No question is a stupid question when you are trying to LEARN. - Peter Diamandis

Many legacy institutions (like Kodak) once were able to make a great living resting on their laurels. According to Yale professor Richard Foster, in the 1920s the average life span of an S&P 500 company was sixty-seven years.14 Not anymore. Today the final three Ds in our chain reaction can disassemble companies and disrupt industries almost overnight, reducing the average life span of a twenty-first-century S&P 500 company to only fifteen years. Ten years from now, according to research done at the Babson School of Business, more than 40 percent of today's top companies will no longer exist.15 "By 2020," comments Foster, "more than three quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet."

The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea." Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical.

It is important to remember that in 1953 none of the technology for these futuristic journeys existed. No one knew how to go that fast and survive. Even the most optimistic die-hard visionaries did not expect a lunar landing any sooner than the proverbial "Year 2000." The only voice telling them they could do it was a curve on a piece of paper. But the curve was right. Just not politically correct. In 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, right on schedule. Then US rockets zipped to the Moon 12 years later. As [Damien] Broderick notes, humans arrived on the Moon "close to a third of century sooner than loony space travel buffs like Arthur C. Clarke had expected it to occur."