There’s a long-lived adage in woodworking and carpentry—measure twice, cut once. As civilization grew and evolved from millions of years ago when primitive cutting tools were used to hunt and gather food, a need for more accurate cutting tools grew and evolved with it.

What do you call a leader with no followers? A guy taking a walk. It is a line from The West Wing that I often think about. Within the context of the scene and the character, it is a response to a potential loss of leadership. 

Naturally, much of understanding anything—and where it might be going—is understanding how it began. 

Vaccines are being rolled out across the globe. The process is occurring faster in some areas than others, sure, but the fact that a vaccine is being distributed at all means that the worst is behind us and that everything will go back to normal. Right?

Ever since the revolution of Henry Ford’s assembly line, it has been possible to produce identical complex products in drastically less time. It was the inception of mass production as we know it today.

A paradigm shift, identified and coined by American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the approach, concepts, and assumptions of a practice. 

A merchant has a fox, a rabbit, and a head of lettuce and sits on the edge of a river. He has a small raft capable of carrying only himself and one item at a time, but without his supervision, the fox will eat the rabbit, and the rabbit will eat the lettuce. 

An object hanging from a string, moving back and forth, is more than something used to entertain cats or hypnotize patients in old horror movies. It’s called a pendulum. 

There’s an old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Throughout the years, that expression has been adapted to fit different situations, including a “team is only as strong as its weakest player” or “your brand is only as strong as your weakest link.” 

More important than the inventor, the first company to market, or even the technology itself, is adoption of the technology. Whether a technology is adopted early or late can make or break not only the technology, inventor, company, or entire industry, but also an entire economy.