I believe all good things are Purpose-Made. I don’t buy the multi-functional, all-purpose nonsense of marketing. Great leaders have a Purpose, Brands need a meaningful Purpose and even People need a driving Purpose.
Young Hugo Cabret from the film HUGO is driven to discover his Purpose:
HUGO- Broken Without A Purpose from Paul Jensen on Vimeo.
If I could sum up my purpose in one word it would be “Potential”. I see latent ability and it sucks me in like a magnet.
All my life my love of potential has made me a “fixer”. As a child in my immediate environment I was comfortable repairing things around the house. I was my dad’s annoying assistant who could always see a better way to do things. I painted the house, trimmed the lawn, tinkered with my bicycle, changed fuses on the oven at home and kept looking for things that could be better.
Why do I connect to Potential so much? Many reasons perhaps but most powerful is that I am South African, which means I spent my formative years in a country where the potential of 80% of the population was effectively invisible.
Potential has driven my love of learning and passing that learning onto others. It’s one of the reasons why my first job was in education. I then spent my whole career in some form of consulting. Seeing the potential in brands and companies. It’s why I love creativity so much and why I spent 12 years in the advertising industry. Creativity helps create potential, new ideas when implemented then realise that potential.
I eventually wanted to see where my own potential could take me. It’s why I left South Africa 11 years ago to make a life in Asia, it’s why I started my own company Invitro Innovation, more than 3 years ago.
In my current Innovation role, I use Ideas as the means to fulfill Potential. I believe that every individual and organisation has the capability to achieve something magnificent, however most don’t, because they don’t see it or know how to realize it.
I love ideas, they take potential and make it have form; ideas create excitement, they build energy, they make things better.
Who knows what next for me, but what I do know, is that at it’s core will be Potential waiting to be realized.
Invitro Innovation 