On July 30 Perseverance launched from Earth and on Thursday February 18 landed safely on the surface of Mars (with audio!). Yesterday we learned that Perseverance’s sidekick, the Ingenuity helicopter, also arrived intact and is ready for flight. We are about to fly our first helicopter on another planet.
Humans have this incredible ability to imagine an invention/ future and then through will and ingenuity, actualize that dream. If you were to time travel back 400 years with a fully charged iPhone to show inhabitants what life is like in the future, you’d probably be burned at the stake for being a witch. We live in absolutely amazing times, where leaps in technology allows for incredible consciousness expansion combined with tangible results: vaccines that normally take 3-4 years are vetted within a year; Elon Musk creates a rocket that can successfully return to its launch pad; we use a device called Zoom to continue work life in the corporate world/higher education. And we just landed a small car and mini-helicopter on Mars!
That should be the mic drop end-of-post, but what this calls attention to is the power of narrative thinking. A compelling story/vision helps line up the filaments of thought toward reality. Jeff Bezos famously tossed out the Power Point approach and went with narrative analyses to envision what “could be” for his company. As explained in the new book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Amazon managers practiced writing press releases first before developing new services, as they wanted to make sure, theoretically and practically, it made sense to customers before going forward and doing the coding work. The story had to be viable and intriguing. The link below is an incredible podcast for a16z where host Sonal Chokshi interviews Bryar and Carr about their book regarding Amazon’s unique approach. It is well worth your time to listen to this, as it illustrates the power of narrative thinking as possibly the foundation itself for successful tech companies.
“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” -Ray Bradbury