The most valuable tools in this new world won’t be the ones that generate the most code fastest. They’ll be the ones that help us think more clearly, plan more carefully, and keep the quality bar high while everything accelerates around us.
What impressed Churchill during his trip was a quality of resilience, an “unshakeable faith in a golden future,” that he did not see at home. Unlike the English, Americans were not deathly afraid of making mistakes with their money because they believed that even if they were wiped out, opportunities to make it all back, and more, would continue to present themselves. “Before disparaging American methods,” he wrote, “the English critic would do well to acquaint himself with the inherent probity and strength of the American speculative machine. It is not built to prevent crises, but to survive them.”
The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.
