The spirit of invention
Driving innovation is no simple task. It's a blend of knowing solutions and problems, and working with constraints. It requires an eclectic mindset that looks into the world as a tool made for its own limitations.
What fascinates me about inventions is its aesthetics — the reason that goes behind it, the plans, the drawings, and the final rendering of the final product. From architecture, engineering, design, software, and all other branches of thought that show evident gaps into a certain vision. That's the true spirit of invention: to achieve a vision in its most material way.
An inventor has this resilience of a true thought leader. The infinitude of paths to arrive at a given solution doesn't scare him — on the contrary — it stimulates him into the challenge. The goal is always the shortest and most elegant path to the solution both for the user and the builder. Yes, the latter is most of the time discarded, but it's probably the biggest beneficiary of the inventor’s genius, as the true talent of a great inventor is creating something that can be created by men, and not only existing in the world of ideas.
A true inventor applies rational thought into his/her work — but the true driving force is always intuition. Its biggest enemy is of course overthinking, which takes away the necessary flow state in order for things to move forward. Also, another characteristic of an inventive spirit is memory and a good capacity to archive ideas, concepts, and references. A good inventor will always copy part of its solutions from other phenomena in nature. And as such, the capacity to think in various parts of the senses (visually, mathematically, geometrically) will allow recycling different parts of other puzzles into the problem at hand.
Sometimes we tend to think that everything is already invented — that now only hyper-complex things can be invented, that everything requires hyper-complex technology or advanced mathematics. That is the consequence of a hyper-analytical world, where every move we do has to be calculated into either a certain outcome or a probabilistic assessment. But invention is like music, it does not end — even if it's pop music. Yes, we might repeat the four chord structure over and over, but there will be infinite melodies to go on top, there will be new sounds coming out, new period references and so on... everything is new when added on top of something, as long as there is meaning to it. The same goes with inventions. Mechanisms, new technologies, new needs, new combinations create an infinitude of possibility within the realm of possibility. Sometimes, invention is just adapting an existing solution into a new context.
What drew me into the world of inventions is its intersection between thought and execution. It's not merely theoretical, where one only plans and nothing more, but at the same time it's also not merely execution. It requires the back and forth between the world of ideas and the world of objects — and I find that interdimensional characteristic its most interesting part. As someone that itself is broken across disciplines, my execution field would also be broken between these two worlds.