Over the years, I have discovered many amazing and useful stories. Today I share two of those stories with you. I hope you find them both interesting and enlightening.
- Make Sure you Have the Horses
A bunch of really smart people got together in 1880 to predict the future, according to Jeff Stibel in his intriguing book Breakpoint. These experts were called on to predict how the rapidly growing New York City would manage into the next century and beyond.
The prognosis was not positive!
NYC was a major source of American innovation in 1880. Skyscrapers, subways, stock exchanges — and it was doubling in size every 10 years. The experts were concerned by this growth, because they projected by 1980, you’d need six million horses to transport all the people who would live there.
2. Write it Down
In Plato’s Phaedrus, the earliest and best-known critique of writing, Socrates warns his companion Phaedrus that writing will only make human memory weaker:
This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. (Plato 1925, 274e–275a)
Hmmm. We remember this, of course, because Plato wrote it down.