Every breakthrough has a beginning.

I

The future is made, not met.

Progress is not weather. It does not arrive on its own, and no one is owed it. Every comfort we now take for granted was once a problem someone refused to accept, and then a path someone had to walk.

II

Every field begins against the current.

Before a field has a name, it has a founding team, sometimes of one. They see a problem everyone else has stopped seeing, and decide it can be solved. For a while they move against the current, and most of the time they are wrong. When they are right, the current turns.

III

Hindsight draws a straight line.

Once something works, its story gets retold as if it could only have gone one way. The doubt, the wrong turns and the near misses are edited out. That is a loss, because the uncertain beginning is the part other people can actually learn from.

So we record beginnings while they are still uncertain, in the words of the people living them.

IV

Progress compounds.

No one walks alone for long. One founder’s lesson becomes another’s starting point, and where two paths cross, a third begins. The printing press made the scientific journal possible. The transistor made the personal computer possible. A beginning is never the start of only one thing.

V

The road is lit by walking it.

Optimism is not a mood. It is the practice of taking on a problem for good reasons before anyone can prove it can be solved, and letting every attempt correct you. The evidence a new idea needs usually does not exist yet. The people who try are the ones who produce it.

Or press and hold anywhere on the field.Or press and hold the field above.

VI

Initium viae.the beginning of the way

It is where we always are. The most important work of this century is being started right now, by people whose names most of us do not know yet. Because we believe in progress, we go to them first, and we write down what they tell us while the outcome is still unknown.

Every path on this page began at one point.