No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness - Aristotle
Recently I have got some dose of exposure to social entrepreneurship, one of my most memorable learning experience was getting to know the startup Wateroam.
When it comes to startup and their groundbreaking achievements, it is most often easy to overlook the technology development part behind it. Everything will look easy in hindsight and I mean everything. Wateroam first product was developed in 2014, it was not easily accepted as the product was bulky and weighted approximately 20 kilograms. Purifying water was not a well known subject (relative to current year) and all that we know that it took many lonely years finding product market fit, until the moment that you know that your innovative product just need cloning and massive large scale manufacturing and deployment.
The lonely engineer.
engineer; to arrange cleverly and often secretly for something to happen, especially something that is to your advantage.
When it comes to innovative products, the key definition is to simply make something new, and most of the time by definition “new” is both the leverage of your innovation and also it means you will probably be the only one who’s working on it (assuming you have never told anyone about your idea). Even if you ended up telling it to someone, you’d ended up only telling a handful numbers of people and the lonely engineer becomes the lonely group of people. Desperation is always at the corner of the room and it’s very very easy to give up.
We as humans tend to seek clarity, something straight forward or logical, we are not fond of emergent properties like love and inspiration, yet they are the most beautiful things we can experience.
Even if you ended up telling about your idea, you want it to be kept with people who you can trust and you and only you and them will work on the idea. It’ll be a very lonely road and it’ll be very painful, no one promises you a rose garden, not even your future self.
Everything revolves around the bell curve.
The bell curve assumes that for every ‘something’ there is a small number of ‘group of that something’ which carries the extreme opposite of what the majority of that ‘something’ has.
I believe this apply inherently or appear as an emergent properties when it comes to human society and its motivation. Influenced by many variables the bell curve is everywhere to be seen. The top one percent, the low one percent, the middle class. The zero sum game economy, whenever a money is transferred to buy goods, the money is lost from someone else and is transferred to other.
I think it also applies on human motivations and the exclusivity of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are known for re-inventing the wheel, the hard nature of this implies the execution of solving a problem, layering the difficulties of knowing the problem and solving it filters successful entrepreneurs to be and stay at the far right curve of the bell curve and it will probably always be that way and there’s nothing wrong with that, if anything it should make you glad if you are pursuing to be one.
Understand what’s normal.
The bell curve represents the normal distribution, it pictures a group of people and their places. This mean that if I were to aim to do something further from the densest part of the group, it means I would become lonelier and lonelier. I will have and experience unrelatable gesture of emotions and anxiety that not much could touch the feelings of.
Obsession
Only heavy mixture of emotions could outweigh or balance the other heavy mixture of emotions, this is where obsession steps in. The hard road will stay hard and you need a damn good reason to keep walking on fire, even when everyone turns your back against you. Obsession is again, not the luxury that anyone can have.
I have met and talk with people deprived of obsession and they are often the stalest type of people. It’s as if someone were to put a gun behind their head their life will flash before their eyes and still won’t make any move. To some degree I have been there and wished someone would put a gun on my head when I was asleep every time i go to sleep.
Obsession means the world is crumbling had you not do something, it is something of importance that you would put your life over. It is the will and power of the great who make and done great things, a few that has moved and stayed despite being uncomfortable as fuck.
No one promised you a rose garden
It’ll be hard and noone promised you a rose garden, might as well just walk on the fire and laugh it off.