“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world… are the ones who do.”

These lines represent Steve Job’s creative rebellion and a call for us all to rethink.

“If it hasn’t been done, and it’s of value, there’s really good reasons it hasn’t been done. And so when you’re confronted with those reasons, you’ve got two choices: you can say, ‘Oh, that’s a very good reason—I’m sorry for bothering you.’ Or you can say, ‘I don’t believe that. I’m going to find out more.’” - Jony Ive

Our beliefs about something represent our current understanding of that something. When feeling stuck, the natural way of breaking the deadlock is to examine the potential mistakes in our current understanding and try to form new, better explanations that can help us make progress.

The black swans as defined by Taleb are those rare events that lie on the edges of the bell curve. Like water, groups have surface tension that tends to pull people inward, making the bell curve narrower. Those people and events that lie on the edge of the curve are labeled outliers or black swans. It is easy to label outliers as a product of random events that are rare and therefore insignificant while trying to understand our world. But good theories, like laws of nature, explain and account for the events that are even on the far edges of the data. They take into account and explain everything. Something that does not abide by those laws indicates limitations of our current understanding. The problems demand the creation of new, better theories. That has been the nature of scientific progress in the modern post-enlightenment era.

Current popular wisdom tends to be driven by what’s popular: This is what 99% of successful CEOs are doing, This is what 80% of women like to do. The majority is the right action. No wonder we are pushing towards the generalization. Everybody follows more or less the same processes and rules.

From history, we know that this progress towards generalization is by nature anti to originality and novel ideas. Those who lie on the edge of the bell curve form their own rules and recreate their own paths.

These outliers are not mere exceptions but an indication for us to rethink.

Beyond the Horizon

the simple question that is this all there is? Triggers the search of something new something novel something better than what existed before.