I finally took the plunge and bought one of those “great courses” to listen to on my weekly drives up to the Valley.
The “Great Courses” (of course) are those ubiquitously promoted university level courses taught by “some of the country’s best professors” on a tremendously wide variety of topics. It’s like porn for those of us who love eclectic and ultimately useless information.
They sent me a sample CD with two sample lessons, one on Linguistics and the other from their course on American History. Way better than expected. Sufficiently so that I plunked down the $119 dollars for American History and soon had nearly 40 CDs worth of lessons to start absorbing.
In one of the earlier lectures, my professor spent a lot of time exploring motivations for the initial voyages to the new world that ultimately led to the settling of the American colonies, and once again felt compelled to spend class time to debunk the idea that Columbus was trying to prove the earth was not flat.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at that, and then not a day or two later found this fascinating site: edge.org in which there is an exhaustive list of scientiic beliefs that have ultimately been shown to be false.
It definitely made me think about what beliefs I hold that may ultimately be disproven. But then again, isn’t it the nature of an entrepreneur to take on things that everyone else believes to be impossible?
What do you think? What beliefs did you hold that were ultimately proven false – in business or otherwise.
Kibble 