Here’s to the Crazy Ones

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble-makers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently: they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world—are the ones who do.”

This video was the launch of Apple’s famous “Think Different” campaign, back in 1997. It has become a hallmark of the creative-technology culture the company, and its founder, Steve Jobs, are now known for spawning and perpetuating. But it is also more than that. In a recent interview, Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, said the late Apple founder and CEO cried when he saw the old campaign. He had helped to write the words, and the ideas behind the campaign were clearly his own spiritual manifesto.

True innovation requires more than “thinking outside the box”; it requires a devotion to the realm of ideas, a willingness to go beyond the moment, beyond the everyday, to go beyond the lessons of one’s own experience and to cultivate visions of something as yet unseen. And then, it requires the courage and the emotional fortitude to not only bring those visions into being, but to do so in a way that is viable, sustainable, contagious and which will resonate and adapt over time.

As we enter this new age of global humanity—more than 7 billion people across the world, more than double the population of just 50 years ago, and facing the destabilization of the climate system that has allowed civilization to occur and expand, throughout history—we want to take a moment to do what Jobs suggested: to honor the “crazy ones”, the Martin Luther Kings, the Gandhis, the Mary Wollstonecrafts and Harriet Jacobs, of the world, the people who dared to believe in a better future, and to give the best of themselves to create it.

In this new age of global humanity, that kind of courage and integrity may be demanded of all of us. It is becoming a basic ethical obligation that we reach out, remain open, pay attention, and occupy our minds and our surroundings with the work of reinventing the status quo…