
Why? Because the truth is that we don’t get too many shots at groundbreaking things — and it’s those shots that come to define the worthiness of our days. If we’re going to spend our time, effort, money, imagination, our best minds and our brightest spirits, on the grand challenge of…delivering stuff we don’t really need with money we don’t really have to impress people we don’t really like to live lives we don’t really want…a few microseconds sooner…we’re not surely not investing our very selves wisely: spending our brief time on earth accomplishing things that truly matter. And lest you suggest I’m an idealist, the simple fact is: that is how great institutions, leaders, and lives, those that earn our respect, love, and admiration — and so lend our brief days a sense of greater meaning, higher purpose, and abiding worth — are built.
Rather than employing the illogic of trickle-down innovation, you and I should ask a wiser question: what are the long-term real social benefits of this product, service, idea, project? What does it add in human terms — does it make people smarter, fitter, wiser, closer, happier? Will it change anyone’s life, in even a small way, for the better, and how many lives can it realist…