I buy a lot of books. I find it impossible to browse the web and not stumble upon a book that looks worth reading. For instance, this one. Until recently, I didn't think use an e-reader so I always just bought paper books without thinking about it. I love having books on my bookshelf - even just seeing the bindings is inspiring and reminds me of things. Just the other day while on a phone call, I needed ideas for smart internet thinkers we should invite to an upcoming event. So I just looked down at my bookshelf and - bam - got some ideas. So having paper books isn't just about being able to read them. It's about having them around. But I actually prefer reading e books. Especially now that I have a galaxy s3 phone and a nexus 7 on my bedstand. So now I'm stuck. When I want to buy a book, what should I do? Buy the paper version, so I can "have it"? Or buy the e version so I can read it? I want both. But it seems crazy to buy it twice, paying full price each time. Here's what I would love to see: When I buy a paper book, give me the ebook version (in an open, portable format like ePub) for free. Or, charge me for it, but make it cheaper. I'd gladly pay an extra $3 for an ePub file in addition to my $12.99 paper book purchase price. I haven't done this myself, but I know you can do this in some cases w vinyl records and mp3s. Even better, I'd love to be able to show proofs of purchase (or better yet, proof of posession) of paper books I already have, and use that to get a cheap or free ePub copy. Something like this just seems to make sense. I know it exists already in some sectors and for some kinds of books, but I'd love to see this become the norm for everything. If it were, I'd read more, and perhaps more importantly, I'd buy more.
I had the pleasure of spending the day yesterday at The Feast. I love their manifesto:
Mankind is now more connected with the tools to engage millions and more potential than ever to build a brighter future.
Our role is to inspire the next generation of doers. To empower more folks to ask why the world works the way it does. To not stop at “because it’s always been done that way.
Pretty much from start to finish, I found myself completely engaged with the presentations on the main stage, and with the conversations during the breaks. Day 1 of the Feast is a set of inspiring presentations & performances. Day 2 is a series of workshops, focused around a set of challenges presented during day one. Unfortunately I was only able to be there for day one, so I'll look forward to hearing what comes out of today's session.
Here is a quick run-through of my notes & takeaways. This is straight from the notebook, so expect it to be rambling and scattered, but filled with goodies:
One of the first speakers was the project lead for the
Steven Johnson, one of my all time favorite writers and thinkers has a new book out: Future Perfect - The Case for Progress in the Networked Age. Go buy it; I'll be here when you get back (I love it when bloggers say that -- I almost always do it myself). In Future Perfect, Steven presents a vision for a new political viewpoint he calls "peer progressive" -- a view of problem solving that is built around the power & potential of peer networks. It's a view that rejects both the traditional leftist view that society's problems need to be solved via top-down regulation, as well as the pure market-driven views of the right:
Unlike traditional libertarians, peer progressives do not believe that markets are capable of satisfying all of our human needs. This is where the experience of the Internet has been particularly instructive. When it came time to satisfy, on a global scale, that basic need for communication and the sharing of knowledge, the best solution turned out to emerge from open collaborative networks, not from private competition. The world is filled with countless other needs—for community, creativity, education, personal and environmental health— that traditional markets do a poor job of satisfying. Put another way, “market failures” are not just the twenty- year storms of major recessions or bank implosions. Markets are constantly failing all around us. The question is what you do when those failures happen. The pure libertarian response is to shrug and say, “That’s life. A market failure will still be better in the long run than a big government fiasco.” The traditional liberal response is to attack the problem with a top-down government intervention.
