The Future Doesn’t Come With Instructions

“Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.”

~Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Biochemist

There are no pre-planned instructions for your future. You have to write it yourself.

Let me tell you how I know this.

My Dad use to buy me model cars as a kid. We called them “models”. We would lay on the floor of what we called “The Newroom” in our house in Missouri and I would hold the instruction manual and watch him go step by step.

Dad would say: “What’s step 5 say?”

I would carefully glare at the step 5 photo trying to make sense of why we attached the tires before the main frame, then I’d read what was on the page and / or show him. Step by step we snipped, snapped, painted, while WWF played in the background. And before you knew it we had a model car. I was so excited.

I think Dad ended up putting them together more than I did.

I was too distracted watching The Undertaker fight Bret “The Hitman” Hart.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38wbyy

But nonetheless we had a nice collection. We were so proud of our collection. I kept them on my shelves in my room.

This all got me thinking. Often times I wish the future had an instruction manual like our model cars.The one thing the model cars taught me is that while some things have instruction manuals many (if not most) things in life do not.

Especially when it comes to innovation and progress.

In fact, much of what’s in the future we don’t see until it suddenly arrives at our doorstep.

Upon more thought I was reminded of the interesting “Ships Not Seen” myth and how when Christopher Columbus (1492), Ferdinand Magellan (1520), and James Cook (1770) arrived off the coast of North and South America and Australia that the Native Americans completely ignored them supposedly because Ships were something they’d never seen before. It was something beyond their reasoning, logic, and understanding. It was a new idea. Something they couldn’t even begin to comprehend. They therefore didn’t even “see” the ships. Were the natives ignoring them or could they really not “see” them?

Joseph Banks a botanist aboard Cook’s ship in one account said:

“The ship passed within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment; I was almost inclined to think that attentive to their business and deafened by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her go past them. Not one was once observed to stop and look towards the ship; they pursued their way in all appearance entirely unmoved by the neighborhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one.”

Whether the myth is true or not, I don’t know. There’s been speculation on both sides of the equation. But if it were true, it wouldn’t surprise me.

My main reason being we didn’t “see” the iPhone in 1995 but we had the tools to make it. Everything that has ever been and that will be is already here. We just haven’t discovered it yet. America was always there. It’s just that nobody just had set sail across the Atlantic to find it. But this very myth is a great metaphor not just for advancements and progress in modern technology but in life as a whole. It was something they hadn’t seen before. It was a new invention. It was a new “Recipe”.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher

Let’s look at another example. In a 1994 video Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric tried desperately to figure out what the “@” symbol means and what “Email” and “Internet” is.