By Lynn Scheurell

Sir Ken Robinson (who I hadn’t heard of previously) gave a TED talk about creativity.

As much as I like to get new perspectives on, well, everything, I wasn’t going to watch this 20-minute video because it was described to focus on education and creativity. And then something told me to watch it. It was eye-opening.

This speaker described the dilemma of educational systems today as having to educate for something that we don’t know is coming, that we are innovating for what we can’t yet see and that current systems actually stigmatize making mistakes.

By making mistakes, and being criticized, judged and minimized for them, we learn to follow an intellectual system of perfection.

We are educated above the neck and to the left side (linear brain). He calls it academic inflation, as education systems focus on cultivating for university admittance (the equivalent of ‘strip-mining the mind’).

The result all this is that some of the most intelligent, creative, innovative people around don’t know how amazing they are because they fear making a mistake and being wrong.

“We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says.

This wisdom is foundationally relevant to any entrepreneur because it is in risking who we are that we create and generate value. Our imagination and creativity is the key to solving problems that we don’t even know exist yet.

Our original ideas that have value are the very core of creativity, in Sir Ken’s description. He says ‘take a chance – don’t be frightened of being wrong!”, degrees (credentials) really aren’t worth anything and that it is the richness of human capacity that matters.

I couldn’t agree more.

You can always change your mind, but the greatest mistake is not taking action on expressing who you are with the world.

The greatest tragedy is feeling shame for being diverse, dynamic and distinct as a person (the speaker’s definition of intelligence), not valuing those very qualities for the power held within them.

Here are three keys that entrepreneurs can use from this video:

1.       Be prepared to be wrong so you can innovate beyond what’s known.

2.       Cast aside rigid structures that limit and make bland your natural gifts.

3.       Express the core of who you are in what you do.