Think of all the major advances in the world today - Petrochemicals/Plastics, Electronics / Semiconductors, Aviation, Antibiotics / Medical Advances, Mass Production Techniques, all of these were conceived in the 1920s through 1940s or earlier!
Since the 1970s, advancement in key areas have stifled. The question is not whether there are still good ideas, it is whether we still have the freedom to experiment with the radical ideas we conceive. Making much progress comes with it’s risks and downside: back in the days, a man was allowed to throw many things at the wall and see what sticks (that’s a nice way of saying people were allowed to “mess around and find out”). That’s how progress happened. Edison’s electrical wires electrocuted people. The Wright Brothers nosedived into the sand during test flights. The boilers on Vanderbilt’s steamships exploded a lot more than once in a while…and it pushed them to iterate and improve, take on new research to birth new and improved ideas to address the obstacles that can only be exposed by interaction with the real world.
Then the whole world started to think about risk.
Nice guys without beards wearing t-shirts, jeans and crocs from Harvard started talking a lot about risk-reward ratio, and people started to pay more attention to details and we lost our grit to trial new things, to flip the switch, to take something that works and flip it on it’s head…now we live in a highly regulated world. If Edison lived in our world today, he wouldn’t flourish that much.
5000 men responded to an ad that read “‘Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.’ Women applied also. The Scott Polar Research Institute uncovered one such letter from three British women eager to join the expedition. They wrote: ‘We have been reading all books and articles that have been written on dangerous expeditions by brave men to the Polar-regions, and we do not see why men should have all the glory, and women none, especially when there are women just as brave and capable as there are men.’
Risk aversion is the enemy – we need people who will build now, apologize later. We need people like the Apostles of whom it was written “Men who have harzarded their lives for the gospel”
Let faith rise…again and like Nehemiah, let’s rebuild.
What do you do with ideas? Some people certainly try to hide them away and protect them, but what actually obtains is that, what you do with an idea is… you change the world.
Ideas are the lifeblood of progress, but they only work when you can actually use them in the world. They don’t work tucked away in brains or even published in research papers or in your Apple notepad which syncs across your nice iDevices so you have access to them everywhere you go. No!
Turning ideas into progress is a complicated thing, influenced by culture, regulation, economics, technology, and the efforts of individuals…countless, tireless hours of hard work you put in.
Maybe, turning ideas into something remarkable has been more expensive than it’s worth. Or maybe we are just too risk-averse we don’t even move a pin anymore, we just maintain what already exists. Or maybe we need to groom a community of “doers” and actually start throwing stuff at the wall…again.
