I’m finding the Art of
Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander to be filled with
tiny gems. The first, which appears both in the text and in the TED presentation given by
Benjamin Stone, is the story of the two shoe marketers sent to Africa; one
perceives the inhabitants’ lack of shoes as a sign of hopelessness, while the
other sees a completely untapped market! I’ve always been a firm believer in
the power of attitude, and I was delighted to find this little parable that
illustrates the point.
The next gem was the story about Albert Einstein’s
conversation with Werner Heisenberg about the nature of a scientific theory.
I’ve long been fascinated by science’s transition from one paradigm to the
next. One of the most famous transitions was from Newtonian mechanics to
Einstein’s treatment of the speed of light as a universal “speed limit.” Then
after that came the shift to quantum mechanics—a paradigm shift that Einstein
himself vehemently opposed. His observation that the theory “decides what we
can observe” is entirely true—in both a scientific sense and in more pedestrian
circumstances. For example, before scientists considered that atoms might be
made of charged particles, they could not possibly have observed those
particles, because they would not have known how to look. No astronomer who
truly considered the Earth to be the center of the universe would have thought
to construct a telescope, because everything else in the universe was
considered to be of lesser importance. In a more everyday sense, we do not see
what our minds are not prepared to find. This goes back to my first gem, the
story of the two shoe marketers. A marketer with a fundamentally pessimistic
outlook will not see the opportunity staring him in the face…even when it comes
in the form of millions of bare feet!
Zander, R. S., & Zander, B. (2000).
The art of possibility [Electronic]. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School
Press.
