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I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18^th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

• Steve Jobs envisioning a “computer for the rest of us,” or a whole music library that fits in a shirt pocket
• Amory Lovins achieving energy-sustainable construction by creating buildings that don’t need a furnace or air conditioner (and the savings on capital cost pay for the energy improvements)
• Zsolt Varga’s ingenious Kenguru: a tiny car that transports one person in his or her wheelchair, without needing any hydraulic lifts
• A goal of conserving water led Bill and Jane Monetti to enormous water savings without any need to redesign plumbing systems—just from reducing the need to flush

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

• Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
• For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
• The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

Without starting with that intention, I’ve been immersing myself in “creativity juice” this morning. A whole bunch of the e-mails I’ve opened have, by random chance (if there is such a thing), forced me to think about how creativity happens,  what it means, and whether “if you build it, they will come”—a/k/a, in the pre-”Field of Dreams” world as the better mousetrap aphorism—has relevance in today’s world.

Today, I’ll share three of these inspirations with you: the raw material. And I’ll write down what I think about this confluence, but set it to post on Tuesday—because I want your reactions before you see mine. Please comment below.

1. This quote from @ChrisBrogan:

When I think about all that a business can do to succeed (or all that an individual can do, for that matter), I start from the mindset of forgetting about the path that someone else has forged. Why? Because innovation rarely (never?) comes from following an established path. If I were going to design a hotel, I wouldn’t try learning what worked and didn’t work for the Four Seasons, I’d think through (and then interview others about) all the details that matter to me as a traveler, and then consider what I could do better.

Someone on a forum I belonged to posted a really great article. The only problem was, it looked like the poster hadn’t gotten permission.

As entrepreneurs, we need to be careful to respect the intellectual property rights of other entrepreneurs, and that includes writers, musicians, photographers, etc. It is often not difficult to get reprint permission (I have over 1000 reprinted articles on http://www.frugalmarketing.com and http://www.frugalfun.com, and I have permission for every single one. To simply place a whole article and not get permission or give credit to the source, is an act of theft, called plagiarism. But even if you give credit, if you don’t have permission, it’s still theft. And yes, that includes throwing together a scraped-content computer-powered website to try to get ad revenue from someone else’s content without asking. If you published a book, you wouldn’t want someone taking your hard work and publishing their own edition.

Remember this: when you steal from those of us who create intellectual property for our livelihood, you not only take away our ability to make a living just as surely as you would if you shoplifted goods from our stores, but you also take away the incentive for us to keep creating the things that make the world beautiful, intersting, and well-informed.

I’m sure the person who posted was not acting out of malice but of ignorance. Many people don’t think of reprinting an article as stealing, just like they don’t think throwing a toxic cigarette butt on the ground is littering. It’s totally appropriate to quote the first paragraph or two, mention some key points in the article (in your own words), and post a link–or to go get permission from the author, who’s usually pretty easy to find online.

Let’s not do things that come back to haunt us.

Note: I have posted a whole bunch of articles about business ethics on my ethics site, PrincipledProfit–and yes, I have permission for all of those as well. I’ve also written an award-winning book on success through business ethics: Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.