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Comment by selestify | Hacker News Reader

> History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way.

Very interesting. Can you give a few specific examples of this for me to look into? How have you come to the conclusion that this is a trend?

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James Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed" series. A history of inventions, how one led to another, often in stupid tiny ways brought about by pure luck - or the right person working on the smallest thing at the right time. Fantastic series if you're into old british documentaries that you can put on in the background while tinkering btw.

Every series he ever did is worth a watch. Connections were of the same mould, but even more random chains of events of how something ancient led to something modern.

A digression, but topical today is "After the Warming" from the 80s about climate change. Quite remarkable if a little optimistic about our chances of doing something. Lots of 80s VR and CGI, which you have to forgive a little. Pleasingly free of dumbing down.

Probably some of these on Youtube.

There’s a good book called Mastery (Robert Greene) on this topic

28 words written, with the expectation of many many orders of magnitude more in response.

This is a social zip bomb, and it's not very nice. Don't spend other people's time like this, do some research yourself if this genuinely interests you.

We got you covered. Or rather - other media has you covered. Just gotta link requests like these to some book/series/etc they might (but probably won't) read/watch ;)

Yeah, and thanks, but it's sometimes hard to see comments like, "Hey cool, could you just give me a brief 10k word essay on what you're talking about?" and not get a little frustrated.

Well it's not a thing with a particularly obvious term to search for -- "small thing worked on over long periods that brings great change" doesn't really provide good results on Google despite it being a rather specific idea. So I'm grateful for any pointers to resources I can look into further for this kind of thing. The other person's reply with an explicit book name doesn't seem to have taken up all that many words, and presumably they know what they're talking about and them dropping a book name like that would save me a lot of time compared to me searching around the internet based on a very vague phrase.

Now granted, my Google-fu could stand to be a lot better.

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