I buy a lot of books. I find it impossible to browse the web and not stumble upon a book that looks worth reading. For instance, this one. Until recently, I didn't think use an e-reader so I always just bought paper books without thinking about it. I love having books on my bookshelf - even just seeing the bindings is inspiring and reminds me of things. Just the other day while on a phone call, I needed ideas for smart internet thinkers we should invite to an upcoming event. So I just looked down at my bookshelf and - bam - got some ideas. So having paper books isn't just about being able to read them. It's about having them around. But I actually prefer reading e books. Especially now that I have a galaxy s3 phone and a nexus 7 on my bedstand. So now I'm stuck. When I want to buy a book, what should I do? Buy the paper version, so I can "have it"? Or buy the e version so I can read it? I want both. But it seems crazy to buy it twice, paying full price each time. Here's what I would love to see: When I buy a paper book, give me the ebook version (in an open, portable format like ePub) for free. Or, charge me for it, but make it cheaper. I'd gladly pay an extra $3 for an ePub file in addition to my $12.99 paper book purchase price. I haven't done this myself, but I know you can do this in some cases w vinyl records and mp3s. Even better, I'd love to be able to show proofs of purchase (or better yet, proof of posession) of paper books I already have, and use that to get a cheap or free ePub copy. Something like this just seems to make sense. I know it exists already in some sectors and for some kinds of books, but I'd love to see this become the norm for everything. If it were, I'd read more, and perhaps more importantly, I'd buy more.
I had the pleasure of spending the day yesterday at The Feast. I love their manifesto:
Mankind is now more connected with the tools to engage millions and more potential than ever to build a brighter future.
Our role is to inspire the next generation of doers. To empower more folks to ask why the world works the way it does. To not stop at “because it’s always been done that way.
Pretty much from start to finish, I found myself completely engaged with the presentations on the main stage, and with the conversations during the breaks. Day 1 of the Feast is a set of inspiring presentations & performances. Day 2 is a series of workshops, focused around a set of challenges presented during day one. Unfortunately I was only able to be there for day one, so I'll look forward to hearing what comes out of today's session.
Here is a quick run-through of my notes & takeaways. This is straight from the notebook, so expect it to be rambling and scattered, but filled with goodies:
One of the first speakers was the project lead for the
Steven Johnson, one of my all time favorite writers and thinkers has a new book out: Future Perfect - The Case for Progress in the Networked Age. Go buy it; I'll be here when you get back (I love it when bloggers say that -- I almost always do it myself). In Future Perfect, Steven presents a vision for a new political viewpoint he calls "peer progressive" -- a view of problem solving that is built around the power & potential of peer networks. It's a view that rejects both the traditional leftist view that society's problems need to be solved via top-down regulation, as well as the pure market-driven views of the right:
Unlike traditional libertarians, peer progressives do not believe that markets are capable of satisfying all of our human needs. This is where the experience of the Internet has been particularly instructive. When it came time to satisfy, on a global scale, that basic need for communication and the sharing of knowledge, the best solution turned out to emerge from open collaborative networks, not from private competition. The world is filled with countless other needs—for community, creativity, education, personal and environmental health— that traditional markets do a poor job of satisfying. Put another way, “market failures” are not just the twenty- year storms of major recessions or bank implosions. Markets are constantly failing all around us. The question is what you do when those failures happen. The pure libertarian response is to shrug and say, “That’s life. A market failure will still be better in the long run than a big government fiasco.” The traditional liberal response is to attack the problem with a top-down government intervention.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
NASA curiosity rover
. When asked about how they did it, he said two things that stood out:
Big problems don't get solved in a single sitting. You just have to keep moving forward.
That struck me as fundamental and profound. Another great line was:
Great works and great folly may be indistinguishable at the outset.
Also classic, and so relevant when you're launching a spacecraft that will be in space for a year before landing on Mars, via a "sky crane". But relevant for any hard project, really.
John Sherry from Intel's Vibrant Data project did a nice job explaining several abstract issues (digital trust, data literacy, platform openness) through a handful of individual stories (in this case focused on how the elderly engage with technology and data). A major theme through the day was the effective use of personal stories to explain things and get ideas across.
