THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE WHEEL GIVES A TED TALK (-- IN THE STONE AGE)
This fable is dedicated to FOUNDING SUBSCRIBER team: Jennifer Tattenbaum & Lisa Bachner! Thank you!
As a teenager, I took a job working for a mason. Day in and day out, I moved slabs of stone from one place to the next on a wagon atop four squares.
Movement, as you can imagine, was labored and miserable.
I wondered sometimes if it wasn’t just better to carry the stones without the wagon. But I tried that once and it sucked even worse.
One morning, as I made my first straining steps forward and as my heavy wagon crested over the point of the squares beneath it, I had a cool idea.
What if the squares instead were circles?
Immediately after having this idea, I was embarrassed. Surely if the whole “circles-under-a-wagon” idea had worked, someone would have already done it.
It probably wasn’t a new idea, I reasoned.
Someone in Babylon or somewhere had tried it, failed, and schlepping stones would just stay hard because that’s the way life is. Then you’re 30 and you die from an infection.
But for whatever reason, that night, after a full day of dragging my wagon atop four squares, I decided to tell my wife the idea.
She was 14 at the time, so I guess at that point we only had two children, but still, finances were tight and there wasn’t exactly time to try out my crazy experimental ideas. I was compelled to tell her, though, just in case I was on to something.
As fortune would have it, my wife loved the idea. She too was exhausted, from carrying babies to market. She had no hands left for carrying purchases and eventually stopped going to market altogether. We were hungry in those times.
She ran from the boulder we used as a table and fetched me a chisel and small rock from outside our cave/home.
“Pilot your idea by chiseling this small rock into a circle. If this works on a small rock, you can assume that the concept is scalable,” said she.
So I set to work hammering and chiseling right at the dinner table. By the end of the night, I had sore hands and a minimum viable product.
The next day, I brought my circle rock to the mason.
I trembled as I explained my, now I was sure of it, very stupid idea.
“This idea blows,” confirmed the mason, who cast my little circle rock to the ground and drank from my goatskin cask, forgetting which one was his.
I was ashamed.
I was also now super thirsty and dragging rocks on a wagon atop four squares, while dreaming of circles. It was, for sure, a bad day at work.
A week later, the mason fired me without cause. Our third baby was on the way and I had an infected ingrown toenail that was likely to cause sepsis. Truly, terrible timing.
Spying on the mason’s property one unemployed afternoon, what should I find but another youth dragging a wagon full of more stones than I’d ever pulled. Under that wagon were four circles where my squares had been. That’s when, in my despair, the name of my invention came to me: “Wh-wh-wheels!” I cried out.
The mason lurked behind me and he heard me say it!
“Lol,” said he. “I was calling them Squares 2.0, but I like ‘Wheels’ better.”
And with that, he took off for the patent office to pay the exorbitant fee I’d never have been able to afford. He claimed the invention as his own and, as it turned out (to my shock, dismay and paralyzing envy), none before him had done that.
I went home to my famished, pregnant wife, who treated my nail with a “witches’ root” that definitely wasn’t working, but I didn’t wanna say anything rude about it. A dejected pauper was I. Theoretically, all you need is love, but both she and I were too burnt out for that at this point.
I didn’t mention to her what I had seen or heard on the mason’s property. I didn’t mention “wheels” ever again, because my wife would go off anytime I did. She blamed the “circle rock day” on my subsequent firing, and honestly, who could say she was wrong?
My idea, “wheels,” went on to make the mason rich and to revolutionize industry across every discipline.
So. Look. That’s my story. But, why am I sharing it here, with you, in Toronto? What does this all mean for the innovators of today?
Don’t assume someone else has already had your cool idea.
Don’t assume someone else has the gumption to pursue your cool idea, if they have it.
And don’t, under any circumstances, tell your cool idea to your boss, who probably has the capital to accomplish it immediately and without you.
As for inventing the wheel, you’re welcome.
(Also, try to stay ahead of ingrown toenails by trimming them correctly before it becomes a serious problem.)
And “that’s an idea worth spreading.” Thank you so much.