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What if the Beatles never existed? Or Coca-Cola? Or Harry Potter? So goes the plot of the movie Yesterday. The world is one day hit by a global power outage, and, the result is a wrinkle in time where a few great things are missing, completely missing. There’s never been the Beatles, no one’s ever had a Coke, and HarryPotter is, well, a pretty common human name with no fame. If you haven’t seen the movie, do so. It’s a ton of fun.
But, here’s the kicker. The movie is an analog for our real life. What are we missing in this real world? What ideas, products, solutions, cures, creations should have, could have, want to have been created, but just never were? Either the idea was crushed before it got legs or someone simply didn’t have the chutzpah to put it out there.
Maybe this is your idea. It’s “crazy.“ Sort of only makes sense to you. But you just have this sense, there’s something there, something that will click, something that will transform a small niche (or a large swath) of the world that you’ve got special insight into. Or maybe you’re a leader and someone who works for you keeps proposing something that they’re passionate about, and it’s not actually completely crazy, it wants to be part of the zeitgeist.
Think of Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the spreadsheet. One day while watching his professor write numbers on the blackboard, he envisioned a “magic blackboard” where when you changed one number, all the other numbers recalculated. According to Steve Jobs, without VisiCalc there would be no Apple! What if Dan had said to himself, “Nah, dumb idea, no one will want it!”
Imagine being part of that world. A world without Apple. Well, you kind of are. Because there are a multitude of ideas that have never seen the light of day.
As Victor Hugo said, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”
What’s your idea? Maybe it’s only a glimmer in your eye. Maybe it’s full of uncertainty (duh!). Perhaps, perhaps, you should let the world in on it!
Related: Becoming Real Innovators