I love this post from Jason Fried on innovation.
“Innovation should almost never happen. It’s incredibly rare. It mostly happens by accident, not by intention. It’s wonderful when it does, but you merely fluctuate in and out of it, it’s not steady state.”
“Work is mostly mundane. It’s mostly maintenance. It’s mostly local improvement and iteration. Work is mostly… Work. Any innovation is an outlier, nearly a rounding error.”
“Even the most innovative projects or products are full of rote, prosaic stuff that still needs building. The poetic magic may be in the 5%, but the bulk of the work is in the other 95.”
I believe even the most innovative teams and people spend most of their time working on the meat-and-potatoes type stuff.
And every so often, on the odd occasion, innovation strikes. But it only turns up if and when we’re willing to do the basics well.