deploys hacking mindsets to invent and create. He’s teamed up with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Intellectual Ventures to tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity, like mosquitoes transmitting malaria.
Holman and his fellow hackers at Intellectual Ventures conducted a series of simulations to explore how malaria continues to spread throughout Africa. Each simulation exposed new opportunities to breach their barrier, to stop the spread and ultimately eradicate this fatal disease. As they continued to concentrate on the problem, unorthodox ideas started to emerge.
A core tenet of this first hacking philosophy – that Every Barrier Can Be Penetrated – is a profound attraction to curiosity and exploration. Hackers don’t look at things as they are; instead, they constantly question every premise. Taking nothing for granted, they ask an endless stream of questions about each problem they face, every element of prevailing wisdom. With the intensity of an inquisitive child, they refuse to accept life as it is, favoring instead what it could be.
Accordingly, Pablos Holman and his team explored crazy options for stopping insect-borne disease. They looked at chemicals, screens, drugs. Yet none of these yielded their desired breakthrough results, and frankly none of them were “hacker cool.” Hackers seek to explore new boundaries, to fuel change. So they landed on an idea only the hacker mindset could discover: they decided to shoot down the mosquitoes with lasers.
The team devised a system to track the wing patterns of mosquitoes and then fire a deadly laser beam to take them out mid-flight. It is much like the Star Wars defense system, but for mosquitoes instead of intergalactic nuclear missiles. The lasers can be mounted on fence posts around farms or in densely populated villages to create a photonic fence that eliminates the pests before they have the chance to spread disease. This advanced system can distinguish between mosquitoes and other insects, allowing helpful bees and butterflies to pass unharmed. It can even distinguish between male and female mosquitoes based on their wing beats, killing only the females, which are the ones that sting humans. To bring their invention to life, Pablos and his team didn’t use combat-grade carbon fiber or billion-dollar computing power. Instead, they used common parts from ubiquitous consumer electronics, such as Blu-ray players and laptops.
Holman is now directing his energy toward hacking the way we eat. In a Wired interview, he said:
I've been thinking about the way that people eat. The way that people eat in the US is wildly inefficient; there's lots of packaging and lots of waste. We don't have any data about what you ate yesterday or on any other day of your life. Personally, I think that'll happen soon. Imagine a 3D food printer with three buttons: 'what I ate yesterday,' 'what my friend ate,' and 'I'm feeling lucky.' Imagine it printing you a meal that's customized for you, injecting your pharmaceuticals and correlating to your diet to create something that's good for you. It could introduce an optimization that's missing from the system.
Pablos Holman embodies the hacker ethos – he believes every barrier can be conquered; his curiosity and sense of exploration define his being. He believes in defying traditional approaches, challenging “proven” assumptions. His disregard for current systems, coupled with a desire to break things for the sake of breaking them, makes him perfectly equipped to tackle problems in any field. Embrace hacker mindset #1 – Every Barrier Can Be Penetrated – and you’ll be equally suited to topple the most insurmountable obstacles you face.
COMPASSES OVER MAPS
This principle is based on a directional aim at a desired outcome rather than a focus on a specific route to the finish line. Hackers shun step-by-step directions and believe meaningful progress is achieved better and faster by a willingness to adapt quickly along the journey. Hundreds of course corrections or micro-innovations yield a better result than pre-programming a route in advance and mindlessly following directions.
A map, you may say, is certainly a handy tool to help you reach your destination. When the map is accurate, you can sit back and follow your course, no thinking required. Your brain can really take a vacation if you’re using the GPS guidance from Google Maps or Waze. When the system tells you exactly how to navigate every twist and turn, you can focus elsewhere and simply comply. But what if the map is wrong? When conditions change, such as roadwork or an accident, your GPS system no longer maximizes efficiency. Or when new roads are built before the system is updated, you find yourself relying on an outdated set of instructions.
Think about how you and your team navigate the work in your own organization. Do people require detailed, step-by-step maps of exactly what to do at every moment? Management-by-operating-manuals worked fine back in the days when markets were local, customers were homogenous, product cycles occurred over decades, and complexity was minimal. Workers didn’t need to think all that much on their own, as long as following the map would ensure their safe arrival.
But with today’s furious speed and mind-numbing complexities, there’s no such thing as a map to success. Naïve bosses who still hand out maps don’t understand that the model no longer works. The cost to produce a map in the past may have been justified, since change was slow. But we now face a rapidly proliferating rate of change – imagine the difficulty of creating a street map if the roadways completely changed five times an hour. Not to mention, business victories now involve pioneering new ground, requiring the equivalent of off-roading through uncharted territory.
When teams or organizations turn off their brains and simply follow the corporate GPS, progress shrivels. Empowering employees to use a compass, by contrast, is a far more effective approach to leadership. Provide a clear vision of your destination point, and give your team the tools to navigate their own paths. Encourage them to make their own informed decisions in the face of ambiguity. Give them the target and resources and then let them use their ingenuity and judgment to find the best route.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that allowed Jessica O. Matthews to chart an unlikely and unprecedented course.
Her eyes were burning, her chest pricked from coughing, and she began to feel dizzy. Seventeen-year-old Jessica was attending a family wedding in Nigeria, but her mood was anything but festive. The trouble began when the power went down, a common occurrence in a region with an insufficient electrical grid. Locals are accustomed to losing electricity seven to nine times a day, forcing their routines awry, but they have routines for the blackouts, too. A diesel generator that was fired up to re-light the wedding was the culprit of Jessica’s discomfort, as exhaust pollution made all the guests’ lungs begin to burn. Her cousins reassured her not to worry, that she’d get used to the poisonous exhaust fumes.
At the point when the air was the cloudiest and thickest, and her oxygen most depleted, Jessica had her moment of clarity. “The saddest thing to me,” said Matthews, “is that they had gotten used to the idea of dying.” This poignant insight led to her mission: to improve humanity by energizing the world.
Jessica went on to earn a Harvard MBA, but instead of following her classmates to Wall Street for a six-figure gig, she decided to double down her commitment to energizing the world. In 2011, she launched a company called Uncharted Play. Her idea was to use kinetic energy to create clean electricity. She recalled her cousins – the same ones acclimated to choking on exhaust fumes – running with joy on the soccer field. “I thought, why can't you take a soccer ball that is already in motion and harness the energy that is being generated during play as an off-grid power source?”
Her passion for creating
