My friend Andrew and I had an interesting conversation about collective thinking. So you can understand our different points of view, he is a medical student, and I am an international business student.
We began realizing that our business world and even our non-business (medical, law, philosophy, history, any subject really) has been following both a telescoping and an exponential growth rate.
Telescoping Exponential
In the history of sciences and new knowledge, we can take some of the greatest minds in history: Galileo, Pythagoras, Newton, any great mind from the renaissance or before the 20th Century. All of these men were experts in not just one field, but many. Galileo is remembered as a premier astronomer, but was also a physicist and mathematician, amongst others. Pythagoras was a philosopher and a mathematician. These men were the best in more than just one thing leading to the basis of so much science in today’s ever-evolving world. This is the telescoping point of view, few people with a vast amount of knowledge on many different concepts.
Today though, this is being reversed. We have many people with very intricate and specific niche topics. You can go out today and look for a marketing agency and find a marketing agency dealing with just publicity or just advertising, they are a specific set of people with a small focus and they’re damn good at it. Same goes for science, you will find a neurologist, radiologist, podiatrist, the list is almost infinite, hell there’s probably even a doctor for just your femur (yes I am exaggerating). You see where I’m going with this.
Graphically it would look like this:
This general overview of specific concepts that used to be held by so few people who knew many things, is now backwards. More people know fewer things, but they’re better at them! That is the defining factor.
In the end what this ends up happening, is that the individual knowledge becomes so high, that the level of growth become a sky rocket. If you take a look at any economical graph or a world economics graph over the past centuries, the growth is exponential.
Image source: dinocrat.com
What does it all mean?
The more we grow, the more specific we get. The more specific we get the more we can dedicate research to individual topics and get to new heights in research, levels of income, and best of all for your business, more revenue!
Take this YouTube video for example, part of the inspiration for this post:
Stick around next week for the followup on this post: Collective Thinking – Cloud Minds
[...] Monday, I had written about Collective Thinking and how specialization is becoming more and more mainstream. This specialization though, leads to a [...]