Get the plan right and push it forward week after week (insight and innovation are nice but they’re neither necessary, nor sufficient).

We fetishise innovation and canonise innovators but just because someone has broken from the pack doesn’t mean they’re deserving of praise.

• I’ve seen businesses which have diverged from market norms just because it’s easier for them (without any regard for customer preference or expectation).  
• I’ve seen entrepreneurs convinced they can ‘educate’ their customers, or even their investors, in the mistaken belief that customers and investors are supremely rational beings indifferent to being proved wrong (they’re not; they are, in fact, humans).  
• And I’ve seen founders clever enough to come up with fantastic solutions to problems nobody has.  

All these are ‘innovative’ but none will succeed.  

“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.”

SHANE PARRISH

I’m not saying Henry Ford should have limited his ambitions to making a faster horse*.  By all means, be insightful and “give ‘em what they never knew they wanted” but recognise they NEED to want it!  It’s not enough for you to THINK they SHOULD want it (however much cleverer than them you think you are). 

If you want to make a living being the smartest person in the room, become a kindergarten teacher.  

Insight is impressive (and probably the stand-out feature of the outstanding) but it’s no more necessary for sustained, commercial success than innovation.  The ingredients which are absolutely necessary (and in many cases, sufficient) are: COMPETENCE; and PERSISTENCE.

“There’s no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way”

WINSLOW HOMER

So, if you can bring insight, do! If you can innovate to solve a problem people want solving (whether they know it yet or not), do! But in any case just persist competently.

Strive on with conviction (not in your own cleverness but in the knowledge that you’re getting it quietly, consistently right). Hold yourself to high standards and out-perform the competition. They might even come to call you a genius.

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”  

THOMAS EDISON

(And if you are innovating, make sure you’re innovating where you’re differentiating and investing in outperformance.)

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* I know, Henry Ford probably never said that, but we now live in a post-truth world (and if it’s good enough for Steve Jobs, it’s good enough for us).  To make up for it, here’s some bonus nuance from Katie Dill of Lyft.