Last night I was watching Weird Science.

I’ve always loved that movie. On the surface, it’s wonderfully ridiculous: two teenage boys get access to technology they barely understand and use it to create the woman of their dreams.

It is exactly the sort of premise that could only survive if nobody in the room asked too early, “But would that actually work?”

And maybe that’s why I still like it.

Because underneath all the teenage comedy and 1980s absurdity is a rather interesting idea:

What happens when an ordinary person suddenly gets access to technology powerful enough to turn imagination into something real?

That got me thinking.

What exactly is an ordinary person?

And perhaps more importantly, would an ordinary person still have enough imagination left to know what to do with that kind of power?

Somewhere Along the Way, We Learn “No”

Children are remarkably bad at rejecting ideas.

Give a kid a cardboard box and it can become a spaceship, a fort, a race car, or possibly some complicated machine whose purpose cannot adequately be explained to an adult.

The important thing is that the child doesn’t begin by asking whether the idea is practical.

They begin with:

What if?

Then something happens.

We grow up.

And eventually many of us learn to reject an idea before we’ve even finished having it.

“That won’t work.”

“Nobody would buy that.”

“You can’t make a living doing that.”

“Somebody must have already tried it.”

“That’s not how things are done.”

Sometimes those voices come from other people.

Eventually, if we hear them often enough, we become remarkably good at supplying the voices ourselves.

I know something about that.

“What Could You Possibly Do With That?”

When I was young, I told my father I wanted to major in speech communications.

His response was immediate.

“That’s a waste of time. What could you possibly do with it?”

Later, during the semester I attended the University of Houston, I worked at the university radio station.

Again, I heard essentially the same thing.

I was wasting my time.

Those conversations happened more than half a century ago.

I still remember them.

That’s the remarkable thing about words. Someone can say a sentence in ten seconds that another person carries around for fifty years.

My father wasn’t trying to destroy my dreams. From his perspective, he was probably giving practical advice. Parents do that. Teachers do it. Friends do it. Employers do it.

We do it to ourselves.

Be realistic.

Be sensible.

Don’t embarrass yourself.

And there is certainly something to be said for practicality.

But practicality has a terrible habit of arriving at the meeting before imagination has finished its presentation.

What If We Reversed the Order?

Maybe we’ve been asking the questions in the wrong sequence.

Instead of beginning with:

Why won’t this work?

What if we began with:

What would have to be true for this to work?

That’s a very different question.

It doesn’t guarantee success.

It doesn’t eliminate risk.

And it certainly doesn’t mean every crazy idea is a good idea.

Most crazy ideas probably aren’t.

But it allows the idea to finish becoming an idea before we kill it.

I’ve spent much of my life around technology, and one thing I’ve learned is that today’s ridiculous suggestion has an irritating habit of becoming tomorrow’s ordinary appliance.

There was a time when the idea of carrying a computer in your pocket sounded ridiculous.

Talking to it sounded even more ridiculous.

Having that computer answer you would have sounded like science fiction.

And yet here we are.

Which brings us back to Weird Science.

Suddenly, Everybody Has the Computer

We are entering a peculiar moment in human history.

For the first time, enormous numbers of ordinary people have access to tools that can help them write, compose music, create images, build software, produce videos, research ideas, analyze information, and turn vague thoughts into tangible things.

Artificial intelligence is certainly imperfect. Sometimes spectacularly so.

But that’s almost beside the point.

The interesting question isn’t simply what artificial intelligence can do.

The interesting question is:

What happens when millions of ordinary people suddenly have access to something that dramatically reduces the distance between imagination and creation?

And I wonder whether the greatest limitation will ultimately be the technology.

I suspect it won’t.

It may be whether we’ve retained enough imagination to use it.

The Most Dangerous Question I Know

During the past year, I’ve found myself using one particular phrase more and more often.

It’s not terribly sophisticated.

It probably won’t appear in many management textbooks.

But it has become something of a personal philosophy:

Why the hell not?

Could we build that?

Why the hell not?

Could we turn this into something else?

Why the hell not?

Could we try an approach nobody around us seems to be using?

Why the hell not?

Notice what the question doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say, “This will work.”

It says:

Let’s allow the possibility to exist long enough to find out.

There’s a tremendous difference.

Maybe “Ordinary” Is the Wrong Word

Perhaps there really aren’t ordinary people.

Maybe there are simply people who have learned to edit themselves more aggressively than others.

People who have been told enough times that their interests were impractical.

Their ideas were silly.

Their ambitions were unrealistic.

Their curiosity wasn’t productive.

Eventually they stop needing anyone else to tell them.

They do it automatically.

An idea appears.

And before it can even fully form:

No.

Ridiculous.

Forget it.

Move on.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things we can do, for ourselves and for the people around us, is create a little space between the idea and the rejection.

Just a few seconds.

Long enough to ask:

What if?

Could we?

What would happen?

And occasionally…

Why the hell not?

Because maybe imagination isn’t something some people possess and others don’t.

Maybe it’s something nearly everybody starts with.

And the real difference is whether we gave ourselves permission to keep it.

I’m 76 years old.

I have absolutely no intention of becoming more sensible now.

There are still too many ridiculous ideas left to have.

👍… lol ☕❤️