"Abraham Lincoln had a single-minded vision: Preserve the Union. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t really become great until he united America behind the cause of ending Fascism and Imperialism. John Kennedy asked us to put a man on the moon. Ronald Reagan was hell bent on winning the Cold War."
All of those examples are centered around war and/or homeland security and some of them don't have a lot to do with entrepreneurship. The beauty of the world we live in today is that we don't need a leader to supply us with a unified vision/direction; we have tons of companies simultaneously working very hard on innovating in a multitude of different areas.
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?
The idea, I suppose, is that by focusing on a single "big problem", we could make very rapid progress (instead of making slower progress on a bigger set of problems). At its height, the US was spending almost 1% of its GDP on the Apollo program. Now imagine we could all agree on some other goal that we would spend that much money on. The hard part would be choosing a good goal, and then convincing enough people that it's the "right one".
Good point. Doesn't a unified vision/direction typically imply a huge problem to be solved? Even the space race was more a race against Communism than a common motivation to accomplish something great.
The ideal is to have no huge problems to solve. Humans being humans, without a common thing to scare us into working together, we'll all work on whatever we want.
That said, one might argue that we have huge problems we just haven't realized are huge problems yet. Climate change comes to mind.
All of those examples are centered around war and/or homeland security and some of them don't have a lot to do with entrepreneurship. The beauty of the world we live in today is that we don't need a leader to supply us with a unified vision/direction; we have tons of companies simultaneously working very hard on innovating in a multitude of different areas.
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?