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Simultaneous Invention: Why You Shouldn’t Wait to Create
In a sentence, simultaneous invention is why you shouldn’t wait to create.
When I was in college, I was collecting notes for a book that I wanted to write. The book would be about human evolution, and how evolution has led to some of the most remarkable and seemingly impossible feats that human beings have achieved. The book would be about the evolution of human potential. The working title for the book was (Super)Human: The Evolution of Human Potential.
A couple months after graduation, I found myself in a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado. I was browsing the science section, as I tend to do, and a book caught my eye: Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Our Capacity by Rowan Hooper. I picked it up and flipped through it. My jaw was on the floor. This was the book that I planned on writing.
While I was off daydreaming about the book that I would get around to writing someday, someone else wrote it. (Though, to be honest, I think Hooper did the subject far more justice than I could have at the time. The man is a seasoned science journalist with a PhD in evolutionary biology. I was an aspiring writer with a Bachelor’s degree. But I digress.)
This story comes up in conversation every now and then, and when I tell it, somebody…
