Big ideas

The Greeks and Romans recognized that Earth was a sphere in the 4th century BC. But astronomers didn’t accept heliocentrism, the model of Earth's 24-hour rotation and annual orbit around the sun, until after Nicolas Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.

Ideas change the world. And in every generation, they’re born in the minds of people like us.

Democracy.

Human rights.

Feminism.

Antibiotics.

Heliocentrism.

But the people who come up with big ideas that change the world don’t know at first that they have a big idea that will change the world.

Big and original ideas start out as fragile. Vulnerable. Uncertain and insecure. Before they become big ideas, they’re small ideas that could just as easily be dismissed and forgotten. They’re criticized and mocked before they’re validated and redeemed.

Before Copernicus wrote his seminal work on heliocentrism (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium - or in English, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), he wrote a short, untitled, anonymous manuscript he distributed to several friends, referred to as the Commentariolus. 

We should come up with as many small ideas as we can. And write them down.

Most will be bad. But some might be good. And a few might be really good.

We should pick the best and explore them.

If an idea is good, and if we believe in it, we should pursue it even when it’s criticized and mocked.

That’s the only way big ideas that change the world are born.