Every few decades or so, an outlier comes into the world and introduces an invention that it set to revolutionize an entire aspect of human life.

Armed with a brilliant mind and unshakable will to change the world, they inevitably end up leaving the world a better place than the one they were born into.

Some of their projects succeed and changes the lives of an entire generation, some remain long after they’re gone gone. And every once in a while, one of those inventions go on to change the course of history.

Take Gutenberg with the printing press, or Bell with the Telephone.. Or even that forgotten genius from history who invented indoor plumbing.

It sounds funny I know, but can you imagine if we’d still have to go outside everytime we need to pee?

You know when they say that the best ideas always come in the bathroom? Now, think about how many of these ideas would’ve been lost had the private bathroom never been invented.

Then maybe all those geniuses would’ve been too busy looking over their shoulders preoccupied by whoever is watching them poop, while they could’ve used that time to devise all sorts of really awesome ideas that we can all enjoy.

But let’s jump back to our subject, and not because I’m losing the thread, but because I can’t believe that I just wrote an entire paragraph on toilet activities.

The Right Side of Time

They say that there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in the entire human history combined. Which presumptively explains why we have such a hypersonic innovation curve compared to any other time in human history.

Even for us it’s hard to catch up with the speed of developments sometimes.

You finally get the hang of a certain technology and they’re already presenting you with its 2.0 version.

Now I know, there are many factors why we are blessed with so many game-changing inventors in our era, such as the increasing demographics, which means a far larger pool of geniuses to choose from.

The life expectancy is much higher now, and people no longer die by spider bites or get attacked by a snake whenever they’re doing their business in the forest.

Throwback moment to the toilet invention we mentioned earlier.

More importantly, having free time to invent was rarely a luxury that other civilizations could afford as they were busy trying to survive.

Let’s face it, you’re much less likely to work on your revolutionary app when you’re busy running after some wild giraffe while competing with 14 different hyenas who also called dibs on the poor prey.

And that’s a normal Tuesday. On a bad day, the big surprise comes when you realize that that pack of hyenas are actually hunting you, and not the giraffe.

But you get the picture, we live in the lucky era.

So all of these geniuses, scientists and engineers that we have can actually focus on their passion and attempt to create life-changing technologies. Because thankfully, there are no hyenas anymore.

And the few that are left you usually find in the parliament or the central banks.

There is however a new emerging threat that is trying to distract the most prolific members of our species from being productive, and that’s internet trolls.

Armed with a functional keyboard and a staggering amount of frustration, those trolls would stop at nothing in their quest to distract people from doing anything constructive.

“If I’m not doing anything with my time, so why should anyone?”

Take the latest avalanche targeting Elon Musk and the Tesla cars for example.

Some people are seemingly outraged that a Tesla driver was caught into a traffic accident, using that as a pretext to “prove” that Tesla cars are a failure. Some went further and are even calling for the banning of the Tesla models because of that.

As if it was the first car accident in human history.

But here’s a funny question?

What do these people think caused the tens of thousands of traffic accidents we have per year?

Were they all caused by horse-riding accidents?

Because you know, emergency rooms are filled with wounded equestrians.

Jokes aside, attacking the Tesla cars because a driver got into an accident, is like attacking Amazon because some crazy person beat their lover to death with a brand new copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.

It doesn’t make any sense.

But then again, the quibbles were never about logic nor common sense, but rather the instinctive need that some people have to bring people down, especially those at the top.

All the benefits that Tesla bring to the table, introducing alternative energy sources - as opposed to bombing people for oil - and all the other advantages take a backseat to their main goal, which is character assassination.

This isn’t a new phenomenon by the way, you can observe this in all sectors and all industries.

Take the blockchain for example, many people try to ignore all the benefits it has already brought and all the potential it still has, and instead, they just sit down and focus on predicting its demise.

Ironically, the often do so while drawing parallels to “the dot com bubble”.

They do entire segments on how they predicted the death of the internet and the dot com bubble. And then when they finish, they upload the video on the internet.

Quite the funny paradox I must say.

Ten years you’ve been posting on YouTube and not once you’ve notice that after the letters “youtube” it says “.com”.

Like many previous inventions in human history it’ll have its ups and downs and people will predict its death a thousand times, but sooner or later, it will change the world for the better.

We don’t know how it will all evolve or how fast it’s going to take hold on the public, but there is one thing we know.

There will always be people who will try to distract everyone from building a better tomorrow.

And when that happens I hope that you remember, that without those outliers and their inventions, who knows if we would still be running after that giraffe.

Embrace the Innovators, Don’t Fear them.

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