Quote by Douglas Adams (Thread ↓):

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I love this quote, and have found it pretty accurate despite its tongue-in-cheek quality. It's not only fun to apply it to the old farts (a.k.a. anyone significantly older than you), it also reminds you that the "natural parts of the way the world works" are only in your head.

Years ago, I gave a keynote at a tech conference in Prague, and to promote the idea of learning about new and sometimes avant-garde things, I compiled a list of smart people being wrong about future technologies.

Here it is, for your entertainment:

> The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.

— Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

> I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning.

— Lord Kelvin, scientist, 1896

> Airplanes are interesting toys, but have no military utility.

— Marshal Ferdinand Foch, successful World War I general, 1911

> Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

— Harry Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927

> Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

— Irving Fischer, economist, 1929 (yes, the same year that later brought Black Friday)

> There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

— Albert Einstein, physicist, 1934

> One computer will suffice to solve all the problems that are demanded of it from the whole country.

— Charles Darwin, physicist (grandson of the biologist), 1946

(often misattributed to Thomas Watson, head of IBM)

Anyway, these examples are all about technologies (because they were given at a tech conference) but my point is broader than that.

Things change in technology, culture, society, science, everything.

What came before your childhood seems natural and normal. What comes before your mid-thirties is exciting. The rest is useless or crazy.

The only antidote to this phenomenon is to be aware of it, and to keep *wanting* to challenge your own views, whatever your age.

The end.