Bold

The only constant is change.

According to a 2005 report in the British Medical Journal, people who retire at fifty-five are 89 percent more likely to die in the ten years after retirement than those who retire at sixty-five. We need to be alive to stay alive, simple as that.

What makes stone soup work is passion. People love passion. People love to contribute to passion. And you can’t fake it.

In each of our minds we have a line of credibility. When you first hear a new idea, you place it above or below this line. If you place it below, you dismiss it immediately, often as ridiculous. If you place it above, you’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, follow it over time, and continue to make serial judgments. But we also have a line of super-credibility. When a new idea is born above this line, you accept it immediately and say, “Wow, that’s fantastic! How can I get involved?”

You don’t spend your time being bothered that you can’t teleport from here to Japan, because there’s a part of you that thinks it’s impossible. Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by that.

Consider that every year, sponsors spend $45 billion backing teams whose sole purpose is to move different-sized and -shaped balls up and down fields.6 In a very similar fashion, corporations can now support teams trying to solve grand challenges.

In 1714, the £20,000 Longitude Prize was offered to the first person to accurately measure longitude at sea. It worked. In 1765, horologist John Harrison pulled it off, but beyond opening the oceans to navigation, this competition brought incentive prizes—as a method for driving innovation—into the public eye.

Everyone we talked to said the same thing: The best communities are run by benevolent tyrants.

If your community can provide a legitimate release valve for people’s incredibly frustrated passion, you are unleashing one of the most potent forces in the history of the world.

Campaigns are not static. This isn’t launch and forget; it’s launch and get busy. And get busy with your data.