there was a book i read (can’t remember which book. sorry.) which asked a renowned professor what childhood experience had the biggest influence in his academic life. he mentioned that his father always gave him puzzles to solve at night before he went to bed, and they would discuss the solution in the mornings over breakfast. more importantly, he said that his dad always asked him after school, “did you ask a good question today?” and not the typical “how was school?” or “how was your day?” that i’m assuming most parents ask their kids.

recently, i’ve started to do the same — asking myself that same question and challenging myself to question the common knowledge. i don’t believe that we do this enough. we’re satisfied with what we’ve learned and accumulated from K-12, from what we read in the news, and from what need to know for our specific careers. of course we all know of the anecdote about how everyone before columbus’s time firmly believed that the world was flat but that turned out to be false. even today, npr’s fresh air podcast hosted a nobel winning astrophysicist that discussed his finding that will potentially change everything we know about physics and rewrite everything because of this “dark energy” that is attributable to causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace when the common understanding was that the universe’s expansion is slowing down due to gravity. my point is that what we deem to be “common knowledge” is constantly being challenged through new research and new findings, and consequently, we need to understand that what we personally know is much much smaller than what we don’t know.

with this approach (approaching life assuming that we don’t know much instead of egotistically believing that “i know everything and my beliefs are absolute”), i believe we can collectively begin to chip away at the undiscovered truths and break away from our traditional understanding of our lives and our world and our universe. is it that crazy to possibly think that the universe encompasses a reality beyond the three dimensional (four dimensions including time) reality we live in? could there be a fifth dimension? a sixth? seventh? n-th? 

what we call “crazy” should be “that could be possible” because the fact is that we don’t know more than what we do know. and don’t let the people that call you “crazy” bring you back down to their limited view of reality.

as the 1997 apple commercial challenges us to ‘think differently’…

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”