Guy Reams (00:01.134)
Today's day 178, where innovation is found.
So one of my favorite books that I picked up during my college days was Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book was pretty powerful to me. It explained the paradigm shift that often happens in the scientific community, where a commonly held belief gets disrupted by a scientist who starts really questioning why anomalies are occurring. See, the status quo, the current paradigm,
sometimes doesn't want to acknowledge that there are things that are happening in the universe that are not explainable by its paradigm. So they brush those under the proverbial rug, hoping that they won't be investigated. Well, there's always a scientist that comes around that decides to investigate those anomalies. And pretty soon, they start finding phenomena or scientific fact that disputes the prevailing paradigm. So what ends up happening is a revolution starts to begin.
Now, as you can imagine, any revolution is not met, is always met with resistance. Usually the person that's causing the disruption becomes a target by the community as a heretic or somebody that needs to be disciplined or removed from their society. And this has always happened. Every major scientist that started to explore those anomalies and provide scientific evidence for a basis that the current paradigm is not true ends up being
part of a visceral reaction from the scientific community. It happens all the time. What's really interesting is, like for example, just to pick an example, the global warming thing or climate change theory. So for a while there, there was a total denial that climate change was, that there was any manmade climate change occurring. And so the scientific community started reeling in shock when people were starting to reveal that,
Guy Reams (02:01.005)
maybe there is some impact that human activity is having on our environment and maybe potentially causing some warming. That was met with a lot of denial. Well, that caused a great paradigm shift. And so nowadays, we're in the current paradigm where there's a prevailing belief that humans are having a direct effect on global warming. However,
Now we're having scientists that are kind of coming out saying, well, wait a minute, maybe the impact is not as great as we thought. And so now the current paradigm is attacking those. So it's interesting, you'll see this paradigm shift go back and forth, back and forth. And so Thomas Kuhn referred to it as a cycle, as a cyclical process. Each scientific community building upon the other. And sometimes,
We just will never get to an objective truth because opinion and popular belief is what really commands people's attention. And so consensus around objective truth is not necessarily the aim, but rather maintaining our position of the most popular held belief. It's just a fascinating thing to observe. Truth aside, it's very fascinating to observe. So he uses several examples. One of the examples he uses was Nicholas
Pernicus, who in 1543 started, published a paper that basically challenged the geocentric model of the solar system. He basically said, we're not, everything is not revolving around the earth. Things are revolving around the sun. That is the solar system. The gravitational pull is coming from the sun. And that is what is causing, that is what explains some of the anomalies that we're experiencing, right? So.
Now this was not met well. He was severely attacked. The popular belief in the scientific community was being challenged. Now little did they know that ancient cultures had already figured this out. But we didn't have YouTube back then, and we didn't have Google back then. So they didn't know that this had already been discovered, that the universe was indeed revolving around the sun. So.
Guy Reams (04:16.109)
They had no idea that Copernicus was not only right, but he'd been backed up by many centuries before ancient astronomers who had already figured this out. But he met with lots of disdain, lots of ridicule. But nowadays, we look back at Copernicus and think, well, that's obvious. I mean, that totally explains the anomalies we're having. Now, of course, later, we would discover, well, we're not really revolving around the sun.
were actually all revolving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So that was another mind -blowing concept. So it's just interesting to watch how a scientific revolution occurs. Now, I bring all this up because this is where I believe that disruption is actually found, or innovation is found. When you have a popular opinion that is generally held by the majority as true, therein lies the innovation.
There will always be unexplainable phenomenon that will occur with the prevailing theory. And these are the things that the current belief system cannot explain. This is the fertile soil in which you will find innovation. When you discover an anomaly, you've discovered the source of a new innovation that will most likely be highly disruptive.
Coon calls this a paradigm shift. When a new innovation comes about, people begin to see the world in a different lens. This causes a new view of the world, and the old view and the new world will begin to clash with each other, and this will be a tumultuous time. Most entrepreneurs that are part of a new disruptive innovation do not describe this as a comfortable time to be in existence. This is definitely rocky.
People are trying to sue you. People are trying to go after you, right? So this is just part of the process, right? So in my opinion, the greatest innovation, the greatest opportunity to discover true innovation is to go to the source that is meeting the most resistance. If people are mounting a great resistance against an alternative theory, that is where the innovation will be found.
Guy Reams (06:31.501)
If your community of experts is resisting a new trend that is emerging, the greater their resistance, the more disruptive that innovation that you'll discover. So with that, if you want to find a new, great disruptive innovative idea, I suggest going to where there is the most disagreement. All right, thank you.