I changed up my reading plan this year: fewer books, more time with each one—wrestling with the ideas instead of just collecting them.
This month I read 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How it Shattered a Nation. It sent me down a rabbit hole—hours with ChatGPT, filling gaps in my investment knowledge, and asking it to explain things in new ways so I could understand. Then I actually did something about it, and made a few moves I’d been circling for months.
Knowledge is the easy part. Implementation is harder. And much, much more valuable.
In late 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin—an achievement hailed as one of the greatest inventions in any field. But for over a decade, penicillin had done practically nothing for humanity. It wasn’t until millions of dollars and hundreds of American scientists and engineers modified the production process, established clinical trials, and distributed the drug at scale that penicillin became viable. By March 1945—seventeen years after its invention—enough penicillin existed for nearly every person in America. Fleming won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
We tend to view inventions as these great Eureka moments. Edison’s lightbulb in 1879. The Wright brothers’ airplane in 1903. The big names everyone knows: Franklin, Bell, Tesla. It’s the Hollywood tale of the hero inventing something that saves the world.
“But this approach to history is worse than incomplete: it’s downright wrong,” write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance. “Implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.”
“‘Most major inventions initially don’t work very well,’ the economic historian Joel Mokyr said. ‘They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce useful electricity until it’s contained inside a working reactor. And they have to be built at scale, the way Ford’s Model T came down in price before it made a big difference to the country.’”
In short, inventions need what Mokyr calls microinventions—“incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product.”
Think of what Edison actually did.
In his lab, he tested hundreds of materials by burning them in a glass vacuum before discovering that carbonized bamboo worked as a lightbulb filament.
But inventing the bulb, Edison understood, was only part of the job.
If electric light was going to work in people’s lives, he needed to build the whole system around it—generators to produce the power, wires to carry it, sockets and switches to control it, and meters to track how much electricity people used so they could be billed.
“Edison did not make electric light possible,” Klein and Thompson continue, “But his microinventions did something more important: Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.”
In the late 1990s, Jennifer Doudna and her partner Jamie Cate produced a working model of an RNA molecule—the foundation of CRISPR, the most widely used gene-editing system today.
And here’s what’s interesting: scientists had already known about RNA for decades. But by implementing, by microinventing, Doudna and her team made RNA useful.
And this isn’t just for scientists.
At age 84, with a career spanning more than six decades, Bob Dylan is still writing, recording, and performing. He’s become an object of study: where does his creativity come from?
“These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he says. “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. All these songs are connected. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”
He discovered the music he loved, then implemented it into his own creativity kit. Microinventing, one line at a time.
If I had to sum up 2026 so far in a word, it would be implementation.
I signed my wife and me up for a CPR class and stocked up on first aid supplies. I pulled the trigger on a few investments I’d been sitting on. I’ve folded George Raveling’s line—choose to be happy, or very happy—into my daily affirmations. And I spent months immersed in Peter Attia’s Outlive, swapping in his diet and exercise advice until the scale started moving. I’m down 25 pounds so far.
Knowledge without action is like buying a “Come and Take It” bumper sticker but driving a Prius. The aggression is there, but the outlet isn’t.
Knowing is the easy part. The value is in the doing.
You know what you need to do.
Consider this permission to go ahead and do it.