I’ve just started reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky.
The book begins by saying that most of us spend our free time watching TV and drinking alcohol, not because we don’t have anything else to do, but because we never realised that we could do something else with our free time.
If we take into account the amount of free time that people have across the world, it would sum up to a Trillion hours.
The world has a trillion hours of cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped into something meaningful.
This TED talk by Clay Shirky throws light on few examples where the cognitive surplus was utilised to create value. These examples show that people love to create and share information.
If we give people the means, motive and the opportunity to contribute in their free time, we can put all the cognitive surplus to use and get something meaningful done.
I resonate a lot with this idea because this is one of those principles powering our work at Rethink.
More on this as I read 🙂