Mavericks, A Different Ordinary
Does a maverick wear a funny hat and clashing colours and walk through the turbulent waters upstream because he is trying to be different? Does she try and fix a problem in a new way because she woke up that morning thinking oh goody I am going to wear my maverick heels today?
On the whole, probably not.
Mavericks just do things in their own ordinary ways, feeling ordinary; sometime that is not the same ordinary ways that were used before. A different ordinary. And if this is true, if mavericks don’t feel like mavericks, then people who do not consider themselves mavericks – could be. You could be a maverick.
When I have watched young children playing each one of them will do, at minimum, one thing a day that is completely unexpected, out of the (sand) box, brilliant and maybe hilarious. Even though I don’t always dare laugh. If every child has maverick moments then every adult must have maverick moment. The only difference with adults is that there is nobody watching, to say – what you did there was quite different, quite unexpected. Everybody has maverick born into them. This is curiosity, this is trial and error, and this is finding a way to get it right. Whatever it is.
The question is not where we find the mavericks it is…
Where do I put myself to encourage my own inner maverick?
At hacker days at Facebook “The only real rule,” Zuckerberg has said, “is that you’re not allowed to work on the same thing that your day job is.” Hacker days are when staff come together to work on ANY idea they have had; and one is trying to produce a working product (maybe a minimum viable product) that shows whether the idea in practise is still a good idea, and then allow other people to participate in the new product. What Zuckerberg does not say is that the other rule that precedes the only real rule is that you need to turn up for the hacker event.
You could set aside time to work on anything that is not part of your day job. And you could do it regularly.
This does not mean that you do not use your day job skills, of course, just that you are not researching your usual project, writing your usual reports. If you have a little bulletin board of ideas that you would have loved to dip into then this is when you spend half a day putting together a prototype or a collage.