The Theoretical and the Actual
I’ve been competing in debate on and off for over 10 years, and in many ways, it’s directed my thinking. I have an argumentative attitude that often makes puts people on the defensive. I ask a lot of questions that make some feel as though I’m minimizing their opinions. I’m often loud and boisterous when it comes to discussing issues that are important to me. My time in debate has certainly influenced more than just my ability to out badly organized notes.
Debate has also given me some tools that my scientific background did not. It put me on the defensive, forcing me to question a lot of my personal assumptions and put myself out there. Much as my notes weren’t organized, my mentality became more focused as I acquired a solid idea of how a good argument was constructed: establish a harm in the status quo, explain how a given plan of action would solve for it, and explain what the impact is, or why solving for it matters.
In many ways, that led me to be a better scientist. While I’m no more organized in my writing, I now have a solid idea of the pieces that go into anything I write, particularly when it comes to establishing the importance of a research project of mine. I became better able to convey my research because I didn’t get mired in the details; taking it a step further and understanding why it mattered made it much simpler to be excited about what I was doing and to breed that excitement in others.
In many ways, it’s that solid link to an outcome that matters that led me to Astrona. This wasn’t just a research project. It wasn’t just another opportunity to learn some new techniques. It wasn’t distantly related to some potential benefit for society.
It was real, almost tangible.
I felt as though I could already hold it in my hand before we even started developing an actual product because it was the first real link I’d had between the theoretical and the practical, at least with the research I was doing. It wasn’t just a really interesting question anymore. It felt like I was finally reaching the impact, finally turning what I was doing into something more.
But over the course of the project, I’ve come to realize that the idea of impact was, itself, too theoretical. Too shallow. Debate gave me a blueprint for how I could contextualize what a good idea was, but it’s the work I’ve done building the company that has built the scaffold. Our company is still in its infancy, but it’s growing rapidly, quickly becoming more than just vaporware. The more we advance, the more I understand its benefits and limitations and how to engage our potential customers and investors.
So I will continue to move from the theoretical to the actual. For a long time, I thought that just involved moving from harm to solvency to impact, but I’ve come to realize that, in building and marketing a product, you never leave behind any step. We continue to seek to understand our markets and their needs. We continue to improve our technology and its ability to meet those needs. And even after we start selling our technology and seeing it affect the world around us, our impact will only be as good as our continued efforts to improve market fit and innovate our product.
I think Lewis Carroll said it best:
Academics and debate gave me the tools I need to start moving, and since I’ve started at Indie Bio, I’ve learned to run. Now, I’ve got to up the pace.
