Total Rethink

4Entrepreneurial Thinkers Can Be Found in Every Walk of Life

“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

—St. Francis of Assisi

People who think creatively like revolutionaries are in the minority, but they can be found in every walk of life, not just as entrepreneurs in start-up businesses or as warriors in political battles.

Einstein, for instance, was a revolutionary because he refused to believe that things weren't different to how everyone had perceived them up till then, and as a result he changed our understanding of relativity, time, and space. His farsightedness also had very practical results, which changed the way the world ended up after the Second World War. He wrote to President Roosevelt soon after arriving in the United States to warn that the Germans were on the verge of inventing a nuclear weapon and that if the Allies didn't beat them to it the whole game would be over very quickly and wouldn't end well. If the Germans were already killing people in the millions, it was not hard to predict what damage they would have been willing to inflict with an atomic bomb.

Just sending that letter demonstrated entrepreneurial thinking: Einstein was looking into a possible future where all the rules of combat would change in ways that were still impossible for most people to grasp and then working out how things might play out in order for mankind to reach that scenario. “I know not,” he famously said, “with what ...