Let Your Ideas Have Sex

There are few things we find more inspiring than individual achievement. Whether it is in Sports, Politics, Academia, or Business, we are always looking for the most athletic, the most brilliant, and the most driven people. Individual achievement is the focus of stories that we deem worth hearing, seeing, and experiencing. After all, it is names like Newton, Einstein, Mandela, Ghandi, Lincoln, Jordan, Ali, Phelps, Bolt, and James that we think of as the agents that drive human progress. But are brilliant individuals really what drive human progress?

The answer is a strong negative. While brilliant individuals are without a doubt crucial, the real MVP is human cooperation. The truth is that even the most intelligent individual is dwarfed by humanity’s collective intelligence. What makes us humans special is not what we can do individually but rather what we are able to do together. Often without making a conscious effort to do so. We do not dominate the planet because we have large brains (in fact, Neanderthals had even larger brains). The reason we have progressed the way that we have is due to our ability and willingness to cooperate. Through the division of both physical and cognitive labor, we have been able to and are continuously able to produce outcomes that are far beyond the scope of individual understanding. (Read’s I, Pencil is a great illustration of this. Check it out here.) Adam Smith was the first to recognize this phenomenon and articulated it in The Wealth of Nations. It is collective bottom-up processes that facilitate the enormous progress far beyond the scope of any individual’s intelligence and ability. This is why central planning does not work, as Friedrich Hayek argued in his famous essay The Use of Knowledge in Society. (An argument that I reconstructed in this post: On Economic Planning.)

In the lingo of Matt Ridley, human progress happens when our ideas have sex. (Check out Ridley’s TEDTalk here.) Letting them have sex is as easy as gathering, processing, and distributing ideas and information. Thus, all individuals that gather, process, and distribute ideas and information actively drive human progress.

Do you want to have an impact and drive human progress? Well, there you go. It’s much simpler than you might think.