(based on a talk given at the Rotman School of Business, Univ. of Toronto)

There is a strong, logical connection between the TV series Star Trek, its inventor Gene Rodenberry, da Vinci, Picasso, Einstein, Edison, the pre-frontal cortex (part of the brain), and psychologist Daniel Gilbert. The links are obvious, once you know them.

Star Trek was a successful TV series, and later movie and sequels. Its theme: the Starship Enterprise “to go where no man has ever gone before”. This is the principle of innovation. The inventor of Star Trek was Gene Rodenberry. He was an Air Corps pilot, flew bombers in World War II (over 80 missions), later became a Pan Am pilot and saved his passengers with a brilliant desert crash landing in the Syrian desert. His dream and passion: to be a TV writer and producer. He quit his job as a pilot, moved with his family to Los Angeles and became a policeman for 7 years, to support his family while he pursued his dream. He sold several TV scripts, finally selling and producing Star Trek. The network wanted to cancel it, but its dedicated fans staged a write-in campaign and saved it. 

How many of us would have followed Rodenberry’s path, quit a great job to pursue a dream and passion? What keeps most of us from doing this?

The answer is: our pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, is our ‘simulator’, our imagination. With it we can simulate future events and experience them before they happen. Only humans can. Animals lack this ability. But the pre-frontal cortex, which has developed only over the past 2 million years, is limited.  It has ‘hedonic bias’. That is — it overestimates the happiness we think we will derive from future events (mostly things we buy) and overestimates the pain and suffering we think we will sustain from bad things that may occur. We fail to pursue our dreams, perhaps, because we think about failure, overestimate the pain it will cause — and never try to pursue our dreams and our passions. We come up with ‘excuses’ — reasons why we never even tried.

The world’s great inventors and innovators avoided this trap. Da Vinci had every reason in the world not to amount to anything. He was born out of wedlock, in the 15th C., when the Church controlled every facet of life. Had he been born in wedlock, he would have become a notary, like his father, and been trapped by the life of a Guild member. As an illegitimate child, he had the freedom to pursue anything he chose — and he did. Picasso lived during a turbulent 9 decades, experienced war, Nazi occupation of Paris, a ban on sculpture and painting — and never missed a day in his studio, producing amazing works of art, fearlessly innovating, producing an astonishing total of 50,000 works! If I know what I am going to do, he once said, why bother doing it? Einstein finished his Ph.D. and could not get a university post, because his professor had been insulted by him and failed to recommend him. Because he was only a lowly Swiss patent office clerk, he had the time to write three revolutionary papers, on relativity, the atomic structure of matter and E=MC2. All of this, in one year, 1905. He changed the world. Edison, as a child, was booted out of school. He was hard of hearing and had ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). His mother home-schooled him and he taught himself by reading. He invented the phonograph, because of his deafness — he sensed vibrations through his fingers and realized that sound was something real, something physical, that could be captured and stored. 

What is your dream? Your passion?  What are you doing to achieve it, to implement it? What are your excuses for not doing so? Can you learn from Edison, Einstein, Picasso, and da Vinci, and turn your constraints into creativity levers? Can you emulate Gene Rodenberry and pursue your dream no matter what? Can you learn from Daniel Gilbert and sharpen your pre-frontal cortex?

Here is a small exercise that may help. Create a digital camera. It is a very special one. It takes a photograph 5 years into the future. Picture yourself in 2014. What do you see? What are you wearing? What does the room look like? Picture every detail. Imagine it. Now — think ahead backward — what will you do today to make that photograph come true in five years?   I believe Gene Rodenberry did this. Try it. List all your excuses for not following your dream — and then turn each of them into a reason to pursue it passionately.