Clay Shirky calls cognitive surplus. "The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects," he - Salim Ismail

The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,

Mark Zuckerberg agrees, noting, "The biggest risk is not taking any risk." Constant

Doing anything significant, big, and bold requires a TON of hard work. It also involves countless risks, setbacks, and restarts. While some people are lucky, most success stories require recovering one more time, facing the challenge, and beginning again. Over and over.

One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium's buyout in 2000, was the company's refusal to update business assumptions. "The Iridium business plan was locked in place twelve years before the system became operational," he recalls. That's a long time, long enough that it was almost impossible to predict where the state of the art in digital communications would be by the time the satellite system was at last in place. We thus label this an Iridium Moment — using linear tools and the trends of the past to predict an accelerating future.