A friend asked me today why a handful of people seem to make all the difference in the world. The history of humankind could be summed up in a book of 100 pages or less and a handful of individuals that made the most astonishing discoveries. Nonetheless, this particular assumption is erroneous and can be explained easily with the concept of the tipping point.
Every single thing we build, every tool we use is an indirect outcome of someone else's work. Human innovation works much like our DNA. Information gets carried out from one generation to the next. Environmental conditions shape our tools (and genome) in order to meet current challenges. The current "set of tools" is carried out to the next generation.
No single person discovered the wheel or fire or the ax. Many individuals worked different versions of the same concept until generation after generation it got refined. In the same respect electricity, the telegram, computing and all other modern innovations did not just pop-up because of the genius of some individuals. Many others have done the hard work before them adding a little bit at a time. The "geniuses" just happened to give the last extra push of the totality of accumulated work — described as the tipping point. More or less the term describes the series of small changes or incidents that become significant enough to cause a larger, more important change. A genius always finds themselves at the top of the tipping point.
Take for example scientific research. Thousands of papers get peer reviewed and published on a daily basis. Many people work on the same problem at the same time and in all likelihood they are referencing each other. At some point one of them happens to stumble upon something revolutionary. The individual gets all the glory while all the people that worked before them get forgotten.
We do the same mistake in our daily life. Someone might fuck up many times but one good act at the very end is all we remember. The opposite is also true. You might be doing good deeds all your life and then fuck up with something bad in the end. The human mind is incredibly gullible and superficial. It cannot comprehend too much information and ends up shaving most of the content. This is why we get so awestruck with first appearances. This is why looks matter so much.
In some respect, we are all geniousness. The only problem is timing at the top of the tipping point.