Lucky Gunasekara, representing The Collaborative Chronic Care project and Lybba gave a really compelling look into the potential power -- and also the perils -- of unlocking and interconnecting our health data. I hope the Feast videos come online because I would really like to see this again -- but the gist of it is clear: individuals are currently NOT empowered by their own health data (he used an example of a patient with Chron's disease, a chronic and complex condition); the potential to improve the user health experience is tremendous; the power of liquid and interconnected data sets is tremendous; but there is potential to cross "the creepy line" very quickly. So: how can we conceive of managing our health data such that individuals, providers and third parties (networks, research organizations, etc) all have the appropriate interest in and control over the data? He has some specific ideas which I'll follow up on in a separate post. Hugely important, interesting, and hard topic. Related: I downloaded the ginger.io app, a "behavioral analytics platform" that uses our activity data to help provide health insights.
Bre Pettis gave an awesome presentation about the meteoric rise of Makerbot. My favorite line:
In 10 years, having a Makerbot will be like having a microwave.
Paul Farmer discussed how Partners in Health has created a lasting and powerful partnership with Arcade Fire. Among other things, Arcade Fire links to pih.org on the back of every album, and also adds a $1 surcharge to every concert ticket that goes directly to PIH. Pretty creative way to partner. And to top it off, Arcade Fire was there, and did an acoustic performance of "Wake Up" which was pretty cool.
Next: I had never heard of Warby Parker before, but they are a really interesting company. They've made a successful, profitable business selling beautiful eyewear. And, they have a social mission baked into the core of the company: for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is donated to a partner company somewhere around the world, which re-sells them at low prices. So they are a social enterprise that cultivates the development of other social enterprises. They stressed that they approach the market with messages in the following priority order: 1) fashionable, awesome product 2) great experience and service and 3) social benefit. This makes a lot of sense, as they need to be commercially successful to make everything else work. Not only have the reduced their retail cost to $95 (way less than comparable fashion prescription glasses) by working w/ suppliers and selling directly online, they also operate their call center out of a loft in SoHo, and are carbon neutral. Pretty cool. The great quote from Neil Blumenthal (CEO of WP) was:
people build relationships with brands the same way they do with people.
Then: Joshua Reich from Simple. I have been a huge huge fan of this brand since it launched a few years ago, and I just got my card in the mail a few weeks ago. One of the great insights of Joshua's talk (and of his business) was that -- until simple -- retail banking's business model (fees) depended on user failure. Having a business that depends on your users failing is problematic. Simple has built their business from the ground up to be aligned with their users -- to help them win at banking, and feel good about money. I love it, and I love the product.
Then: we got into education. I loved this video -- titled "The Future Belongs to the Curious" from Skillshare :
I couldn't agree more with that. Giving curious minds things to grab onto, connect with, and make is awesome.
Thor Muller talked about Brightworks - an experimental, experiential school in SF that looks amazing. His great quote:
In order to create space for serendipity, we need structure.
In the past year, story pirates has collected 30,000 stories from kids in 250 schools. Every one gets a comment back. My favorite quote from Ben Salka, CEO, was:
All education is experiential. Some of those experiences are flat, and some of them are great.
Story Pirates exists to create great, memorable, educational experiences. They are so awesome.
Then -- shift away from Education to Opportunity. First up: Defy Ventures.
Defy Ventures is an entrepreneurship program for outgoing prison inmates. It's an amazing, amazing idea. Think about it: gang leaders, drug ring leaders, are natural entrepreneurs. As DV CEO Catherine Rohr put it -- "they have crazy business skills, but are just weak on risk management, since they got caught." But in all seriousness: this is a program that is turning a "failure industry" into a generator of opportunity. Here are the stats:
70% of prison inmates return to prison. 70% of their children go to prison.
Think about that.
The Prison Entrepreneurship Program graduated 687 men -- with a resulting 5% recidivism rate.
Think about that!
Defy Ventures takes the idea a step further, into multi-step program: "boot camp", followed by a $100k business plan competition, followed by a business incubator program.
One of the most touching moments of the whole day was when two of the recent business plan competition winners -- both former convicts in prison on drug charges -- took the stage and described their stories and talked about the new businesses they were working on (one was a painting and handyman services, another was a personal concierge).
In Catherine's words:
the prison population is one of the most overlooked talent pools in America.
Pretty cool.
Then, on to cities: physicist and urban scholar Geoffrey West took the stage to describe the parallels his research has shown between how nature scales and how cities scale. This has been written about previously but is super interesting. Geoffrey's money quote was:
It's largely thought that cities are buildings. Not true. Cities are people.
When we talk about cities, it's easy to talk about them in terms of the physical infrastructure -- roads, bridges, buildings, parks. But all of that -- all of it -- is really just a medium for connecting the people who live there. With that in mind, it's much easier to conceive of cities as organisms -- that therefore have common characteristics with other areas of biology -- than as some other sort of foreign creation. Without getting too far into it, Geoffrey presents a concern about the pace at which cities are scaling, changing -- and what this means for sustainability. In the end, he described himself as a pessimist.
But this event was about optimism, and as such, it closed with a great story: The Low Line
If you haven't heard of this yet -- it's a project to convert the abandoned Williamsburg Trolley Terminal, which sits beneath Delancey Street at the end of the Williamsburg Bridge, into the world's first underground urban park. It would be a revitalization project to parallel the awesome and successful Highline project, and it would look like this:
... using nifty solar reflectors like this:
What a cool project, and what a great way to end the day.
So, that was a lot -- and I didn't touch on everything from the day.
But this was enough to get my wheels turning and to get inspired about my own work and all the exciting things people are working on.
Kudos to Jerri and the Feast staff. Can't wait til next year.
He goes on to articulate the peer progressive approach (emphasis mine):
The peer-progressive response differs from both these approaches. Instead of turning a blind eye to market failures, it assumes that these problems are widespread, and actively seeks them out as the central focus of its agenda. Instead of building a large government agency to combat the problem, it tries to build a peer network around it, a system of dense, diverse, and decentralized exchange.
That last part is key -- the idea that our first step towards approaching hard problems should be build a peer network around it. This sounds simple, but it's profound. And this is where there is perhaps the biggest distinction between the approach the traditional left takes and the peer progressive approach. Building a network around a problem is inherently a hands-off approach. It says, up front, that we don't know all the answers, and we are doing everything we can to empower others. An example that illustrates this outlook is the recent launch of Ask Patents -- a community website powered by Stack Exchange, that will tap into the power of peer networks to assist with the evaluation of patent applications. Joel Spolsky of Stack Exchange has a great post introducing the idea. Ask Patents is inspired by the Peer-to-Patent project (lead by Beth Noveck and Chris Wong) -- but improves on the implementation by piggybacking on the existing and incredibly active community at Stack Exchange. Another example is the Camellia Network, which is building a network to support youth aging out of the Foster Care system. There are tons of other examples, across every sector of industry and society. Here's a short video describing the idea:
How things really work
All of Steven's books are great (I must admit not having read every single one... yet). As I was thinking about it, one way of looking at the body of his work is the constant process of uncovering how the world actually works, as opposed to how we think it works. Or rather, the continuing crusade to debunk myths across all areas of life -- so that we can see and then learn from how things really work. In Emergence, he tells the story of how complex, coordinated action takes place. Not by central planning, as you might expect, but by decentralized, distributed decision making adding up to a greater whole. This is the case across biology (how coral reef ecosystems grow), sociology (how cities get built) and technology (how the internet works). The idea that complex ideas and systems emerge from underlying architectures and distributed decisionmaking is deep. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he investigates what he calls "the natural history of innovation", debunking the myth that big ideas are the products of "single moments of genius". Instead, they are nearly often the product of accumulated observation, thinking, and connections between ideas that form over long periods of time. He calls this "the slow hunch" and it's an idea that has stuck with me profoundly, to the extent that I've incorporated many of the ideas behind it into my daily life, I've named this blog after it, and it's literally the foundation of my work environment. This video is a great illustration (and has been viewed 2.5mm times, if you can believe that): Now, in Future Perfect, he debunks the myths behind our polarized political views of how we accomplish progress and achieve societal good. He points that the left-right dichotomy is a false one, and notes that while we natively focus on our societal shortcomings, we massively understate the widespread, incredible progress we've achieved. For example, he debunks Peter Thiel's claim that we're not making progress in the transportation space, with a holistic view of progress:
Yes, Thiel is right that the planes themselves can’t fly any faster than they did forty years ago, and so by that metric, progress has in fact stalled. (Or gone backward, if you count the Concorde.) But just about every other crucial metric (other than the joys of going through airport security) points in the other direction. That extraordinary record of progress did not come from a breakthrough device or a visionary inventor; it did not take the form of a great leap forward. Instead, the changes came from decades of small decisions, made by thousands of individuals and organizations, some of them public-sector and some of them private, each tinkering with the system in tactical ways: exploring new routes, experimenting with new pricing structures, throwing chicken carcasses into spinning jet engines. Each of these changes was incremental, but over time they built themselves up into orders-of-magnitude improvements. Yet because they were incremental, they remained largely invisible, unsung.
This is the beauty of Steven's writing -- the ability to open up a clear and compelling view into What's Really Going on Here. So, I'll leave it at that for now. If you're in Boston tonight, go see Steven at the Harvard Bookstore. And if you're in NYC next week, catch up with him at the New York Public Library. And go read those books!
NASA curiosity rover
. When asked about how they did it, he said two things that stood out:
Big problems don't get solved in a single sitting. You just have to keep moving forward.
That struck me as fundamental and profound. Another great line was:
Great works and great folly may be indistinguishable at the outset.
Also classic, and so relevant when you're launching a spacecraft that will be in space for a year before landing on Mars, via a "sky crane". But relevant for any hard project, really.
John Sherry from Intel's Vibrant Data project did a nice job explaining several abstract issues (digital trust, data literacy, platform openness) through a handful of individual stories (in this case focused on how the elderly engage with technology and data). A major theme through the day was the effective use of personal stories to explain things and get ideas across.
Lucky Gunasekara, representing The Collaborative Chronic Care project and Lybba gave a really compelling look into the potential power -- and also the perils -- of unlocking and interconnecting our health data. I hope the Feast videos come online because I would really like to see this again -- but the gist of it is clear: individuals are currently NOT empowered by their own health data (he used an example of a patient with Chron's disease, a chronic and complex condition); the potential to improve the user health experience is tremendous; the power of liquid and interconnected data sets is tremendous; but there is potential to cross "the creepy line" very quickly. So: how can we conceive of managing our health data such that individuals, providers and third parties (networks, research organizations, etc) all have the appropriate interest in and control over the data? He has some specific ideas which I'll follow up on in a separate post. Hugely important, interesting, and hard topic. Related: I downloaded the ginger.io app, a "behavioral analytics platform" that uses our activity data to help provide health insights.
Bre Pettis gave an awesome presentation about the meteoric rise of Makerbot. My favorite line:
In 10 years, having a Makerbot will be like having a microwave.
Paul Farmer discussed how Partners in Health has created a lasting and powerful partnership with Arcade Fire. Among other things, Arcade Fire links to pih.org on the back of every album, and also adds a $1 surcharge to every concert ticket that goes directly to PIH. Pretty creative way to partner. And to top it off, Arcade Fire was there, and did an acoustic performance of "Wake Up" which was pretty cool.
