be improvements. So research, development and exploration have to be prepared for failures, flops, ideas that didn’t work out.
It is sometimes said that if you (or your company, department, family, etc.) are making not mistakes, you aren’t trying enough. On the other hand (there usually is another hand or several), it is no good constantly making mistakes and suffering failure. So, a balance has to be sought. Some innovation attempts made regularly, but not too many too often, and balanced with reliability, dependability and predictability.
Many young people, especially those of the male persuasion, overestimate their ability to innovate while underestimating the challenge of keeping things going as well as they have been. The image of a hero admired by all arises. One gets the phenomenon remarked on by Mark Twain about how when he was 14, his father seemed hopelessly stupid but by 21, the father obviously had learned so much in merely 7 years. Those preparing to be teachers sometimes observe many items they consider to be errors in the performance of experienced teachers only to find that it is very difficult to actually teach as well those they disparaged.
