The world is full of lines. They are everywhere, they are on the road, on walls, on maps, in the sand, in our minds. Like I said, everywhere. The lines themselves are like a tool, they can be good or bad. Lines on the road keep us from driving off into a ditch or into oncoming traffic. A line on a wall might lead the way to an exit in an emergency. The lines on a map represent the separation between a horrible dictatorship and a free and prosperous country. However, a line can also be totally arbitrary and be based on not on protecting or helping people but on manipulating or separating them.
A while back we talked about how some manufacturing companies would set their production goals by drawing a line on the wall. So along as the product stacked up at least as high as the line at the end of the day everything was good. If not, the bosses were upset and looking for ways to get people to be more efficient, which in the minds of too many means firing people in the hopes of finding someone to work faster. Not to mention scaring people into working faster.
Or back to the example of the map. Look at the lines in the Middle East and Africa. A lot of those countries didn’t exist as defined entities until after WWI and some as recently as WWII. Those lines were drawn arbitrarily as the empires of France, Britain, and the rest of the European powers retreated. Those lines have not exactly been beneficial for humanity.
Let’s spend some more time though with a couple of mental or psychological lines, one is the bottom line and the other is the line between risk and reward. The bottom line of course is a big deal for business. If your bottom line isn’t big enough, you won’t be in business for long. So it’s a valid concern. However, it can become too big of a focus. When it becomes all consuming, your business has gone from the beneficial endeavor it started out as to a monster intent on growing itself regardless of who get in the way.
Our attitude towards the bottom line also has an effect on that risk/reward line. On one hand, a desire to grow the bottom line can drive a person to take a little more risk in the hopes of doing so. An excessive focus on that line has a tendency to make a person overly cautious to avoid any risk if it means a potential loss of money. That leads to absolute stagnation.
The other big thing in that equation that is often neglected is people. Could the risky endeavor help people or not? Could it be a benefit not just to oneself but to others? Could it just be something that leads to a breakthrough in technology, or expanding our knowledge?
Think back to the birth of the digital age in the 1990s. The tech world was bursting at the seams with innovation. New programs, hardware and applications for them were being developed faster than it was possible to keep track of them. Suddenly we could snap photos, get directions, make calls, and keep in contact with friends old and new almost anywhere. Computers and programs to make them useful became affordable for almost everyone who wanted them. How was all that possible?
The venture capitalists back then understood that to get some reward, you needed to take some risk. They put forth some of their money understanding that they might lose it. But they saw the risk as being worth the potential reward. Whether their motive was profit or helping people, they understood that to make progress of any kind you have to be willing to take a risk. Today, everyone is more interested in how money is going to get made than in the idea and its potential. We need to recover some of that spirit, that desire to take risk, to get out in front before anyone else.
TARTLE is doing that, getting out before others and creating a new way of looking at and treating data. With your help, we can remind others that we need to get back to people, back to being willing to take a chance. That’s the only way anything worth doing gets done.
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