Sam Webster-Harris

speaker

698 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 8 Sep

Sam Webster-Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement · How To Solve Complex Problems · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

It's a question of noticing when your new Lego blocks become available.

Remember AWS?

It worked because Jeff Bezos felt the pain of the problem at scale at exactly the moment the technology to solve it was also becoming available.

So he had perfect timing.

Now let's consider a case of bad timing.

Google Glass in 2013.

They promised augmented reality in a stylish package and they failed spectacularly.

Why?

The foundations weren't there.

The displays were too heavy, the batteries couldn't last and the idea of someone wearing a camera all day recording everything was not in the slightest bit cool.

A decade later though, the display, processing and battery technology is all better and as a society we are much more used to cameras being everywhere.

So perhaps the stars are aligned for a second attempt which might well unlock a whole new world of apps and ways that we communicate and work.

If augmented reality is a success, it might become a building block for plenty of new ideas that could be used as a component in different industries.

And that's a great way to be innovative, to notice when new building blocks come out and thinking about how to use them in new places.

Drones started out as cool toys and ways to film and bomb stuff.

But then you can also turn a drone into surveillance technology for your farmlands or distribution technology for medical supplies in Africa.

This is why I'm such a big fan of interdisciplinary thinking that looks across different fields.

Looking forwards, there are quantillions of brilliant ideas out there waiting for their time to shine.

Of course, trying to invent the next internet is a pretty tall order.

But if you're working in an industry and you try breaking a process down into its most fundamental parts and improving one of those, I think you have a high chance of coming up with some good ideas.

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