Better Questions.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is a reminder of the power of curiosity and action in driving true innovation.

Those of us born before the digital age know a few things about a few things. As children, we read and memorized enough information to pass exams and get into college. When we got to college, we memorized more information to pass more exams, and if we were lucky, we found a job where we could hopefully use some of the information we had just spent the last 16 years memorizing. Along the way, every student trying to memorize something for an exam has complained, “Why do I have to learn this? I will never ever use this information.”

With Wikipedia, then Google, and now Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and whatever comes next, we don't need to memorize or even know things anymore. The innovators of the future will not be the scholars who have memorized the most information on a topic and try to improve an existing process, device, or tool. Instead, it will be the visionaries who can ask better questions who will drive true discovery. These trailblazers will push the boundaries of conventional knowledge, leading to breakthroughs that were once unimaginable, shaping the future in ways not yet imagined.

In the roaring 20s, the leading cause of death was infections that developed after a common injury or minor surgery. Alex was working tirelessly in his London lab to find the cause of these infections. Day and night, he worked on his experiments, growing bacteria in petri dishes to learn more about how they spread and how to stop them. Every hypothesis, based on common approaches, usual protocols, and conventional wisdom, that he tested failed. Nothing recommended in any textbook seemed to work. Feeling defeated, he decided to take a much-needed vacation.

When he returned from his vacation, he found a disaster waiting for him. Mold had grown in one of his petri dishes, ruining the bacteria experiments he had worked so hard on. He knew that he would have to throw it away and start his experiment all over again. Allowing a petri dish to become contaminated and letting mold grow was entirely counter to the accepted methods of conducting a proper experiment. It defied the rigorous standards of cleanliness and control required in scientific research, and it was a devastating professional embarrassment.

However, when he took a closer look at the contaminated petri dish, he noticed something strange. The bacteria around the mold had stopped growing. Through careful study, he found that the mold had produced a substance that killed the bacteria. Alexander Fleming’s accidental diversion from scientific standards made possible a discovery that turned out to be the world’s first true antibiotic, which he called penicillin. This groundbreaking revelation introduced something entirely unknown to science before, saving countless lives by effectively treating bacterial infections.

The key to innovation lies not just in the facts we already know or even in having access to everything that has ever been known. It is our ability to ask new, uncharted questions, our willingness to challenge established norms, and what we do with the new knowledge we gain that truly matters. Whether discovery is deliberate or purely accidental, true progress is achieved when our curiosity reveals something new and we act on the insights we find, demonstrating what today’s fortune says: "Action is the proper fruit of knowledge."