What’s the most interesting yet obscure fact you know?
I’ll go first to get the ball rolling.
Millions of mass produced books started circulating throughout Europe in the late 1400’s. Thanks to German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press with moveable-type.
You already knew that.
But did you know it took another sixty years for someone to realize that the pages could be numbered? Sixty years!
I’m not the smartest cookie in the jar, but I like to think I could’ve come up with this silly little insight in sixty seconds.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
It’s easy to dismiss our ancestors as ignorant little fools who we can confidently laugh at these days.
It’s so obvious to us now, but can you imagine how fascinating numbered pages would’ve been back then?
Here’s a modern example from my personal life.
I used to agonize for weeks over what my first-day-of-school-outfit would be starting in kindergarten and continuing up to my senior year of high school.
I couldn’t help but think there was a giant spotlight on me. And I suspected there were secret meetings being held in the auditorium by my classmates, teachers, and administrators furiously debating each piece of clothing I wore.
Nope.
It took me thirteen years to realize nobody was paying much attention to me or my outfits.
It’s so obvious now, but this realization would’ve fascinated my schoolboy self.
Then it dawned on me…
All of humanity’s collective ideas, insights, inventions, and discoveries can be summed up in four words — obvious now, fascinating then.
Numbered pages and the spotlight effect are just two examples. But I’m sure you can think of plenty more.
Our lives are a never-ending struggle of finding out stuff that’s obvious to us now, but would’ve been fascinating had we known it sooner.
I have a couple predictions of what our grandchildren will laugh at us for not realizing sooner:
Poisoning the environment is bad.
Printing trillions of dollars is bad.
Giving six year olds smartphones is bad.
Sure, we already have a hunch that none of these things are good. Yet we continue to do them.
But what about the things we can’t predict?
Ah, now that’s where it gets interesting. And since we can’t predict them, they’ll likely be even more impactful.
So what?
I’ve been chewing on this idea for months. It seems so obvious now, but it was fascinating when it first hit me.
Are we forever destined to remain ignorant little monkeys? Constantly missing the obvious facts staring us in the face?
Yep.
Our collective wisdom has come a long way when you compare what we know now to what we knew yesterday, last month, last year, or last century.
But there’s always more progress to be made.
So I see it as our duty to constantly be digging, scraping, and hunting for new and improved ideas, insights, inventions, and discoveries till our final breath.
We owe it to our descendants.
All so our grandchildren and their grandchildren can dismiss them as being so obvious, while hopefully recognizing they were fascinating to us in the moment.
Because, as I see it, the grand narrative of humanity is simply this — obvious now, fascinating then.
Always has been, always will be.
Your thoughts? Please leave a reply below.
Another great one Arman. I'm wondering - who is the smartest cookie in the jar??
(That sentence made me LOL).
Love your thinking. And you are absolutely spot on. I'm reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and it fits so well in this story. How some things were discovered, how people thought 'now we know it all'.
But if you think about it, it's also fascinating how our future discoveries will keep surprising us. It's so extremely hard to imagine what more there is to discover, right?
A lot to think about...
Arman, this is an interesting thought! Funnily enough, I didn't realize how obvious this is til you pointed it out. I'm reading Originals by Adam Grant, and your idea made me recall how some of the best ideas came about from procrastination, i.e., letting it sit for a while before acting on it. I wonder how that plays out with obvious now, fascinating then.