Many thoughts come to my mind after reading the article “Just apply yourself” (Barcelona Metropolitan issue 177, page 58), published in the Metropolitan Barcelona magazine.
The article talks about this new app fever that is surrounding us all with all these new devices and smart phones that allow us to download millions and millions of applications that entertain us, help us in our day to day work or are time wasters.
The article focuses on how to come up with a new app that could change people’s lives and particularly our own life by selling it. As if we could do it.
There are two main ideas that come to my mind when reading things like this:
- First of all, and this is the reason for the title of this post. There are always people trying to sell us the idea that it’s really easy to get rich with the minimum effort. That’s not what the article says, but that’s the idea that stays in our mind after reading it. If you want to get rich quickly and easily, then it is going to be a question of luck. The opportunities you have to achieve this goal are as probable as winning the lottery. Actually, there are more people that have won the lottery than people that have gotten rich quickly and easily programming a cool app.
- The second thought that comes to mind is related to the part that says:
“In a way, the sheer existence of the app is encouragement to us all to go back to the drawing board in the belief that maybe we do all think differently, so we too might have the capacity to dream up something no one else has thought of”.
That paragraph is actually telling us that everything that has to be invented has been invented. And our world, our lives, our education is focused on teach us a way of thinking that is not creative at all. Our imagination is clearly bordered by our knowledge, our believes, our way of thinking, our language. Inventing something really breaking new is such a difficult thing that none of us can even dream about it. We’d need to live in a different culture, in a different world maybe. Faucault would say that “we are prisoners of our own language”, and that could be extended that we are “prisoners” of our culture. If we’d like our society to be more creative, then we should start by teaching our children in a creative way. There are interesting projects around the world that work on this, for example, the Waldorf Schools.
