We live today in what many consider the age of technology. Everyday there are new apps, new ways in which incumbency is disrupted. But very few of the creators or inventors of today, understand the long view, or the way they are changing the world.
Steve Jobs understood. Elon Musk understands. Maybe even Mark Zuckerberg does. Part of that understanding come from education. From seeing the world beyond themselves and their work, and seeing their place in world.
During another fertile period of innovation in America, as we moved from the 19th to the 20th Century, the same was true. Sitting high atop the pantheon of those that would seek to change the world then, were Wilbur and Orville Wright. With the support of their family, their bicycle shop was perhaps the ultimate tech startup of the time.
Wilbur and Orville Wright and their family are subject of a new biography The Wright Brothers, by multiple award winning historian David McCullough.
My conversation with David McCullough: