We live in a culture that is driven by naysaying. In one corner, people insist that the individual stands no chance against structural and systemic maladies. In the other, people say that we are in inexorable decline as a civilization and that decadence is everywhere we turn. Both wind up arguing against risk-taking, against the possibility of creating new things and new worlds.
How can we recover the adventurous, optimistic, forward-thinking, risk-taking attitude that has made America the most innovative country in the history of the world?
Today, the venture capitalist (and former journalist) Katherine Boyle explains how. She makes the powerful case that that spirit of building is very much alive in America—just not in the places that we once assumed we’d find it.
Yes, Excellent podcast / article.
Ms. Boyle alludes to the key first part of having the successes that got us here, kind of the “supply side” of innovation. That is, the supply of innovators is actually alive and well. As she briefly hints, look at Space-X. There are thousands of examples. For example go to the drug store and get a Pulse-Ox meter (and you can see the equations it uses to detect O2 levels).
What’s missing then? Well a couple of biggies serve to put up roadblocks to the supply of innovation, such as:
1) A long running epidemic of bureaucratic behavior where so many people want to live and work more and more by fixed rules instead of independent thinking. This pervades Government and many companies (who work harder at avoiding legal battles than at doing the right thing), and
2) A widespread loss of focus on physical reality which is being displaced in peoples’ minds by perceptions of “issues”, many of which are fed into the public dialog and then amplified and given hugely artificial importance (which is often very incorrect, sometimes very deliberately). I lay this primarily at the feet of the News media and Social Media. So many of us are deeply preoccupied with the mini or virtual issues instead of on the direct problems we face or the value of real action. I know that if I had told my Grandpa that I was upset with what pronoun someone was going by, he’d have told me “OK, so you don’t have enough work to do so now I want that shed cleaned out tomorrow”.
The good news is that I think I see the preoccupations over the small issues peaking out as actual physical limits like paying for gasoline, food, or the products of skilled labor rise to the top of the list. It’s sad that we had to cycle through the loss of perspective to get it back (if we are getting our perspectives back) but it might be a self-correcting cycle.
I’d tell the graduates to leave the minutiae behind.
Wow.
Thank you, Katherine, for sharing my thoughts outloud.
It's time to get serious about the direction of our lives, the responsibility we have to our children, and the rapid decline of moral standards in our society.