The Adjacent Possible
One concept that really stood out to me in one of my business school classes today is the idea of the “adjacent possible.” Although the professor did not go into the idea in too much detail, he drew upon a metaphor that served to ingrain the idea in my mind.
A child who is seeing the night sky for the first time is asked, “what do you see?” Instead of “lights,” what he is really answering is his form of the idea of the “adjacent possible.”
For a toddler who has never really experienced the wonders of nighttime, the “adjacent possible” is the concept of “stars.”
In fact, the universe is quite infinite beyond our wildest dreams. Just to throw some quick stats out there, the observable universe extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. A.k.a., if every single human on the earth today multiplied him/herself by 5.75 and represented one light year, we would have all of those guys in every direction to make up our current understanding of the expanse of our world. Freaky…
The universe is also 13.8 billion years old, so far as we know, of course. Which literally means you have 345 million grandpas you don’t know about, even if some of those are bacteria and amazingly large trees.
What is your “adjacent possible?”
The span of one human life is possible, but there are an infinite number of things to explore in this world. Of course, there are the day-to-day tasks we must accomplish in order to sustain ourselves—those things are unnegotiable. If we do not brush our teeth, get back to our emails, and take out the trash, potentially devastating consequences may occur. We also may have to maintain our most treasured relationships with our partners, parents, and beloved pets.
But what are the things you are doing to emerge into your “adjacent possible”? Even though there is a limit to our present understanding, you may also have a feeling that there is something beyond your current wisdom. These types of “breakthroughs” are the reason I am addicted to teaching. Every time I see a student have an “aha” moment, I see a mind emerging into its “adjacent possible.”
If we were more aware of the possibilities of our “adjacent possibles,” we would, perhaps, have many more solutions to some of our most pressing problems of the modern age: poverty, environmental degregation, and social disconnection.
While we might get mired in our everyday limitations and the monotony of daily tasks, there is always a way to seek more. But it requires the undertaking of a certain amount of risk. The entrepreneurial venture of learning requires a person to accept that he/she does not know everything there is to know about the universe. That, in itself, is a brave act of humility, and resistance against whatever environment he/she has been brought up in.
Not to say that we should rebel against our present-day circumstances, but that the act of attempting to discover what else is out there is potentially rewarding, and potentially deathly.
Fortunately, we have already had a brilliant American proponent since 1775: “give me liberty or give me death!”
If Patrick Henry, who himself owned slaves, could nevertheless reconcile the contradiction, there should be no reason for us not to pursue what we may consider to be the “next frontier.” There is more to discover, but we must discover it one step at a time, but taking on simply the next “adjacent” thing that we are curious about.
