You can’t exceed your environment. If you give a cannibal a watch, he doesn’t look at it and say “the gears are not precise, they are ten-thousandth of an inch off” He doesn’t say that. That’s what I mean by you can’t exceed your environment. You can’t exceed what you’ve been exposed to. — Jacque Fresco

Perfection, it seems to me, to be a subjective term limited by one’s exposure.

Think about it…ask yourself if you know one Ancient Egyptian who invented nanotechnology.

Yet, if they were exposed to the preceding technology, elements, and ideas that led to the development of nanotechnology, they could be just as capable of reaching a breakthrough.

This is the same reason why King Tut didn’t have air conditioning.

The best his entourage could do is make fans inspired by leaves and bird’s wings.

A “fan-bearer” would stand next to the king and fan him. Over time, the fan became a symbol of power and status. Long fans were their idea of perfection since they were used as a symbol of rank.

What they did is they worked with only the ideas that they were exposed to at the time, and in turn were limited by them.

“A child never writes his own alphabet. A seed does not grow, it needs soil, water, and radiant energy. A sailboat does not sail, it is pushed by the wind. Nothing in nature is self-activating” — Jacque Fresco

We claim to be self-made, yet we all have accents.

So the most useful thing you can do is: grow your alphabet, water your seed, and get some wind in your sail by accumulating hundreds of thousands of new bits of information about what you’re building.

This is why exposure is the key to future time travel. You are a fan-bearer who has access to the largest library in the world up to now — the internet.

But the library is so large that you don’t know where to begin. You need an efficient compass. How do you ascend from fan-bearer to A.C.-maker to more efficient ways of cooling?

And…exposure to what exactly?

The answer: to ideas in all forms…both inside and outside your field since as Leonardo da Vinci once said “Everything connects to everything else”

Consistent efficient exposure is the key to:

Curing creative block

Finding your style

Surpassing your influences

Reaching new heights

It is a hypothesis of mine that people are so inefficient at two things:

Exposing themselves to new information on a daily basis Finding quality information quickly

And because of these inefficiencies, they say “perfection is difficult to attain and therefore improbable”

But of course, I could be wrong, and welcome evidence to the contrary.

By quality information, I mean, if you’re in the arts: enormously taste-resonant art.

If you’re in the sciences or engineering: enormously useful, relevant (to your project, or interest) information.

But I don’t think just perfection is a worthy goal. I think more than perfection is a worthy goal. And I think that that goal is attainable through exposure.

Perfection is: a long fan

More than perfection is: a constantly evolving cooling system

Types of Exposure

There are two types of exposure if you’re working in the arts: artistic, and technical.

If you’re working outside the arts it may be better put as content, and technical.

If you’re an inventor that maybe: inventions, and technical execution, and so on.

People mostly can’t achieve their current vision due to poor quality, or irrelevant technical information (how to execute specific aspects of music they love, or how to light a scene in a film, or how to build that invention, etc.) in relation to what they’re trying to build.

And they mostly can’t surpass their vision or idea of perfection due to poor quality or non-taste-resonant content or artistic information (finding more moving songs, reading more gripping books, watching more stunning movies, finding more useful solutions or materials for inventions).

You see, when you consistently expose yourself to new enlightening, useful, or life-changing taste-resonant ideas on a daily basis, what’s happening is: you’re looking up at what you think is the peak of the mountain, and day by day, the clouds part, and you realize that the peak wasn’t where the clouds were, and then again, and again…and again.

What you think the level of excellence is right now — of your field, of beauty, etc. that is a clear image of the limits of your exposure.

So the thing to do is to expand your environment, to endlessly expand exposure. The more you expose yourself to more information in your field (or in other related fields), by following your interests, by reading books, watching movies, listening to music — by reading papers, listening to interviews, sleeping to lectures, the more you begin to realize this fact.

The fact that “perfection” as a concept is limited by what you’ve been exposed to, and there really is no such thing as a universal or objective measure of perfection.

Any assumption of finality or utopia is really stupid because there’s never been any evidence to show that a person could design the best laptop. You can design the best laptop that you’re familiar with at that time but they’ll always get smaller, faster, more appropriate, lighter in weight. There are no final frontiers, there are no utopias, no best way of doing things. There’s always a more appropriate way of doing things. — Jacque Fresco

The limit that Fresco talks about here is different than the limit he was talking about earlier. The limit he’s talking about here is finality, or perfection — objectively, or I’d add, possibly even subjectively (in terms of how taste-resonant an artwork is). And that’s the non-existent limit. No such thing as “we’ve arrived!”

It’s as ridiculous as saying “we’ve arrived at the perfect transportation system! Logs are the new feet!”

However, the limit he was talking about earlier is your exposure limit. And that’s the only real limit.

The only thing you can do to remedy that is to widen that circle of knowledge as far, and as efficiently as possible.

This is the most wonderful realization in the world. Never reaching a supposed “perfection peak” means that deeper and deeper layers of enjoyment are accessible.

Never reaching it, but always striving to part the clouds means that you’re constantly enlightened, and retain a deep curiosity about the world around you and how everything connects to everything.

“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” ― Isaac Newton

But there’s another reason why you should do this. It can produce a feeling of constant bliss. Why? Because new ideas are more exciting.

The reason is: the law of diminishing returns.

The first bite of ice cream is so much more pleasurable than the last one. A new wonderful idea is much more exciting than an old one. That’s not to say that the old idea is less valuable.

In fact, the way you measure how valuable (or taste-resonant in art) an idea is is through the law of diminishing returns. If you collect let’s say a fine art photograph that excites you, and the next day you think “eh, it’s okay” that idea wasn’t very powerful. But if you collect it and after a day it’s still exciting, and after 3 weeks it’s still exciting, then you know you’ve got something.

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.” — François de La Rochefoucauld

It may be just as valuable in terms of usefulness, or in terms of taste-resonance. But the discovery of a new extremely taste-resonant, or extremely useful idea far outweighs an old idea of the same taste-resonance or usefulness.

When it comes to scientists and engineers though, it isn’t about how taste-resonant an idea is but about how useful or relevant it is to the current project — so it’s important to keep in mind not to use the law of diminishing returns as a qualifying filter, but rather use usefulness, efficiency, or functionality as a qualifying filter.

But nevertheless, with exposure, it’s a never-ending stream of a “Dunning-Kruger effect” shocks and reminders of “you don’t know how much you don’t know”

Even more pleasurable, is when that new idea fits in, supports, or builds on all the older ideas either stylistically, or functionally.

But the problem is that most people work backwards. They say “I want to build Y” whether or not that is a correct goal to solve X (Check out the XY Question — this comment may apply slightly more to engineers, scientists, inventors, technologists, than to artists), and they go about trying to build that with their current level of knowledge.

But they don’t realize that exposure can, not only help them build the right Y (if they’re searching efficiently, and considering the XY question), it can also grow that seed once it has been found.

An important film to watch that lays out a ton evidence on how creativity works is Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson. One of the few films I can honestly say changed my life forever, and highly recommend if you want to understand creativity.

In my Art Discovery Course, a course designed to help creators of any kind cure creative block, find their style, and surpass their influences, I introduce you to efficient discovery techniques to find quality ideas as fast as the current techniques permit you.