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Today’s Problems Won’t Be Solved With Yesterday’s Experience
May 26, 2020
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No-one likes to be wrong; after all, being wrong comes with risk. Fail and you’ll have to deal with the burst of embarrassment that comes from failing; and who wants to be worrying about what people are saying about you? I can feel the anxiety rising just thinking about it! So naturally, when faced with any level of risk we retreat. We wave the white flag and run as fast as we can toward safety. We resist the pull of the unknown and lean back toward the known.
The problem is the safety we seek out is in the familiar. Our comfort comes from the knowledge and experience we have gained surviving past problems and situations. The security blanket we cling to is the by-product of our past. That’s too bad, as the future’s problems will be different from our past problems, and therefore our experience & knowledge won’t be all that useful to us. It’ll be like bringing a banana to a sword fight.
Our lives are filled with uncertainty (and probably more now than ever). What comes next? Who the hell knows? If truth be told we (yes, us humans) have an incredibly bad track record when it comes to predicting the future. In fact, so-called “experts” have some of the worst track records when it comes to predicting the future, often under- performing random selection. The Wall Street Journal once proved this by running a popular feature in which experts picked stocks while pitted against random throws of a dart against stock pages. No surprise, the darts almost always won. Next time you come across one of those heralded experts who repeatedly suggest ideas they’ve done, or have seen work, before you’ll know they aren’t creative, they are simply dwellers of the past who are trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. They are curators of the museum “unoriginal.”
Of course, there’s no way of knowing what the future will be like - and now we know we’d get it wrong if we tried to guess - but we all instinctively know that success won’t come from simply repeating the things that have already happened. We should follow those instincts, as assuming our knowledge and experience alone will lead us to what is right will be wrong. If we relied on our knowledge and experience to guide us forward, we’d still be waiting for a taxi instead of tapping on our phones and hopping into an Uber. The future will belong to those who take risk. Those who are willing to be wrong. Those with an open mind to new ideas. Those who are willing to endure ridicule for their inevitable failures along the way.
Experience is the opposite of originality.
The future belongs to those who will create what isn’t here today.
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