Looking to the Past for Solutions Sometimes I wonder why the obvious is not so obvious to people. I was thinking about this the other day. I was relating it to hockey, but it certainly applies to many facets of life. I was looking at how terrible the coaches and general manager were on a popular hockey team and I couldn’t understand why they were so bad and wondered what I would do if I was in their shoes. I thought about it for a while and then it dawned on me. If I was a hockey coach and was doing bad I would want to know why especially if the team was composed of a good group of offensive players and I could pinpoint the problem as being one of defense. These coaches were making the team look at videos of how to play. To me that was not the answer, if would have been more helpful if the coaches looked at videos. I am not talking about any old videos, but videos of teams being coached by the two or three best coaches in hockey. They could see how in certain situations these coaches reacted and once they learned that even if they didn’t learn the complete lesson, maybe they would be able to improve their decision making. Certain situations lend themselves to this kind of learning. Some military men have studied some of the greatest generals in history. In a battle this may not be the kind of situation for this. War is not like a sport and you could be making a mistake by using some tactic the other side recognizes because they have also studied some of the great battles. One has to be very careful and be sure their opponent is not a student of history. So, while this tactic may not work in a battle, it could be useful in other areas, such as science, some of the professions, medicine and other areas. I wonder why some business didn’t seem to watch Amazon and learn from them when they saw how much of their market share was increasing. One of the businesses had been the most prosperous for many years and that is Sears. Another which recently announced they were going out of business was ToysRUs. It seems both of these businesses stuck to their business model and only made a half-hearted attempt at change. It was obvious years ago that Amazon was succeeding because they had a great business model. You could shop at home, get a good price even if it was not always the best and be able to make easy returns. ToysRUs and even Sears could have acted on this model years ago by establishing a huge internet presence and taking on vendors much as Amazon did and who knows maybe by now they would have been competitive. There was no way ToysRUs was going to make it in this atmosphere just selling toys so they would have had to branch out. Even if they didn’t want to try and be like Amazon they should have at least tried to copy what Target did. They also are doing pretty good. Another area I wonder about is energy science. We had the greatest energy scientist in the world and his name was Nikola Tesla. His inventions we know about are legend. Think about this, he was experimenting with broadcasting electricity in 1890 and yet we are still without it. We could have avoided all the problems caused by gasoline and diesel vehicles by broadcasting electricity directly to electric cars and they wouldn’t have needed batteries. Why didn’t other scientists realize this? It is said by some they did but were prevented by the large energy companies from doing this and our whole civilization was not only held back in technology, but our planet was polluted for a hundred years. Scientists could have built on his work and one can only imagine what the world would have been like today. This is only one of his incredible inventions and there are probably far more inventions we know nothing about where the paper work was seized to hide them. It is said he figured out how to harness cosmic rays another limitless power source. A lot of inventions were not noted for what they were and no one picked up on them to try and develop even more fantastic things. One of them which comes to mind is the ancient Roman cup known as the Lycurgus Cup. The cup would change color depending on how the light hit it. Incredibly nanotechnology was used. Can you imagine if the research into this technology had been studied and advanced? Even the smartest people of that time didn’t recognize what they had. If nanotechnology would have been followed science would have advanced tremendously. Drugs would have advanced because this technology is being used to deliver them. There are many industrial applications along with detection applications. We might have been hundreds of years ahead of where we are now if development in that area had been continued. It is truly a shame there was no study in certain areas and we have all suffered as a consequence even if we don’t know it. Some believe the world was trashed because we let too many things slide by without taking advantage of them. Studying the events of the past can be very helpful to making a better future or being successful in certain endeavors and yet not enough people do this. There are just too many cases where ancient secrets have been lost because no one pursued them in the past even if they were widely spread, such as Damascus steel which wasn’t figured out until about 60 years ago. We have to change our mindset and when we get stuck on a problem see if there is any history of that problem being solved and if there is we should investigate it much as those hockey coaches should do.
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