Innovation Is A Choice

Which path will you choose?



In 2004, Ayush Chauhan was laid up for a year from a pretty bad accident. That gave him the time to think about whether or not — as his friends and family assured him — he truly was living the middle class dream. He had gone through undergrad and grad school in two of the premier educational institutions in India. He’d landed a great job in banking.





And yet, like many of us, he felt he could do so much more than he was allowed to do within that job and that career path.






Despite angst and opposition from his family and friends, he chose a new path. Chauhan is now co-founder of Quicksand, a multi-disciplinary innovation consultancy with offices in New Delhi, Gurgaon and Bangalore, India. They help other innovators — Gates Foundation, Google, IDEO, Reebok and more — bring their ideas to targeted consumers and citizens.




Asking Big Questions, Every Day

Says Chauhan: “The innovation path is filled with very existential questions. An imagined future can be lost very quickly when you are caught in the drudgery of everyday tasks. To make that journey interesting, and to keep asking those big questions, is the biggest challenge….




"Am I going to create a sense of purpose that is larger than what the world is asking me to do today?




“Can I tie my mundane tasks to a sense of purpose that’s larger than what I’ve been asked to do?




“Also, to keep things interesting and vibrant, we must have some sense of autonomy. That allows us to create our individual future.




“If I have the autonomy to create my own future, and so does everyone I interact with, then we’re headed in the right direction.




“You also have to create a sense of adventure, unpredictability and bravado if you are on an innovation path.”




All of Us Are Unique

All Our Contributions Can Be Unique

Chauhan shared a simple story to drive home that each of us can contribute to those bigger questions, in our own way. “An apple tree once tried to answer the existential question, ‘What’s so great about me? I’m the same as every other apple tree.’ And yet that particular apple tree is the only one in that square feet of space, growing behind that house. That’s what made it unique. I think that’s what we’ve discovered about what makes our firm and us unique. There are other firms doing what we do, sometimes better than us, but what we are doing — with that client, at that point of time, where we are — makes us unique.




“If each of us can take that journey one step at a time and be true to our sense of purpose with each step, that makes each of us very unique.”




And… It all begins with a choice.

Chauhan had the “luxury” of a horrible accident to give him the time to make that choice. Most of us would not choose to go that route to decide to innovate.




Still, innovation is a choice. Not just once or twice in a lifetime. But every day.



Choosing to rise above our mundane To Dos. To imbue every To Do with sense of purpose that is larger than what the world has asked you to do.


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