[Book review] Zero to One: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
This is a continuation of yesterday's blog on "Zero to One".
[Book review] Zero to One: If you believe that life depends on luck, why are you reading this book?
The central question of the book is:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
On a more subjective level, what is the one thing that most people don't know but only I know? The "hidden truth" is the question that lies between the "textbook theorem" that everyone knows and the unprovable "world after the end of the universe". The book says that people are no longer willing to look for a hard question, but not impossible to answer. When you prove something that no one knows or believes, you gain because you are scarce. This gain is the monopoly, and the gain is so significant that you don't even have to think about money, as I wrote yesterday.
Speaking from my own experience, I think I won a scholarship 30 years ago for proving the question "Can I cycle around Australia?" When I cycled around Australia in 1993, there was no internet, no mobile phones and no GPS for the general public. It was not known from Japan whether there were roads that I could use to cycle around Australia. But nowadays, if you search on Google, someone has done something similar and will tell you how to do it. If you have a problem, you can call for help on your mobile phone, and you inform an ambulance where you are from the GPS in your smartphone. I believe that my bike trip, which was seen as an adventure at the time, was the catalyst that led to me being awarded a scholarship from Oxford University to prove my visionary power. If I did the same thing now, a mundane bike trip with little to no risk would not have the vision or value to earn me a scholarship from the best university in the world.
[Oxford] How I could go to Oxford with a full scholarship.
https://www.su-re.co/post/oxford-how-i-could-go-to-oxford-with-a-full-scholarship
Historically, there is a much bigger story. For example, in the 19th century, it was a hidden truth, known only to a few, that slavery was wrong. It is also a hidden truth that only a few people know that fair trade is not really fair, as I have written before.
[Coffee] Fairtrade: good intentions or numbers game.
https://www.su-re.co/post/coffee-fairtrade-good-intentions-or-numbers-game
What is the hidden truth that we at su-re.co are working on? This is also what I wrote the other day. The world needs a new ideology: clean, almost free energy. This is the ideology that nuclear power had in the past, which may revive in the future. But we need the ideology that there is another clean and almost free energy for those areas where no huge power lines are coming.
[biogas] Biggest challenge and consequence of Just Transition in developing countries.
That's why we're building cheap biogas digester and giving them out to farmers for free. The concept of the Think-Do-Be tank seems to have been inevitably designed around this idea. There is another hidden truth here, but I won't write about it now because it is directly related to our business model (^^;).
