In The Roomba Where It Happens
Why The Secret to Success Gets Swept Under The Rug
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
In one of his more cryptic moods, William Blake decided human nature reminded him of a tiger — with mood swings that revealed a half majesty, half menace dichotomy. The Victorians of the day weren’t entirely surprised. After all, the telephone and dynamite were among their many inventions that they firmly believed could coexist in harmony.
Peeking into history, we see this same human tendency plays out in every generation and epoch: long, yawning monologues punctuated by sudden, frenzied outbursts. Blake was telling us that we toggle between bouts of grandeur and moments of struggle, a dance called human nature — and so will our next move be regal or reckless, as he intimated? Or was that Wordsworth?
Enter the Butterfly Effect: the idea that minuscule changes in a complex system can result in vast, unpredictable outcomes. While Ed Lorenz wouldn’t formalize this theory for another two centuries, its essence — a world teetering on the precipice of unpredictability — was something Blake was all too familiar with.
From his birth in London in 1757, life was a slippery slope for young Will. By age four, he professed visions of God; by nine, he imagined a tree teeming with angels. His Victorian parents no doubt thought him a tad unusual. Instead of stifling his imagination, however, they enrolled him at Henry Pars’ drawing school in the Strand where Blake flourished as an artist and poet instead of being dismissed as an eccentric. Truly, the divide between fame and failure can be razor-thin, a recurring theme in our narrative that suggests the act of nurturing carves out a lifelong path for success and achievement.
The result of a few art lessons is that Blake is now revered as a cornerstone of the Romantic Period. Esteemed critic Jonathan Jones acclaimed him as the “finest artist Britain has ever known,” and in 2002, the BBC honored him as the 38th Greatest Briton.
Blake’s legacy emphasizes that within each of us lies a hint of the Tyger’s duality: a balance between our composed and chaotic sides. Amid life’s uncertainties, wouldn’t we all be better off with a tidbit of encouragement, especially if our perspective diverges from the norm? Isn’t that the mind of a poet at work, questioning reality and seeing things in a different light? If a year at art school can produce a life of immortality, who knows what lies ahead?
Ed Lorenz personified the idea that small things had a big influence. He too violated the norm, the conventional, and was made to work hard for his glory. The revelation of Chaos Theory, with its profound implications for weather, was a minuscule shift in thinking like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings or a parent’s gentle encouragement, that drastically altered the course of history. It not only transformed his career but startled the scientific community.
Lorenz’s theory tilted the Newtonian and Aristotelian universe off its axis by claiming that some reserved seats were taken by a new teammate called chaos. The notion that success was solely attributed to the natural organization (men at the top, women below) or the level of ability (IQ is king, dummies back off) or a privileged upbringing (more money, more choices) was shattered. It introduced the idea that life was decidedly more chaotic. Just as weather patterns aren’t wholly unpredictable, neither are the pathways to glory.
Much like Lorenz, who credited his eureka moment to a strong cup of coffee, people often find it challenging to say what and where their lives steered in the upwards trajectory. Our subjects, from Nobel laureates to Fortune 50 CEOs, often expressed the same astonishment at their own ascent.
When we asked Warren Buffett what brought him to the top of the game, he said his success depended on being born in America around the Second World War. That sounded like a busted flush, a poker hand missing a card. While roughly 25,000,000 babies were born from 1930 to 1940, it is hard to make the case that Buffett was one of many so fortunately endowed. There must be another good reason for his success.
Our deep dives into their stories consistently showed that there were moments where individuals like Blake found environments that nurtured them, where everything seemed to….resonate and where their odd ideas were nurtured.
Drawing a parallel to the musical “Hamilton,” we looked at Lorenz’s lightbulb moment to see if a single factor in his case rose above all others in taking him to the promised land of scientific immortality.
It brought to mind an iconic phrase from the play Hamilton that everyone has heard by now, “in the room where it happens.” It refers to a scene in which Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton are heatedly discussing Thomas Jefferson’s decision the previous evening. It was a plan to relocate the nation’s capital to the Potomac River, a choice that favored the political interests of the South. Burr was furious. He had not even been invited to the dinner. Burr wasn’t in the room where it happens. In the context of history, the room was more than a stage set; it set the stage that shaped the future of our country.
And so we asked, was there a room where it happened that changed the course of Ed Lorenz’s life and the science of meteorology?
The Room Where Innovation Happens
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), established in 1861, combined elements of professional and liberal education aligned with the German research university model. It prized the role of problem-solving over punditry and ideology. MIT stands alongside Cornell University and the historically Black college, Tuskegee University, in private land-grant universities, as some of our country’s most remarkable intellectual developments.
