Frontier Pots of Gold
Cynics, Optimists, and Making Money at Uncrossed Frontiers
I. You Can't Un-Drill the Oil
As a kid, I’d hear stories about the Spanish explorers of the 16th century and feel a strange nostalgia. (Woah, woah, woah, careful.) To be clear, I did not fantasize about wiping out the inhabitants who preceded the Europeans in the Americas, but I was titillated by the idea of venturing into the geographic unknown.
Humans reached the literal ends of the Earth—both poles— almost a century before I was born. Unless we somehow destroy human civilization without going extinct, there is no going back to the days of limitless imagination for land exploration (on Earth).
We can’t uncross the geographic frontier, just as we can't put the genie back in the bottle with nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, the printing press, or penicillin.
II. 1995: The (Not) Final Frontier
The most notable frontier that we crossed over the past 30 years is the boundary between time and information—i.e. instant communication via the internet. As a child, I vividly remember riding Spaceship Earth in Disney World and laughing at the “future you” kid who was video chatting with a friend on her TV. By the time I left high school, every person I knew had a device in their pocket on which they could video call anyone alive.
Crossing the information frontier was amazing (besides the ensuing choice to monetize people's attention), but I've observed a side effect: constant access to all existing information has given many people a mistaken sense of certainty about the uncrossed, non-internet frontiers.
In other words, when you combine the speed at which we can Google answers with the hordes of "experts" online who confidently assert facts (which are often opinions couched as facts), it feels like we already know everything that we’re capable of knowing.
In such a world, every uncrossed frontier would fall into one of two boats: uncrossed frontiers that can't be crossed (the Cynic Boat), or uncrossed frontiers that we mistakenly think have already been crossed (the Overconfidence Boat).
For example, people in the Cynic Boat would doubt our ability to ever prevent Alzheimer's disease, while the crew of the Overconfidence Boat spent the 1990s labeling dietary fat as the enemy, believing we had already crossed the frontier of heart health.
The Overconfidence Boat causes tribalism, anger, and straying from the truth, but it's less concerning than the Cynic Boat, because reality tends to sink the Overconfidence boat in the long run—as we saw with the spikes in obesity and heart disease that followed the dietary fat interventions.
The Cynic boat is existentially concerning because cynicism leads to complacency and a self-fulfilling prophecy of a worse future. After all, if zero people believe that we can cross an important frontier—such as a cure for cancers—then they will be proven right.
The good news is that there is a third boat, the Optimist Boat.
Optimists recognize that neither cynicism nor overconfidence are helpful: for all of today's problems, an uncountable number of frontiers remain uncrossed by humans, and we have every reason to believe that most can be crossed.
July was the hottest recorded month in history. For future generations to thrive, we will need abundant energy “that’s too cheap to meter" (whether that is nuclear fusion energy or something else).
We’ve explored 5% of the oceans and have not returned humans to the moon since 1972 (and nobody has ever gone beyond our moon).
There is no evidence that early intervention and prevention of most cancers is impossible.
Although the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, we have a long way to go. People continue to die of diseases that we know gene editing can address, and we still only understand a small fraction of the genetic interplay for something as black-and-white as height.
Another frontier that we have appallingly not crossed is providing clean water to all humans: 26% of the world does not drink clean water, per the UN.
Optimists realize that anything that is physically possible, but not yet achieved, is blocked by nothing more than a lack of human knowledge.
III. To the Optimists Go the Spoils
There is serious financial upside to boarding the Optimist Boat instead of the Cynic Boat. New markets emerge as soon as humans cross a new frontier, at which point most early players get wealthy and countless new people begin to make a handsome living in that field. For instance, oil wells didn’t exist in 1850, and now it’s, uh, big—to the tune of $4 trillion annually (in case you were wondering if people had a financial interest in denying climate change).
Although markets in industries with not-fully-crossed frontiers have vast potential riches, you might join decades too early to get wealthy—à la solar energy companies in Obama's first term—even if something seems inevitable.
Such is the nature of risk, but the good news is that if you aren't a huge risk taker, or you haven't devoted your career to cancer research or astrophysics (and don't plan to), there is still a way to expose yourself to the upside of an uncrossed frontier.
IV. The Blueprint
First, pick something that you find interesting.
Choose an uncrossed frontier, e.g. improving education, understanding approaches to homelessness, or scaling compassion to a societal level (that is definitely a frontier we haven’t crossed). If the big, obvious frontiers don’t whet your appetite, choose an overlooked problem, such as identifying great things that other local governments do that your government does not do.
Second, and most important, educate yourself.
If you have a low-to-medium-intensity day job in a non-frontier industry, you don’t need to quit your job! Instead, spend some time each day (during work, as I know you can make the time) learning the very basics of a new frontier, even if it means revisiting elementary-school concepts. After you fully understand something’s foundation, figure out what the current experts (think we) know, where they disagree, and what the most important unanswered questions are. Has your opinion changed since you started?
Read and follow smart people who are trying to answer those questions, even for just a few minutes each day. If none of your friends care, it doesn’t matter. You aren’t in high school: being an expert on a niche field makes you more interesting. Meet other people, even virtually, who also care or who are self-described experts.
Third, be an optimist.
Now that you’re becoming self-educated, you might realize that crossing the new frontier is harder than you thought, but you’ll now understand why.
You goal is not to solve a huge problem alone; the goal is just to be curious. Cynicism is the only enemy.
Fourth, realize that you can stand out more than you think.
Although there are billions of living people, most will not make an effort to self-educate, or they lack your freedom and means to do so.
If you spend two years becoming a self-made expert about a frontier and you combine that with your existing job/career skillset, you can become a “one-of-one.” Your intersection of knowledge becomes unique, which means you’re no longer in competition with others, because nobody is just like you.
I’m always amazed at the financial value of people who have certain intersecting skills—e.g. lawyers who really know chemistry, dentists or small-business owners who are great marketers, and ex-athletes who are great at verbal communication. Blaze your own category.
The chance to cross pivotal frontiers within a generation should be motivating and thrilling. The choice between optimism and cynicism is up to you.
(Thank you to Olivia Duff for the boat drawings.)