Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger von Oech

Innovation gets romanticized as a lightning bolt, but Roger von Oech drags it back to the unglamorous part: grief. The line pivots on a quiet insult to our self-image. We like to think we are held back by a lack of ideas; he suggests we are held back by loyalty to our own past competence. That is sharper, and more accurate.

The phrasing "what worked for you two years ago" is doing a lot of work. Two years is close enough to feel current, far enough to already be stale. It evokes product cycles, career arcs, algorithms, and the way cultural taste turns over before institutions can update their playbooks. Von Oech, a creativity writer, is speaking from the era when "innovation" became a managerial virtue rather than an artistic accident: brainstorming is easy to schedule; unlearning is not.

The subtext is about identity and incentive. What worked recently is where your status lives: your resume bullet points, your team's habits, your personal story of being right. Letting go threatens competence, hierarchy, and the comfort of repeating a method that once paid off. It also hints at sunk-cost bias dressed up as "experience."

The quote's intent isn't to worship novelty; it's to warn against nostalgia masquerading as strategy. New ideas are plentiful because they cost nothing. Abandoning a proven approach costs face, time, and the reassurance of mastery. Von Oech reframes creativity as a discipline of subtraction: clearing space before you can build anything that belongs to the present.