Next: I had never heard of Warby Parker before, but they are a really interesting company. They've made a successful, profitable business selling beautiful eyewear. And, they have a social mission baked into the core of the company: for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is donated to a partner company somewhere around the world, which re-sells them at low prices. So they are a social enterprise that cultivates the development of other social enterprises. They stressed that they approach the market with messages in the following priority order: 1) fashionable, awesome product 2) great experience and service and 3) social benefit. This makes a lot of sense, as they need to be commercially successful to make everything else work. Not only have the reduced their retail cost to $95 (way less than comparable fashion prescription glasses) by working w/ suppliers and selling directly online, they also operate their call center out of a loft in SoHo, and are carbon neutral. Pretty cool. The great quote from Neil Blumenthal (CEO of WP) was:
people build relationships with brands the same way they do with people.
Then: Joshua Reich from Simple. I have been a huge huge fan of this brand since it launched a few years ago, and I just got my card in the mail a few weeks ago. One of the great insights of Joshua's talk (and of his business) was that -- until simple -- retail banking's business model (fees) depended on user failure. Having a business that depends on your users failing is problematic. Simple has built their business from the ground up to be aligned with their users -- to help them win at banking, and feel good about money. I love it, and I love the product.
Then: we got into education. I loved this video -- titled "The Future Belongs to the Curious" from Skillshare :
I couldn't agree more with that. Giving curious minds things to grab onto, connect with, and make is awesome.
Thor Muller talked about Brightworks - an experimental, experiential school in SF that looks amazing. His great quote:
In order to create space for serendipity, we need structure.
In the past year, story pirates has collected 30,000 stories from kids in 250 schools. Every one gets a comment back. My favorite quote from Ben Salka, CEO, was:
All education is experiential. Some of those experiences are flat, and some of them are great.
Story Pirates exists to create great, memorable, educational experiences. They are so awesome.
Then -- shift away from Education to Opportunity. First up: Defy Ventures.
Defy Ventures is an entrepreneurship program for outgoing prison inmates. It's an amazing, amazing idea. Think about it: gang leaders, drug ring leaders, are natural entrepreneurs. As DV CEO Catherine Rohr put it -- "they have crazy business skills, but are just weak on risk management, since they got caught." But in all seriousness: this is a program that is turning a "failure industry" into a generator of opportunity. Here are the stats:
70% of prison inmates return to prison. 70% of their children go to prison.
Think about that.
The Prison Entrepreneurship Program graduated 687 men -- with a resulting 5% recidivism rate.
Think about that!
Defy Ventures takes the idea a step further, into multi-step program: "boot camp", followed by a $100k business plan competition, followed by a business incubator program.
One of the most touching moments of the whole day was when two of the recent business plan competition winners -- both former convicts in prison on drug charges -- took the stage and described their stories and talked about the new businesses they were working on (one was a painting and handyman services, another was a personal concierge).
In Catherine's words:
the prison population is one of the most overlooked talent pools in America.
Pretty cool.
Then, on to cities: physicist and urban scholar Geoffrey West took the stage to describe the parallels his research has shown between how nature scales and how cities scale. This has been written about previously but is super interesting. Geoffrey's money quote was:
It's largely thought that cities are buildings. Not true. Cities are people.
When we talk about cities, it's easy to talk about them in terms of the physical infrastructure -- roads, bridges, buildings, parks. But all of that -- all of it -- is really just a medium for connecting the people who live there. With that in mind, it's much easier to conceive of cities as organisms -- that therefore have common characteristics with other areas of biology -- than as some other sort of foreign creation. Without getting too far into it, Geoffrey presents a concern about the pace at which cities are scaling, changing -- and what this means for sustainability. In the end, he described himself as a pessimist.
But this event was about optimism, and as such, it closed with a great story: The Low Line
If you haven't heard of this yet -- it's a project to convert the abandoned Williamsburg Trolley Terminal, which sits beneath Delancey Street at the end of the Williamsburg Bridge, into the world's first underground urban park. It would be a revitalization project to parallel the awesome and successful Highline project, and it would look like this:
... using nifty solar reflectors like this:
What a cool project, and what a great way to end the day.
So, that was a lot -- and I didn't touch on everything from the day.
But this was enough to get my wheels turning and to get inspired about my own work and all the exciting things people are working on.
