It's good to be reminded more often of this can-do attitude. It's becoming way too prevalent to consider everything done that can be done, or to say that all territory's already been staked out by the billionaires leaving no hope for the rest of us.
Imagining a thing and then spending a lifetime making it a reality is not the same as wanting to get rich or famous. It's not even obliquely related to the drive for success. In fact it's a failure mode. It's an intellectual pursuit that might make you wealthy, but probably won't, because wealth and acclaim are orthogonal to satisfying your own curiosity.
Very eloquently said. This drive feels more absent than ever. There’s like this aroma of helplessness today within innovation as a general approach to problem solving. Perhaps it’s just a sign of my times and I’ve reached to “get off my lawn” jaded stage.
I am trying to realign my pursuits and sense of fulfillment by focusing on what “feels right” rather than be manipulated by monetary concerns. I certainly don’t want or need to strive for tons of money; the only way I’ve justified the path is by somehow having faith that whatever I naturally involve myself with will find it’s way in supporting itself to conclusion.
I’ve always wondered how “the greats” supported themselves. You only hear about their intellectual pursuits but not their support system.
I’m not sure who it was but in the area of thermodynamics Faraday or someone was basically supporting his entire family on a farm and just working on the profundity of heat in his spare hours.
Indeed. Suffers the same superficial depth as Neil Armstrong's first words on the moon. Should have been "Without the man in this photo, the photo of a man wouldn't exist."
Not to take anything away from Kirsch's achievements but that statement is similar to saying "Without Einstein we wouldn't have a theory of General Relativity". …which is very likely false: In the 1910s there were dozens of other people looking into unifying gravity with Special Relativity (and electromagnetism) and, eventually, someone else would have surely come up with a theory isomorphic to General Relativity.
In the same way, someone else probably would have invented the digital image scanner.
You could almost say that it's such an obvious invention that the first person who had access to an internally programmable digital computer came up with it. Scanning and printing over a wire were implemented in the late 19th century[1], so the only thing left was to be able to store the signal and replay it.
That's hard to do in practice. The internet has made it clear to me that "Nothing new under the sun" has always been true. Almost every "original" idea that I have had I wind up finding having already been carried out by someone else first.
I believe however that original thinking is still a good thing to embrace although I am not sure that sitting down and saying to yourself, "Okay, now think of something to do that has never been done before" is a fruitful way to approach brainstorming. Original ideas seem to come about a little more organically (if they come at all).
> Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.
I like that one better. In general I like Kirsch's lamenting that we have become a flock of consumers rather than of creators. I feel so much better at least when I build/make things, not so good when I spend a stretch of evenings just consuming entertainment (doom scrolling, whathaveyou). I am on the fence though as to whether that is a new phenomena or whether that is somehow related to our seemingly modern entertainment culture.
To be sure there must have always been people unmotivated to create, build. But perhaps before radio, television, the internet, those same people at least would have wandered outside and knocked a baseball around, or looked for crawdads, or dropped sticks into a creek to watch them float away like small boats.
Look at it this way: for basically everything there is already a project on github. But how many of those projects actually work? or are in a 1.0 release? or are even used by more than 100 people?
If something has already been done it's not the end of the world. If you think it has value you should do it again and try to collect its leftover potential
As much as I appreciate the guy, and his work, I find it a little boastful, in a strange way, to just ask strangers a line of questioning that would lead up to a conversation about how awesome you are. I would hope the likes of Shannon, Brattain, Shockley, Bardeen, Kilby, Noice, etc, would not be so ostentatious.
Imagining a thing and then spending a lifetime making it a reality is not the same as wanting to get rich or famous. It's not even obliquely related to the drive for success. In fact it's a failure mode. It's an intellectual pursuit that might make you wealthy, but probably won't, because wealth and acclaim are orthogonal to satisfying your own curiosity.