Hey, Genius: Enough Already!

It's time to tell smarty-pants innovators to quit throwing off the curve with their brilliance.

By David Volk | October 2008 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Illustration by Craig Hill

Although I’m too busy to look it up right now, I was recently stunned to learn that sometime, somewhere, a literary figure who is older than my grandparents said something like “the rich are different from you and me.” This remark got me to wondering what the difference was.

It would be easy to come up with some high-fallutin’ F. Scott Fitzgerald-style answer like “they possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard and cynical where we are trustful,” but that’s just so much hooey. But once I got to thinking about it, the answer hit me with all the force of a box filled with my recently cut-up credit cards being thrown at my head: They have more money.

So it is with the people featured in this fine issue. Innovators like biofuels fan Michael Weaver and social networking mavens Dan McComb and Lara Feltin not only have more ideas, but they also think differently from you and me. They are constantly coming up with new concepts, new ways to use existing technology and probably even new ways to use old things that haven’t even occurred to us yet. As a result, their innovations allow us to work smarter, play harder and communicate better.

And I really wish these folks would snap out of it.

Yes, you saw that right. I wish they’d stop because they’re making the rest of us look bad. They’re running circles around us, throwing off the grading curve and making everyone else look like slackers.

Oh, sure, it may be challenging to make athletic shoes eco-friendly or create an eye-catching way to do internet advertising, but thanks to them, it’s getting increasingly difficult to defend the status quo. I have to spend more time dreaming up reasons why my underlings should stick with tried-and-true methods. Sadly, the answer “we’ve always done things this way” doesn’t have the impact it used to.

Even the classic “because I said so” seems to be losing its cachet.

In the good old days, all it took was a pointed finger and a hearty snicker to stop innovation in its tracks, because smart people didn’t want to be the butt of jokes. After all, being an intellectual wasn’t just bad form, it could also be downright deadly. Granted, Alex Bell, Tom Edison, Al Einstein and William Gates managed to squeak through, but they had such bad hair, each had grown accustomed to being scorned.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of innovators. I haven’t invented anything yet, but I could have. I once had this great idea for a way to replace electric toothbrushes during power outages. It required users to put toothpaste on a stick with bristles and manually move it around inside their mouths, but it never caught on. Maybe the problem was the cost of mass production

That’s another thing that most people don’t think about: the expense of upgrading equipment once these innovations occur. It seems like the moment you make the final payment on the equipment, there’s another, more expensive innovation that makes it all obsolete.

But I’m not falling for that. No, sir! I’ve decided to stick with my IBM Selectric typewriter until they get this “DOS” thing all figured out.

Oh, copy boy? Could you take this manuscript to typesetting? And mind the hot lead on your way.