Willis Carrier Quotes

If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H Carrier by doing these three things: Ask yourself, ‘What is the worst that can possibly happen?’ Prepare to accept it if you have to. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.

Part One in a Nutshell Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry RULE 1: IF YOU WANT TO AVOID WORRY, DO WHAT SIR WILLIAM OSLER DID: LIVE IN “DAY-TIGHT COMPARTMENTS.” DON’T STEW ABOUT THE FUTURE. JUST LIVE EACH DAY UNTIL BEDTIME. RULE 2: THE NEXT TIME TROUBLE—WITH A CAPITAL T—BACKS YOU UP IN A CORNER, TRY THE MAGIC FORMULA OF WILLIS H. CARRIER: a. Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen if I can’t solve my problem?” b. Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst—if necessary. c. Then calmly try to improve upon the worst—which you have already mentally agreed to accept. RULE 3: REMIND YOURSELF OF THE EXORBITANT PRICE YOU CAN PAY FOR WORRY IN TERMS OF YOUR HEALTH. “THOSE WHO DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FIGHT WORRY DIE YOUNG.

Rule 2 is: If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier by doing these three things: Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen?” Prepare to accept it if you have to. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.

The next time Trouble—with a capital T—backs you up in a corner, try the magic formula of Willis H Carrier: a. Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen if I can’t solve my problem?” b. Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst—if necessary. c. Then calmly try to improve upon the worst—which you have already mentally agreed to accept.

Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?

Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch.