Experts and the Dissenting Entrepreneur [Part 2]

More from John Schroeter… [Gilder's Daily Prophecy] April 20, 2021 [UNSUBSCRIBE]( | [ARCHIVES]( External Advertisement Jeff Brown: “Buy This Stock for This $11.9 Trillion Revolution” [Interview]( to Jeff Brown, there’s a new $11.9 trillion revolution that will affect 3.8 billion people. He believes a lot of people will get rich from this massive trend, but hurry.… The World Economic Forum issued a report saying… “The train is leaving the station, and individuals need to get on board quickly” [Click here to watch a replay of Jeff Brown’s America’s Last Digital Leap event or you could be left behind.]( [Warning] Do you enjoy receiving Gilder's Daily Prophecy? Please [Click Here Now]( so we know to continue sending you Gilder's Daily Prophecy for free! Experts and the Dissenting Entrepreneur [Part 2] [George Gilder]Dear Daily Prophecy Reader, If you missed part 1 of this Daily Prophecy, [go here]( to catch up. Let’s dive into more from my colleague, John Schroeter. [Will this weird device be in your home soon?]( Conceptual thinkers ask very specific questions and then quickly solve them deductively, that is, by making reasoned inferences. The experimenters, on the other hand, ask general questions, which they solve inductively over time by amassing evidence that supports their conclusions and serves new generalizations. What do these differences mean to the dissenting entrepreneur as he builds his team? In short, the world. First, to be fair to the experts, let’s clarify one important detail. Conceptualizers and experimenters peak at very different points in their careers, particularly when evaluated within a single discipline. When Einstein quipped, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so,” it was with a decided bias toward the conceptual thinker. On this score, he, too, was painting with a very broad brush. It is true that for conceptual thinkers, breakthroughs tend to come early in their careers. This is natural, considering that conceptual or theoretical work can proceed apace, unburdened as it is by years of painstaking empirical research. Youth, however, does confer a kind of advantage upon the conceptual thinker: the younger he is, the less knowledge he has accumulated, and thus the more likely he is to challenge the norms and assumptions of his field. In other words, he still doesn’t know what “can’t be done.” But herein lies a trap: having now made his “great contribution,” he is instantly transported across the divide. He is now an expert, and therefore, an incrementalist. He now knows too much — he has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and his knowledge is now more a hindrance than a help. His exponential mindset has become a linear one. No more radical new abstract ideations that are key to breakthrough innovations will be forthcoming. Having thus been exposed to the kryptonite of his expertise, his best work is now behind him, like the old athlete who lives on the mental reruns of his game-winning shot in the final seconds of the homecoming game. Breakthroughs happen when curious ignorance meets inspired imagination — qualities the expert now lacks. He is now on the downslope side of the inverted-U curve, where knowledge has extinguished inquisitiveness and, with it, his taste for discovery. But it doesn’t have to end like this. Our expert will suffer this horrible fate only if he remains within his field of expertise! External Advertisement [Market Millionaire Discovers "Perfect Stock"]( [Alex Green]( bought Amazon when it was trading around $30... Netflix when it was around $2... And Apple when it was less than $1 a share... And now... Market millionaire Alexander Green says he's discovered the "Perfect Stock" that could be the key to your retirement. [Find out about this $3 stock before share prices go up.]( [This New Technology is about to reach “Critical Mass”]( Indeed, there is nothing like “knowing it all” to kill one’s imagination. That’s nothing more than a shortcut to closed-mindedness. Why keep looking when you’ve already seen it all? Sadly, this also comes at a great cost to one’s sense of wonder and curiosity — of being an awe-struck beginner. Steve Jobs realized in retrospect that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. “The heaviness of being successful,” he said, “was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” It’s true that experts tend to have very narrow points of view. They actually know surprisingly little outside their areas of expertise. Astrophysicist Martin Rees calls out his peers on this point, characterizing them as “depressingly lay outside their specialties.” Being so focused, they never build the essential capacity for cross-pollination that comes with cross-discipline collaboration that in turn gives rise to novel and potentially exponential ideas. They are so far down their respective rabbit holes that they never see the light of day. This is precisely why conceptual thinkers, once having made a significant breakthrough in one field, need to come out of those holes or down from their silos (or ivory towers) and jump into fresh fields where they can once again engage their natural propensities for imagining extreme departures from existing conventions — where they can once again become that unencumbered upstart brimming with big ideas. Or they can stick with their cronies, grow long, grey beards, and become cynics in academia, like their fellow extinct volcanoes. But what about the experimenters? Are they a horse of a different color? It turns out that unlike the conceptual thinkers who outlive their creative shelf lives, experimenters are just getting started because they have accumulated a critical mass of knowledge in their fields. In fact, the more knowledge they gain, the more creative they become! Their tentative but methodical trial-and-error processes work to yield increasing levels of clarity, ultimately delivering the long-sought epiphanies. The downside to this process, in times of rapid change, is the long gestation period that experimenters have historically required. But new practices enabled by high-throughput experimentation techniques can dramatically compress these otherwise long timescales, perhaps even making experimenters temporally competitive with their conceptually driven peers. While experts are busy generating new knowledge, this is not where the real value lies. Conventional wisdom says that knowledge is power, but this is no longer true. Knowledge has become commoditized, and is increasingly so. There’s so much of it, in fact, that it can scarcely be digested — even when it concerns a given expert’s domain. The dissenting entrepreneur’s concern is the service to which that knowledge can be put in pursuit of a larger goal — an audacious goal whose objective was originally framed by a question — a big “what if” kind of question. Today, the ability to conceive substantive questions is power. We are drowning in knowledge but thirsting for questions. Can we count on the experts, conceptual, experimental, or otherwise, to ask the right questions? I don’t think so. This post is adapted from the book, [Moonshots — Creating a World of Abundance]( by Naveen Jain and John Schroeter. Regards, [John Schroeter] John Schroeter Senior Analyst, Gilder's Daily Prophecy Check. Check. Check. Passed all tests. [Prototype]( is a blueprint of a prototype designed by a group of engineers at Washington. 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