When you are working on new things and innovating people give you a lot more margin for error. When people haven’t seen what you are doing before, but like what you are creating, they give you way more space to operate.
I recently re-read How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (HTGFRIRA – read my review here) by Mohsin Hamid. It had been almost 4 years since the last time I read it, so it was fun to go back to and read again.
Hamid has a very unique and playful style of writing. He tells great stories but is willing to break a lot of the conventions when it comes to technique. Thinking about reading his stories, I realize that I don’t judge them as strictly as other books I’ve read. I appreciate the risks and give him more leeway when it comes to making sense of timelines or changing perspectives.
I think there is a lesson to be learned from that example. No matter the discipline, you can earn some extra leeway when you deliver in innovate ways.
Delivering is still key though. If HTGFRIRA wasn’t a good story, no one would read it. But the story is captivating at its core, and the method of telling it you is innovative, so you give in much more to the experience of reading. You give Hamid leeway that you wouldn’t give him if he was trying to tell the same story in a less innovative way.
If you can deliver a good product in a unique way that people have never seen before, they will remember you, they will keep coming back, and they will give you a much larger degree of charitable interpretation.
A different example of this is the Wiener Circle hot dog stand in Chicago:
They deliver a quality product at the core, but do so in a unique and innovative way, and that makes almost all the difference.
Leave a Reply