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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Bestselling Author Brad Stulberg on goals:

The book of the week is How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley.

The best book I have read this year.

An engaging and insightful exploration of innovation's nature, mechanisms, and resistance, filled with counterintuitive stories, historical examples, and profound questions about human progress. It reveals innovation as a collaborative force driving modern economies, from prehistoric roots to future possibilities, making it essential reading for understanding societal directions.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. Fascinating and delightful read.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

Most inventors find that they need to keep ‘just trying’ things. Tolerance of error is therefore critical. Of all the lessons of innovations in the book, I think the most relevant is Thomas Edison’s. Edison understood better than anybody before, and many since, that innovation is itself a product, the manufacturing of which is a team effort requiring trial and error. He tested more than 6000 plant materials till he found the right kind of bamboo for the filament of a light bulb. ‘I’ve not failed,’ he once said. ‘I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’

Starting his career in the telegraph industry and diversifying into stock-ticker machines, he step up a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, to do what he called ‘the invention business’, later moving to an even bigger outfit in West Orange. He assembled a team of 200 skilled craftsmen and scientist and worked them ruthlessly hard. Edison’s approach worked: within six years he had registered 400 patents. He remained relentlessly focused on finding out what the world needed and then inventing ways of meeting the needs, rather than the other way around. The method of invention was always trial and error. In developing the nickel-iron battery his employees undertook 50,000 experiments.

Invention, he famously said, is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Yet in effect what he was doing was not invention, so much as innovation: turning ideas into practical, reliable and affordable reality.

The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from exploration or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves; freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject the ones they do not. Innovation is the child of freedom, because it is a free, creative attempt to satisfy freely expressed human desires. 

This reliance on freedom explains why innovation cannot easily be planned, because neither human wishes nor the means of their satisfaction are easy to anticipate in the detail required; why innovation none the less seems inevitable in retrospect, because the link between desire and satisfaction is only then manifest; why innovation is a collective and collaborative business, because one mind knows too little about other minds; why innovation is organic because it must be a response to an authentic and free desire, not what somebody in authority thinks we should want; why nobody really knows how to cause innovation, because no one can make people want something.

Innovation happens when ideas can meet and mate, when experiment is encouraged, when people and goods can move freely and when money can flow towards fresh concepts, when those who invest can be sure their rewards will not be stolen. Innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity.

The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg. A captivating and transformative guide that redefines true achievement through purposeful growth, mastery, and deep engagement.