We Can Fix Stupid

Really?  You can't fix stupid?

Perhaps at least we can work to prevent it.

There's too many stories in the news everyday regarding stupid.  We encounter stupid everywhere: walking down the street, in our spiritual organizations, in restaurants, on school boards, city councils, in local county, state and federal government, in our media, at our jobs, in our clubs, trolling on social media, and even at our kid's soccer games.

So if we can't stupid, we're all really screwed. No wonder Elon Musk is working so hard and fast to colonize Mars.

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit or sense.--Wikipedia

Seriously. We have to fix stupid.

No, for real. If you care about the future of our species I implore you to consider it may be time to stop sitting on the sidelines, sharing the stories on Facebook, and having a good laugh.

It may very well be true we can't fix stupid but at the very least we must take matters into our own hands to ensure the stupid become a dwindling class.

Start with promoting and supporting all forms education, over communicate, take risks, vote for the well-informed, report stupidity, blog, protest, expect proper grammar, join a group, start a movement, write a book, and most of all, remember:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.--Albert Einstein

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.--Michel de Montaigne

A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.--Michael Moore

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.--Frank Zappa

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Daring Success and Failure
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A Call to News Beat Activisim

Daring Success and Failure

Surely this is science fiction:

Man dares to safely land first stage rocket booster, in an upright standing position, on an unmanned drone barge in the ocean.  The booster hits too hard and crashes.   Elon Musk tweets, "Close, but no cigar."

It is not science fiction, and as a National Geographic article puts it...

Failure is an Option

The failed attempt is part of the efforts of a bold agent of change, Elon Musk (see my Jan 5th blog --Transformational Change) who planned the test booster landing as part of what NASA called a flawless mission launch to re-supply the International Space Station.  Here is an example of a man who has set out to change everything about the way we launch into space and think about space travel.

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.--Winston Churchill

Some businesses have made efforts to institutionalize the power of failure by creating Walls of Failure within their offices. Workers post their failures and what they learned from the experience.  The practice keeps others from repeating the same mistakes.

The takeaway here is not to let fear of failure keep you from acting on what matters.  Instead, plan on it as part of the process.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.--Michael Jordan

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Transformational Change

Transformational Change

It's common to attribute great innovation to creativity, intelligence or wealth.   Not everyone though can be brilliant, geeky, and a billionaire -- on the other hand,  it sure seems to help. Two transformational figures that come to mind are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

What chances
do the rest of us have for creating great change?

One can only stand in awe looking at the legacy of change created, and being created, by these two men.  

The innovations of Steve Jobs are widely recognized, but Elon Musk is still far from being a household name. 

What's important in looking at these two icons, is not to be intimidated, but inspired. Their ability to create change is really no different from the rest of us.  Clearly they they have had phenomenal resources to enable them to start and scale faster once they have an initial idea. But how they start the idea process and work with it is something we can draw from by drilling down past the personas and wealth.  

First principles and the iterative process.

Two things these men share in common are zero base thinking (what Musk calls First Principles)  and an iterative development process.  

Iteration is the act of repeating a process with the aim of approaching a desired goal, target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration", and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration. --Wikipedia

The core of iteration is that your concepts, ideas, products or processes are in a constant state of improvement.  You create something great today and tomorrow you approach it as starting point for improvement rather than the ending point.  Musk says it's, "Constantly be thinking about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."

Zero base thinking is just what it sounds like, it is starting with a blank piece of paper rather than building upon the best practices and examples around us.  Most of us think and communicate by way of analogy — comparing new experiences and ideas to those we already know exist.  Musk says the benefit of “first principles” thinking, "allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists." 

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”--Elon Musk

Watch this video interview with Kevin Rose where Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the fundamentals of transportation and the combustion engine in order to create a car.

"All men dream, but not equally.  Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." -- T. E Lawrence