Manhattan Projects

How might your life be different if you could consult the brightest minds in the domain of whatever problem you’re trying to solve?

I often like to joke that Manhattan projects fell out of favor after the last party built the deadliest bomb the world had ever seen. In some strange way, the fear that a few smart people in the same place will conspire to build something dangerous seems to have seeped in to the cultural perception of genius and expertise. We now mistakenly conflate “tv experts” and the relatively inert ruling class with the nerds who’ve spent 30 years trying to crack the code of the universe. It’s not that physicists are the go-to smartest people on every issue, but rather that some equivalent meeting of the minds between the best in the world in any domain would likely produce unthinkable miracles at an alarming speed.

Perhaps it seems a little unrealistic for the average person to have access to the Nassim Taleb’s or Noam Chomsky’s of the world, but it’s actually not that much of a stretch. In actuality, most of us are distantly, or not so distantly connected to some virtuoso sitting on their hands performing below where their brightness seems to predict. For every young billionaire out there, or recognizable genius, there are probably 100 or 1000 others who aren’t famous or who were talked out of lofty aspirations.

The politics of dispossession aside, what if you simply used the network you already have to create genius thinktanks for problems in your life? Relationship issues? Why not phone that friend of a friend who’s been doing marriage counseling for 25 years? Need help making a financial plan to retire early? Why not get in touch with your cousin’s old coworker that retired at 35? Not only can you solve your own problems better and faster, but you can turn this collaboration into value for others.

Almost all of us are sitting atop some untapped oil or gold reserve that we simply have not thought to actualize.