Most important innovation for humanity

Topic: “Which according to you is the most important innovation for humanity?”


Thinking is the most important innovation for humanity. In order to make any sense, I will have to redefine “thinking” before I go any further. Let’s go back to the time of the cavemen. I’m starting from the cavemen because if I go along with Darwin and trace humanity back to the apes, that will hopelessly complicate things, so let’s just keep things simple. We have our very first caveman plodding along looking around at the world, and his mind is filled with thoughts. He’s thinking “what a pretty tree” or “look at that huge lake”. Step one, discard this run-of-the-mill thinking from the “thinking” I’ve set out to define. This is not what I’m talking about. Back to the caveman. He comes to a river. His first instinct is to swim across, but he notices a log lying across the river. He walks over the log instead. This is creative thinking. Discard that, too. Once he reaches the other bank, he looks back and thinks, “There must be a way to make more of these.” Bingo! This is the thinking I’m talking about. In other words, innovative thinking is the most important innovation. There’s a difference between innovative thinking and innovation itself, in case you’re wondering. Innovative thinking is the mind-processing that leads to an innovation. There can be innovative thinking without an innovation coming from it, but there cannot be an innovation without innovative thinking.


Why I call innovative thinking an innovation is because it was innovated by someone. Because thinking has been around since time immemorial, people don’t credit it to anyone. But I think it’s obvious that the cavemen came up with innovative thinking in the first place. How else did they make spears out of sticks and stones? How else can you explain all the ways in which they figured out how to use the materials of the earth? Innovative thinking often builds upon creative thinking, but it also works independently. In short, thinking is an innovation.


What makes thinking the most important innovation for mankind? In order to answer this question, let’s first see what happens when people don’t think, as is illustrated so beautifully in these lines from Edgar Guest:


“The many will follow the beaten track
With guideposts on the way.
They live and have lived for ages back
With a chart for every day.
Someone has told them it’s safe to go
On the road he has travelled o’er,
And all that they ever strive to know
Are the things that were known before.”
—The Things That Haven’t Been Done Before


People like these rely on past innovators, but we cannot depend on past innovations to build our future. Imagine what would happen if the world’s future was left to these people. There would be no future, just the present suspended indefinitely. In real life, innovators are few and far between, but they are the wheels that make the world go.


Let’s move on to innovative thinking itself, and why it’s the most important innovation there is. Creative thinking is mostly revolutionary: it’s a circle. It doesn’t lead anywhere new. Innovative thinking is evolutionary. It’s a ladder. It keeps going up. There is always a need for innovative thinking. It shapes, it refines, and it improves. One thing it does that creative thinking doesn’t: it redefines. It opens up new horizons and new possibilities. If it can’t lead straight on, it’ll lead around, or zigzag, or perpendicular; it will always find a way to get there.


Innovative thinking has died a slow death over the centuries. When the world was young, the possibilities were ripe for the taking, and thinking thrived in abundance. Humans learned how to benefit from nature, and as the decades rolled on, they built over and expanded upon past thinking, or went off on a tangent to spawn new thinking of their own. There were periods where thinking slowed down to a mere trickle, and others where it stopped altogether, but it always sprang back. It was used to find new solutions to old, persistent problems. As we progressed, innovative thinking took a back seat, and creative thinking sprung up. The strange thing is that nowadays, there’s no dearth of innovations. We just aren’t promoting innovative thinking. We teach our students to be stagnant, and that leads to deadlocks and dead ends. We confine innovation to the innovators, and make it seem like something unattainable. Innovative thinking may not always lead to an innovation, but it always leads forward. The thing that kills innovative thinking is the belief that an innovation must come from it, otherwise it’s of no use. You can’t play the piano without practice, can you? Likewise, a mind trained in innovative thinking is more likely to come up with an innovation than one trained to run in circles.


René Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am.” We are where we are and we are what we are due to how we think. There isn’t a simpler philosophy in the universe, or yet a more slippery one.