Be your own disruptive technology

“Remember that you may have to disturb yourself in order to become aware of yourself, in order to establish a reference point for your progress…”
John Roger

The term disruptive technology comes from Clay Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.  My simplistic understanding is that while an entrenched leader is ignoring the low margin segment at the bottom of their market, an innovator is going to come in with a process or product to serve a niche and eventually innovate their way to market dominance exactly because they are not doing business the same old way.  The dilemma is how do they maintain the creativity and innovation once they are now the market leader.  Will they continue to innovate or will they become conservative in the pure sense of that word, conserving what they now have attained.

As we progress and accomplish our goals, how do we continue to innovate, learn and grow?  It is critical that our personal practice of productivity (say that three times fast!) has a built-in review process.  Daily review of your calendar and inventory of actions or to-dos is valuable to make sure you are getting to the items with due dates and to allow you to determine how to allocated today’s attention and energy.  It also allows you to acknowledge the completion of items on your lists and free up your allocated energy tied up in those tasks.  Weekly reviews get you a slightly higher perspective on work and projects in progress, allow you to catch anything from the past week that might have slipped through the system and a scan of next week can clue you into any preparations necessary for upcoming commitments.  Annual creation of ideal scenes, goal statements, treasure maps and other long-range ideation give us a chance to open the gates of our imaginations and realign our goals to our vision and purpose.

Take particular notice of the dreams that persistently pull at you.  They may be the way you are disrupting yourself toward innovation in your own life.  While a part of us is busy maintaining all that we have built, other parts of us are conjuring up the next big thing in our journey. Our manner of squashing our own dreams often come in the things we tell ourselves right after the dream is articulated within our hearts and minds.  We tell ourselves all the reasons we can’t achieve those dreams.  We don’t have the resources; we don’t have the right diploma or job title or seed money.  We recite inwardly all the qualities we lack.

Our greatest disruptive technology is our own thoughts and imagination. Our will. We focus on the positive outcomes we want.  We set a goal.  We plan.  We act.  We get feedback and course correct.  We act again and again and again.  We feel fear and keep moving anyway.  We reach a little farther than the last time.  In the end not all of our breakthroughs are world-changing products or ideas.  They don’t all make us a ton of money.  What they do is return us to who we are in all of our authenticity.  We wake from our habitual responses and become aware of ourselves.