18 REAL-LEADERS.COM / SUMMER 2022 MINDFULNESS How toThink Big and Create World-Changing Ideas By Michael Bhaskar WHY HAS THE FLOW OF BIG, WORLD-CHANGING IDEAS SLOWED DOWN? IN HIS NEW BOOK, HUMAN FRONTIERS , MICHAEL BHASKAR EXPLAINS THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING EVERY ASPECT OF BIG IDEAS: THEIR ORIGINS, THEIR ROLE IN SOCIETAL PROGRESS, AND HOWWE CAN MAKE MORE OF THEM. THERE ARE SUCH THINGS AS BIG IDEAS, as opposed to any old, common idea. In general, people are a bit wary of things called “big ideas.” I think the world is somewhat hostile to them. People tend to want to attack a big idea, or think that it’s somehow arrogant, or an imposition, or a myth. People want to say that big ideas break down into lots of little ideas. That is partly true. But the stuff of history is about big ideas — that which I call the “human frontier,” or the limit of what we can do. Maybe it’s our technological frontier, or the knowledge frontier of what we know about the world, or perhaps a cultural or artistic frontier. A big idea is one that impacts at the frontier. And that’s not speculation, because a whole range of researchers have found ways to work out how much impact an idea has. You can then say, “Well, we can estimate the impact of every patent, and we find the top 5 or 1% that have the most impact. Those are big ideas.” Then there’s also a psychological aspect. Some ideas just shock us. Darwin’s idea of natural selection was an explosive idea that pulled apart a lot of peoples’ worldviews. Big ideas have this shocking, sensational impact. Human history, human civilization, really doesn’t make much sense unless we have some awareness of those ideas that matter most. EXAMINE HISTORY FOR INGREDIENTS THAT SHIFTED CULTURES. Look around the world, and it feels like everything is going on. We have amazing new technologies launching. We have what seems like a really fast pace of change. How can it be called a Great Stagnation? The phrase “Great Stagnation” was coined in 2011 by Tyler Cowen, the economist, and quite a few other economists have now backed it up. The first piece of evidence would be that in the frontier countries — the most developed countries on Earth — economic growth has started to slow down on a long-term trend. In the middle of the 20th century, growth was faster than it is today. If we were a society that was accelerating into the future, why wouldn’t growth be accelerating? Even more than that, there is a productivity slowdown. Yet productivity tends to be driven by new technologies, so that suggests that big, new technologies are either not being rolled out as fast as in the past, or that something is not quite catching on about those technologies. In about the space of a human lifetime, we went from most people walking around and using horses, to humans landing on the moon in a massive rocket. It was an extraordinary transformation, and in each of these, modes of transport was a big idea. Since then, all of those modes 1 DISRUPT PEOPLES’ WORLDVIEW 2 EXAMINE HISTORY
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