Betting on Unknown Unknowns

making long-term predictions about the future which are grounded in reality will often lead you to be wrong.

When you have groups of people who are especially tenacious and especially creative, magic happens.

There’s a peculiar thing where oftentimes it’s the wildly optimistic predictions that end up being right. Such predictions seem entirely crazy at the time—it feels like betting on everything going absolutely perfectly. On the contrary, they are betting on “unknown unknowns” which will meaningfully change the game.

The problem with JC Penney isn’t that the department store business is a bad business (you could argue that the online bookstore business for Amazon was also a bad business). The problem is that JC Penney doesn’t have a high density of people who are either deeply tenacious or deeply creative. The unknown unknowns at JC Penney are 1,000 times less ... See more

You can only bet on unknown unknowns near the frontiers of human tenacity and creativity.

It’s not hard to find examples of experts’ predictions which always end up being way off. It’s not because the experts are not knowledgeable—in fact it might be because they are too knowledgeable.

Betting against invention and innovation has, on the whole, turned out to be a bad bet over the course of human history.