I had coffee with one of my good friends last week and one of the things we like to talk about is how we can work together more. Like any good business meeting, instead of talking about the products we could build, we first looked at the market itself.
Business lesson #1 Find a growing market, then figure out what you can make to address that market. DO NOT make a product, THEN try to find a market for it.
We are both in technology so naturally, our discussions revolve around this topic and usually around education, as he works in that field. He commented on how there is a knowledge deficit in the industry today. I thought about what he was saying so I think it’s worth unpacking this statement a bit.
Knowledge Deficit – A lack of trust and understanding because a lack of knowledge or information
Typically this term has been used in social science to explain why people don’t trust what engineers and scientists tell them. It’s not because they don’t trust these people but rather, they don’t understand what they are talking about. My friend wasn’t actually talking about this phenomenon but actually something a little scarier. He was actually referring to the knowledge deficit within an industry. How people are considered trained in an industry yet they lack the core building blocks to which their knowledge should be based upon.
The above has nothing to do with the perpetual motion machine besides getting us on the topic of knowledge.
First of all, what is the definition of the perpetual motion machine? For those who have never heard this term before, the perpetual motion machine produces energy and it runs off the energy that it produces. It is able to do this indefinitely, or perpetually. For an interesting read on the history of perpetual motion machines, Wikipedia has a pretty interesting page and some pretty exotic looking machines.
Spoiler – Unless the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, perpetual motion machines cannot be achieved.
If you recall from my post on making the world a better place when you think a problem is impossible, try to reframe it or benchmark with another industry. In this case, the answer is in the first half of this post, KNOWLEDGE.
Knowledge is the perpetual motion machine we have been looking for all these years.
When you feed knowledge into someone, and they, in turn, feed this knowledge to someone else, it actually creates a perpetual motion machine. The beauty of this machine is that it doesn’t “cost” anything and you can scale it by teaching multiple people at one time. So some of you may be thinking, this technically isn’t a perpetual motion machine and you are right to some extent. Let’s look at this another way.
The basis of this website is the concept of value. For those who have not read the about page, please do so now as my definition of value is slightly different from most people. At its fundamental level, my definition of value is getting more out of something then you put in. This definition is actually the principal in which the perpetual motion machine is actually built upon. The concept that energy out is equal or greater than energy in.
In conclusion: The concept of value is very important in life and business as people expect so much more from the relationships they are part of. One of the only ways to truly provide value is to possess knowledge, and to share that knowledge. This was a fairly short post and I will be expanding on this subject in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you as always for taking the time to read this.
Henry Bill 