What does a Coen brothers movie, an iPhone, and my startup have in common?

I’m thinking about innovation today. In order to innovate, to create a new business model, or to do anything new you have to abandon some existing illusions. This is alarmingly difficult to do. It’s often hard to watch.

I saw No Country for Old Men on its opening day. I was enamored from beginning to end. Like A History of Violence and Limbo, it uses the suspense genre and subverts it to discuss more significant ideas. Yet, that subversion comes at a price. The audience is frequently alienated.

I think all the films require some inspection (and perhaps introspection) to understand, but I don’t believe that any of them are inordinately complicated. Yet all three films were simultaneously criticized (by the public) and adored (by the literati) for their endings. And I won’t even discuss the Sopranos. There are two elements at work:

First, all these works attempted to introduce new ideas in traditional form. They broke the artistic contract between the viewer and the content producer.

Second, the new elements were not obviously called out. The audience had to come to them.

The best analogy I can draw is a very good consumer product with awesome features and no clean UI. Does that make it smug? Perhaps. But there’s an insistence that the work should stand on its own terms, rather thanobeying convention. In a vacuum, we laud this approach. In reality, it is painful.

“We do what we do best, not what is best to do…” – Martin Amis, roughly

For state of mind, I recently read an essay by Paul Graham on learning how to do what you love. Graham’s primary conclusions appear to be: 1) doing what you really love will become a relentless search for some and often painful, 2) understanding the difference between what you love and what seems prestigious is difficult (Stumbling Upon Happiness, perhaps?), 3) if you are pursuing it, it may very well pay off. But perhaps we have no choice.

This has been a steady preoccupation of mine for the past few years, that question of what we do and why we do it. Despite being remarkably intelligent, we humans rarely seem to consider that our actions have meaningful alternatives. We push inexorably down a narrow hallway to a life that is based on what has been accomplished, not what we wish to see accomplished. And then, when there, we make choices to preserve status or keep our futures on target. We do this with often tragic consequences. The oddest thing about it is that our best spiritual leaders, supposedly the stewards of our morals, all cautioned about this trend.

That’s pretty esoteric, so let me make it clear: you grow up, you usually fall in love early, you usually have children, you usually buy a house. Like socially acceptable crack, your life now revolves around this construct. I’m not down on marriage (though I’m less upbeat than some on the topic), but if you hold back on any one of those decisions, the game changes. Once children enter the mix, everything falls apart.

In the excellent film “Thank You for Not Smoking“, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) puts this perfectly when he hollowly justifies his role as a tobacco lobbyist with, “everyone’s got to pay the mortgage” immediately followed by his admission that that claim is a “Yuppie Nuremburg Defense.” And moreover, since people justify their behavior through their dependents and possessions, could we be a better society if we all rented?

The thing that occupies my mind is that these issues seem academic, but they have profound and perverse ramifications. Since we’ve entered Pontius Pilate-mode on Iraq, we aren’t considering why we were such suckers in the first place. I’ll submit that we allowed it to happen merely because of this mold of thinking. If you’re afraid of loss, you can justify your behavior with any action. Lacking sound economic trade-off analysis , conscience irrationally fights fear and fear’s fires can be be better stoked. And so bitterness, fear of starvation, and economic hardship become war, genocide, and any number of other brutalities.

It may be that worrying about goodness is just a terrible idea. Carol Shields might have been saying that very thing in “Unless.” But as Paul Graham cautioned, I probably am not going to get around it, so I best put my shoulder to the wheel…