Ideas or Reality: Which comes first?

Ideas have the power to shape the world.

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How often do you question ideas?

And I mean big ideas, the kind exalted by startups and thought leaders.

I asked myself this question as I perched on a black metal chair at one of my favorite local restaurants.

I’d been reading the book Why We Work by Barry Schwartz over my margarita pizza and basket of plain fries. (I know, I know. Not the epitome of health. But it was a Friday.)

Barry spent a significant chunk of the book exploring the question: what happens when an idea causes us to shape the world in a way that makes the idea true?

As the title suggests, he was looking specifically at work.

He made the case that the introduction of the now long-held idea that people only work for money actually caused us to approach work in a way that made the idea true.

By breaking down work into meaningless tasks people had to repeat over and over like a cog in a machine, we gave people little other reason to come to work except for the paycheck.

His argument reminded me how much power ideas hold.

It…