Gaser wonders at the myths, misconceptions, and romanticism around the word “innovation”: The idea of genius is heavily romanticized in modern culture, says former Yahoo ValueLab Chief Solutions Officer Tim Sanders on Big Think (watch: 7:47), leading to misconceptions that set you up for failure. There are no eureka moments, says Sanders, only “little ideas that combine with other little ideas that improve themselves into game-changing ideas.” Sanders tells the story of when he met Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, and spoke about John Lasseter, his Creative VP and the man behind the Toy Story script. The movie was so challenging at the time it was almost shut down nine months in after a meeting with Disney that came to be known as Black Friday. But the smashing success we ended up watching is what Catmull called “a thousand problems solved.”

The lone inventor is nonsense. Bunkum. A myth. Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything. He said so himself. Without Steve Wozniak, there never have been the original Apple I. without Jony Ive and Tony Fadell, there would be no iPhone or iPod. Thomas Edison didn’t invent a single thing, says Sanders. The name itself was a brand consisting of 14 people. Both merely knew how to “recognize patterns and convergence.”

The final misconception is the myth of the expert, or people who are so steeped in their domain that they don’t have expansive perspective. If you walked up to a fish in a fishbowl and you ask the fish, "How’s the water?" The fish would look at you puzzled and ask you, "What’s water?"