Kudos to Jerri and the Feast staff. Can't wait til next year.
He goes on to articulate the peer progressive approach (emphasis mine):
The peer-progressive response differs from both these approaches. Instead of turning a blind eye to market failures, it assumes that these problems are widespread, and actively seeks them out as the central focus of its agenda. Instead of building a large government agency to combat the problem, it tries to build a peer network around it, a system of dense, diverse, and decentralized exchange.
That last part is key -- the idea that our first step towards approaching hard problems should be build a peer network around it. This sounds simple, but it's profound. And this is where there is perhaps the biggest distinction between the approach the traditional left takes and the peer progressive approach. Building a network around a problem is inherently a hands-off approach. It says, up front, that we don't know all the answers, and we are doing everything we can to empower others. An example that illustrates this outlook is the recent launch of Ask Patents -- a community website powered by Stack Exchange, that will tap into the power of peer networks to assist with the evaluation of patent applications. Joel Spolsky of Stack Exchange has a great post introducing the idea. Ask Patents is inspired by the Peer-to-Patent project (lead by Beth Noveck and Chris Wong) -- but improves on the implementation by piggybacking on the existing and incredibly active community at Stack Exchange. Another example is the Camellia Network, which is building a network to support youth aging out of the Foster Care system. There are tons of other examples, across every sector of industry and society. Here's a short video describing the idea:
How things really work
All of Steven's books are great (I must admit not having read every single one... yet). As I was thinking about it, one way of looking at the body of his work is the constant process of uncovering how the world actually works, as opposed to how we think it works. Or rather, the continuing crusade to debunk myths across all areas of life -- so that we can see and then learn from how things really work. In Emergence, he tells the story of how complex, coordinated action takes place. Not by central planning, as you might expect, but by decentralized, distributed decision making adding up to a greater whole. This is the case across biology (how coral reef ecosystems grow), sociology (how cities get built) and technology (how the internet works). The idea that complex ideas and systems emerge from underlying architectures and distributed decisionmaking is deep. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he investigates what he calls "the natural history of innovation", debunking the myth that big ideas are the products of "single moments of genius". Instead, they are nearly often the product of accumulated observation, thinking, and connections between ideas that form over long periods of time. He calls this "the slow hunch" and it's an idea that has stuck with me profoundly, to the extent that I've incorporated many of the ideas behind it into my daily life, I've named this blog after it, and it's literally the foundation of my work environment. This video is a great illustration (and has been viewed 2.5mm times, if you can believe that): Now, in Future Perfect, he debunks the myths behind our polarized political views of how we accomplish progress and achieve societal good. He points that the left-right dichotomy is a false one, and notes that while we natively focus on our societal shortcomings, we massively understate the widespread, incredible progress we've achieved. For example, he debunks Peter Thiel's claim that we're not making progress in the transportation space, with a holistic view of progress:
Yes, Thiel is right that the planes themselves can’t fly any faster than they did forty years ago, and so by that metric, progress has in fact stalled. (Or gone backward, if you count the Concorde.) But just about every other crucial metric (other than the joys of going through airport security) points in the other direction. That extraordinary record of progress did not come from a breakthrough device or a visionary inventor; it did not take the form of a great leap forward. Instead, the changes came from decades of small decisions, made by thousands of individuals and organizations, some of them public-sector and some of them private, each tinkering with the system in tactical ways: exploring new routes, experimenting with new pricing structures, throwing chicken carcasses into spinning jet engines. Each of these changes was incremental, but over time they built themselves up into orders-of-magnitude improvements. Yet because they were incremental, they remained largely invisible, unsung.
This is the beauty of Steven's writing -- the ability to open up a clear and compelling view into What's Really Going on Here. So, I'll leave it at that for now. If you're in Boston tonight, go see Steven at the Harvard Bookstore. And if you're in NYC next week, catch up with him at the New York Public Library. And go read those books!
