The Dangerous Idea
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs."
The oldest known text to contain the term “zero” is the Jain text from India titled, Lokavibhaaga (458 AD). But the concept of zero didn’t truly “arrive” until centuries later when the founder of Algebra, Al-Khwarizmi, a Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer, introduced it to the world.
Prior to its “existence,” the idea of nothing never was. But, it became necessary to invent the concept when the human race deemed it necessary to begin counting things.
Today, zero is a fully adopted and useful idea.
To many, zero is a friend. For a check bearing several zeros in a row is a welcome remittance, indeed. Zero can bring comfort knowing there are zero things left on a “to do” list. It also lets us know when we’ve satisfied a debt.
Zero can also be a foe. For a zero balance in your checking account is an unwelcome realization. Zero can also be an insult referring to someone who is without wit or intelligence. Zero is also a slang term that means “to kill.”
But at its core, zero is merely an abstract idea. For there is no proof that there is such a thing as nothing. In the physical universe, as far as we know, it is impossible to have nothing.
How did we adopt the idea of nothing? Or better yet, why? Maybe the question is unanswerable.
The mathematics community reveled in the idea. But theologically speaking, the idea of nothing is a frightening prospect. For merely suggesting that there is such a thing as nothing, one must begin to question the notion of an afterlife. Yet, the concept of zero has survived even its toughest critics for millennia.
But zero is not alone. It is just one of the roughly 550,000 ideas you’ll find in the dictionary (more commonly called “words”) that never, ever were. That is, until someone “sold” them to someone else. Prior to that, every single word we know was once a nebulous concept just waiting to become realized.
Which is precisely what innovation is all about. Find something that is “hidden” from the rest of the world, make it real, and make it useful.
Good marketing involves bringing new ideas to the equation of life that reveal a new way of looking at things. And, quite often, the more “dangerous” the idea, the more power it has to create change.
Where is your zero hiding?
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