Finished listening to this fantastic episode of “Invest like the best” with Kenneth Stanley. He is the author of the book “ Why Greatness can’t be planned“. Although he didn’t intend to, the book makes a very strong bull case for web3. Here is how:
Innovation has nothing to do with Objectives
The book argues against the most used tool that our society has to achieve anything i.e. The Goal Setting. In our society, every project big or small starts with a goal, in some cases, we also have BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals).
Greatness happens when a bunch of stepping stones (aka interesting things) interplay with each other
The book posits that greatness happens when a bunch of stepping stones (aka interesting things) interplay with each other. This interplay of interesting things leads to further stepping stones. Eventually, one or more of these stepping stones becomes ‘Innovation`. As such, you can’t control the goal or the direction in which it evolves.
It’s a compelling argument based on the empirical evidence of all the historical innovations. The author is a computer science professor and he also did a computer simulation (PicBreeder) to prove this thesis.
If you think about it, innovation is like how evolution happens in the sense that evolution didn’t have a goal of producing humans or birds, or whales.
So what does it mean for innovation?
Our best bet towards innovation is to curate interesting things and allow those
interesting thingsto build on top of each other. After that, relax and watch the magic happen 🙂
Web3’s bull case for innovation
So how is the book a bull case for web3? Well, we have a term for this phenomenon in Web3 – Composability. It’s the idea that you take an existing innovation and build on top of it rather than building from scratch. The open nature of smart contracts allows composability and thus accelerates innovation.
For example, You can deposit funds into a decentralized exchange, #Uniswap, and receive a token that represents your deposit. With composability, #Aave (a different company) enables you to use these tokens as collateral in its own lending protocol.
I found it such a fascinating concept. I am sure the author didn’t intend to tie it with Web3 but it looks like the book makes a bull case for Web3 innovation.