It explains why MIT’s astonishing contributions spanning technology and science are always leaning against the wind of conventional wisdom: from developing the Internet, Professor Vannevar Bush’s concept, which sowed the seeds for the World Wide Web, Bob Metcalfe’s discovery of the Ethernet (May 22, 1973), and the World Wide Web (1994) by Tim Berners-Lee, to the Blockchain (1999). Those discoveries spawned new applications developed by MIT, from the Mouse (1980) to the Fax Machine (1959), Margaret Hamilton’s coding of Apollo 11’s moon landing (1969), the birth of Email (1971), the PC (1973), and through Professor Butler Lampson’s work at Xerox PARC, the Spreadsheet (1979).
And let’s not forget Roomba (2002).
The famous apartment vacuum cleaner idea came to Joe Jones when he was working in the research department at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1989 during a semester break. “I decided I wanted to build a robot to clean my apartment because I’m a slob.” “I thought it would be fun.”
Like Jones, Ed Lorenz’s moment of insight was a chance to have some fun. To his astonishment, when he slightly rounded off a set of initial conditions, the simulation yielded a drastically divergent outcome. It captured the idea that small shifts in a complex system could have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences. To Ed Lorenz, this was fun of the highest caliber.
But his secret was not in rolling the dice on a math problem. What led Ed Lorenz to his remarkable discovery wasn’t only meticulous attention to detail but also his willingness to challenge established norms, and a deep curiosity about the behavior of complex systems.
In his case, there was a fourth factor.
For the same reason, MIT boasts an impressive array that includes 100 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award recipients, and 8 Fields Medalists. The list continues with 58 National Medal of Science awardees, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 83 Marshall Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force, and several heads of state.
The Butterfly Effect found fertile soil within an institution that championed the wayward trajectory of scientific exploration as it navigated against conventional beliefs. In a time when cancel culture casts its shadow over so many colleges, an openness to engage with discoveries that challenge established doctrines sets MIT apart and provides a haven for Ed Lorenz to flourish. For Ed Lorenz, MIT was the room where it happens.
The Stories
They tilted at windmills, and astonishingly, their lives turned skywards.
Once Upon a Terroir recounts the journeys of ordinary individuals who ascended to extraordinary heights. Although they never believed they could achieve the levels of fame, wealth, happiness, and purpose that they ultimately did, much like a butterfly effect, their success was predictable if you consider that everything hinged on small initial circumstances.
Their early lives were marked by adversity. Facing childhoods of divorce, abandonment, and humble beginnings in gritty housing projects, they were pretty used to being knocked about. When the future came calling, it held a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, and no one imagined how different their trajectory was destined to be. But something happened, and that was how we began our research in the field of Successology.
Our findings differ from the usual fare of glitzy tales that accompany the narratives of the rich and famous. Our subjects’ stories are anchored in resilience, courage, and triumph against the odds. They lacked privileged connections but armed only with determination and desire, they tilted at windmills, and astonishingly, their lives turned skywards. This marked the beginning of our trek — delving into the phenomena of triumphant lives by analyzing the backstories, looking for clues to the moment everything began to change. Much like Warren Buffett’s homespun Omaha fable, what we found was closer to home than anyone imagined.
The second, much better-known narrative, were the outcomes from Nobel Prize laureates to Four Star Generals to billionaires. Our task became an all-consuming quest to unravel the intricacies of how, when, and where these turning points occurred.
As we traversed the timelines, we uncovered a moment of transformation that was particularly evident with all our subjects. It was an EKG of success. Their life charts separated into two distinct halves: the first was a time of untapped potential captured by Winston Churchill in a charming phrase, “A fluid, friendly, but unfocused circle.” That was when a metamorphosis propelled them to global prominence.
The arc of greatness reveals itself mysteriously but bends towards the obvious. For Ed Lorenz, MIT encouraged a side that tended towards skepticism in the pursuit of scientific excellence, even though he could hardly have felt this consciously. It was why he spent his entire professional life at MIT although he was originally a product of Harvard. The institution did something that he knew intuitively was inextricably bound with, if you forgive the unscientific term, his soul. This prompted us to delve further into “the room where it happens.” Like Lorenz’s butterfly, is there a place that liberates all of us to be all we never realized we could be? If so, it would relate to the idea that there are pivotal places that influence the direction of our lives.
We set out to discover the truth behind this rather intriguing idea. Then, like Lorenz, we wanted to fetch a mug of java.
