thriving. Companies such as Google and Apple have created a culture that empowers their employees to stretch, to attempt the “impossible dream,” to explore, to go after opportunities that may not always work out.
Third, to encourage innovation, we must model and communicate that “thinking” is not wasted time but is integral to the innovation process. Unfortunately, most educators and almost all employers expect thinking to be done on a person’s own time, not on the clock. Imagine you are sitting at your desk, ruminating about an idea, when your boss comes along. What’s the first thing most of us do? We try to “look busy.”
Allowing a person time and freedom to peer off into space, to daydream if you will, about an idea’s potential is not permitting that person to be idle or unproductive. It is allowing him or her to think creatively. Allowing for the thinking process to develop in a person’s mind is essential if we ever expect that individual to provide us with those voilà! moments. People who achieve the great breakthroughs in our world have usually already experienced those breakthroughs in their mental processing; they’ve seen the idea working in their mind long before they ever tried it in “real life.” Before I ever took my first walk in space, I saw it in my mind many times, imagining what it might look like, feel like, sound like—all in my mind. If we want to foster innovation, we must encourage an atmosphere that allows for creative thinking, even if, to some people who may not understand, it looks as though nothing tangible is being done or accomplished.
Innovators view change as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience or an interruption. At 86 years of age, I decided to move from Los Angeles back to near Cape Canaveral in Florida. Sure, it is challenging to deal with change, but I always want to be open to new opportunities. Most people don’t like to move out of their comfort zones, but as we all know, change is inevitable. You can resist it and complain about it as an inconvenience, or you can regard change as your chance to do something new. Keep that parachute open. Use your mind to ponder the possibilities rather than to pooh-pooh the interruptions change brings to your “normal” way of doing things.
Albert von Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian Nobel Prize–winning physiologist who first discovered the benefits of vitamin C, was fond of saying, “Discovery lies in seeing what everyone sees, but thinking what no one else has thought.”
That was a man who kept his mind open to the possibilities, and that’s the kind of man I have tried to be, and always want to be.
• CHAPTER THREE •
SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS, AND I WILL SHOW YOU YOUR FUTURE.
Choose your heroes wisely, and be careful who you idolize. Why? Simple: You will become like the people with whom you most often associate. The people with whom you surround yourself will have an impact on you, either positively or negatively. It is a timeless truth that bad company corrupts good character, but if you walk with the wise, you will become more like them.
I’ve been blessed with some great friends, people who have not only given of themselves to help me, but who have helped to bring out the best in me. Other than my father, one person who was a great friend to me, as well as my most influential mentor, was Jimmy Doolittle, the famous aviator. When my dad introduced me to Doolittle, I was just a kid, but the world-renowned pilot took time with me and encouraged me to pursue my own dreams of flying.
When my father passed away, Jimmy Doolittle, more than any other person, encouraged me and helped me to deal with my dad’s death, and to keep moving forward with my own life.
Another of the places where I experienced that sort of friendship and camaraderie was in the Air Force.
A year before I graduated from West Point, I went along with my fellow cadets on a social science tour of the Far East, studying General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation of Japan. When I awakened after my first night in Tokyo, the newspaper headlines read: “NORTH KOREA ATTACKS SOUTH KOREA.”
To the world’s surprise, 75,000 North Korean soldiers had poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. As an ally of the United States, South Korea