With the release of his latest book last week, award-winning entrepreneur Josh Linkner has returned to his favourite subject: innovation. In Big Little Breakthroughs, he breaks down the mindsets, tactics, and habits of some of the world’s most creative people to show how anyone can become an everyday innovator.
Josh argues that understanding this perspective and harnessing the skills that allow us to innovate everyday helps to remove an intimidating barrier to creativity that commonly develops, especially in the face of massive success stories and seemingly genius individuals making landmark breakthroughs. A piece on the new book in Psychology Today sums up the perspective shift that Josh illustrates on how we can all be innovative, even on a smaller scale:
However, these eureka discoveries aren’t reserved for special people. Linkner insists that adopting some new habits can make any of us more creative. “Big little breakthroughs,” he says, are a progression of small creative acts that can pay off over time. “They are the sparks that fuse into a raging fire.” He proves his point with stories that feature people from all over the world and from among a range of areas that include sports, music, fashion, art, and food.
The article goes on to point to a 2019 survey which “found that the top missing skills in the global workforce were innovative problem solving and the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity.” So, the skills that Josh is hoping we can nurture are equally useful in our own pursuits as they are when put to use towards larger organizational problems.
Another article highlighting Josh’s new book, this time in Inc., summarizes the “eight core obsessions” that he found during his research on everyday innovators. They are:
- Fall in love with the problem.
- Start before you’re ready.
- Open a test kitchen.
- Break it to fix it.
- Reach for weird.
- Use every drop of toothpaste.
- Don’t forget the dinner mint.
- Fall seven times, stand up eight.
With a better understanding of this creative framework, Josh hopes to equip his audiences with what they need to make their own big little breakthroughs, every day.
Josh Linkner is a creative troublemaker. He passionately believes that all human beings have incredible creative capacity, and he’s on a mission to unlock inventive thinking and creative problem solving to help leaders, individuals, and communities soar.
If you are interested in booking Josh or another speaker for a virtual presentation, please contact us for more information.
