I am a huge fan of airport bookstores…where I’ve always been able to find a book, for pleasure or for work, that not only helped make the time away from family a little more tolerable, but also would often inspire new thoughts and exciting insights.
On my most recent trip through an airport, This Idea Must Die caught my eye. In this book, John Brockman takes issue with more than 100 scientific theories (entropy, infinity, string theory, the scientific method, etc.); he doesn’t necessarily challenge their importance or contributions to our world, but he does express that these theories are inhibiting our progress today.
Here’s how I perceive Brockman’s idea can apply to our lives: When is the last time you critically looked at your world and found something important — a fundamental part of your work, a behavior, a metric of success — and just killed it?! I suggest you try doing this, hypothetically for now, and consider the new opportunities that open up as a result.
The pick-something-to-kill approach resonates with me because of a little family history. I have an ancestor who I have come to “hate.” Now, I don’t actually know that he is direct relative, but my last name is not what you would call common. So, when I learned what Frank McGurrin had done, I had to despise the man.
In 1868, one of the revolutionary tools of the time was the typewriter. Maybe you never had the chance to use an actual typewriter, which until the 1960’s where mechanical devices with keybars that propelled forward when a button labeled with the desired letter was selected, leaving an ink stain in the form of the corresponding letter. One flaw with early typewriters was a technical glitch for folks who typed quickly, as keybars were known to cross each other when letters next to each other were pressed in quick succession, forcing the typist to stop, separate the jammed keybars, and start again. As a solution to this problem, Christopher Scholes and colleagues designed a typewriter layout that intended to optimize a typist’s speed by placing letters of the most common words (i.e. “the,” “and”) farther apart so that keybars would not cross. But while the design, which was called QWERTY for the 6 letters across the top left of the layout, decreased the chance of crossed keybars, an unfortunate side effect of this design was also slower typing speeds.
Other inventors offered alternative designs, but Scholes and the Remington company that manufactured the QWERTY typewriters had an advantage: Frank McGurrin. Frank was one of the first, and fastest, touch-typists (typing without looking at the keys) of the time. And as a result of his winning several typing contests in that day (along with some strong marketing efforts), the QWERTY keyboard was determined to be the optimal design, and QWERTY was effectively established as the standard keyboard layout for typewriters.
I expect that many of you can look in front of you and see that Frank’s impact is still with us today — even though there has been extensive research to indicate other keyboard layouts, including a simple alphabetic format, would be easier to learn and improve typing speed. But altering every English-based keyboard is too significant of a change to even consider… yet, if you remember typing training the way I do, you assuredly agree that we are stuck with an idea that should most definitely die!
Now you can understand why I feel so strongly that sometimes even the best ideas/behaviors/metrics must be killed. No matter how valuable your own important ‘thing’ appears now, so much of value is contextual and we do know that contexts change — faster and faster every day. Without questioning everything, we’ll never recognize that some solutions for past problems, like typewriter keyboard designs, are irrelevant today. So without killing past solutions, we cannot know what progress they are preventing. And maybe, just maybe, when you imagine the world without ideas from the past, you will see an exciting new future!
