Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action

Chapter 8

Timing

I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing, too.

—Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

—Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

 

In 1855, a Scottish clergyman named James Gall had an idea that should have changed every map ever created, but didn’t. It was four years before Charles Darwin would publish his Origin of Species, and Gall was presenting his world-changing idea at a Glasgow meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The world he lived in had long since evolved from the point where people thought Earth was flat.

The most commonly used map of the time was known as the Mercator map and was originally developed to help sailors to navigate the ocean and reach their destinations. It had been used for hundreds of years. There was only one problem…it was wrong.

In taking a spherical globe and projecting it onto a flat piece of paper, the sizes of the landmasses were distorted. Greenland, for example, looked huge while Africa appeared much smaller. In reality, Africa’s landmass was nearly 13 times the size of Greenland. Gall’s theory corrected this “projection problem” and adjusted the size of the landmasses—but it was too radical for his time. He and his map were widely ignored, and would be forgotten over the next thirty years.

Then, in 1885, the first inaugural issue of The Scottish Geographical Magazine ...