Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “Long Arcs” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
It takes far more time to innovate than it does to have an idea. Ideas arrive quickly. They can flash into the mind in an instant, as sudden as lightning. But to move from that spark of inspiration to something tangible, something that lives in the world, requires years of persistence. It takes continuity to deliver a vision, not simply the convenience of stepping in as a middleman. It takes sustained effort to manifest, not just clever maneuvering to monetize. And the truth is, you usually have to do both at once: manage and monetize while also manifesting. That means having some kind of business model in mind even while your idea is still taking shape, as you move from the airy world of ideation into the heavy work of creation.
This is where many creative outliers stumble, because the long arc of making something real does not line up neatly with the short arc of immediate returns. The marketplace rewards speed, scale, and financial leverage, while innovation demands time, patience, and persistence. That tension explains why so many large companies, eager to accelerate their own growth, simply acquire smaller ones rather than nurture their own innovations.
Yet here lies the paradox: when a large company acquires a small one, the values that fueled the innovation often do not survive the transition. The reason why an innovator joins a startup is not the same reason they might linger in a corporation after an acquisition. In the startup, the motivation is freedom: the freedom to create, explore, and push boundaries. In the large organization, the motivation becomes money, the chance to cash out, to reap rewards, to stop worrying about invention. For true creators, that shift is devastating.
A real creator never wants to stop creating. That is the rub. For them, inventing is not a phase of life, nor is it merely a job description. It is who they are. That is why you rarely find truly creative people thriving in the bowels of large organizations. They may hang around long enough for their stock options to vest, maybe even longer if they are treated unusually well, but eventually the call to create something new becomes too strong. Inventing another path into the future will always feel more compelling than
repeating the same routines of the past.
The people who invent movements, technologies, or even cultural paradigms are generally not the same people who want to manage them. Even when they do want to manage, they are often not especially good at it. Administration and innovation require entirely different forms of energy. The thrill of creating is electric. The grind of managing is bureaucratic. And for many inventors, the latter is simply too dull to sustain their spirit.
Here is another truth: it is infinitely easier to destroy than to create. A building that took fifty years to raise can be knocked down in a few hours. A relationship that took decades to build can be ruined with a single careless word. A life, cultivated with love and attention for half a century, can be ended in an instant. Creation always requires a long arc. Destruction can happen in a second.
The same is true for companies, communities, and cultural movements. When you have invested years nurturing something into being, you know the weight of that effort. But if you have never created anything yourself, you cannot possibly understand. The creative process looks invisible, even frivolous, to those who only consume. Consumers and creators live by entirely different rhythms.
For the consumer, the arc of satisfaction is short. You see something, you buy it, you bring it home. Maybe it delights you for a while. But then you get bored, put it aside, and move on to the next thing. For the creator, the arc is long and often arduous. Invention, innovation, and creativity unfold through painstaking iteration. A piece of music, a new technology, or a breakthrough idea does not spring into the world fully formed. It is refined through trial, error, failure, and resilience. Most people give up long before the thing is ready, which is why so few creations ever make it to completion.
This is also why creative outliers are so often regarded as misfits. In a culture of instant gratification, it looks almost insane to spend years, even decades, working on something uncertain. Why labor so hard, with no guarantee of reward, when everything around you tells you that speed is king? Yet this is the only way true innovation happens. Those who cannot see the process often dismiss it because they simply do not know better.
Howard Lieberman created this image with ChatGPT.
I cannot even blame them. If you have never made anything, really made something, how could you possibly understand? Consumption is quick. Creation is slow. And in an age that worships speed, the slow work of making seems invisible. Until, of course, the systems those consumers rely on begin to fail. When the products break down, the infrastructure collapses, or the cultural assumptions no longer hold, they are left bewildered, asking, “What happened?”
The answer, of course, is that nothing happened to them. They happened to themselves. Their neglect of creation, their dismissal of the long arc of innovation, their reliance on shortcuts, all of that accumulated into fragility. They trusted in permanence where there was none. They assumed that what had been created by others would simply continue without attention or care. And when it did not, they were left standing amid the ruins, wondering why.
The lesson of long arc economics is that true value is created slowly, over time, with patience and persistence. Anyone can trade, flip, or monetize in the short term. But those who create, those who invest in the slow, painstaking process of bringing something into being, are the ones who generate enduring value. This is not just about money, although money is part of it. It is about meaning. It is about culture. It is about life.
To be a creator in such a world is both a privilege and a burden. You live on a different timeline. You resist the lure of instant gratification. You endure the skepticism of those who cannot see what you are building. But in doing so, you also contribute to the deep structures of society, the ones that last beyond the fad of the moment. That is the true reward of the long arc.
I stand with my fellow innovators and creative outliers in this recognition: we are misfits only in a world obsessed with immediacy. In the longer view, the arc of innovation is the arc of humanity itself. Everything that has lasted, everything that has mattered, was born from someone’s stubborn refusal to abandon the long arc of creation.
