The wisdom of the proverb, too many cooks spoil the broth had not yet been invented when Siddhartha Gautama walked out of the world to go sit in isolation believing intuitively that he had to go it alone if he were to find that enlightenment he sought but wouldn’t do so living in the midst of this cacophonous world where everyone had the answer but none the right one.
That is why when he became enlightened and became the Buddha, he famously said, you go to do it yourself. In an echo of that statement has come forth all the great inventors and their inventions. Almost all the books ever written were courtesy the efforts of one man or one woman sitting in splendid isolation hardly or never seeking the views of another person whose input would have caused a straight journey to meander into an unfinished zigzag labyrinthian jigsaw puzzle.
Discoverers like Columbus set sail against the tide of opinions that the world was flat and that such an undertaking would see them fall of the world at some point; but because Columbus didn’t bother with opinions of others which came a dime a dozen, he proved the Buddha right that sometimes you’ve got to go it alone and never mind the naysayers who are there waiting to see you fail just to say, I told you so.
And so out of the daring of individuals, the world got Shakespeare, Newton, DaVinci, Michelangelo, Gandhi, Einstein, Diana Ross who broke away from the Supremes, Beyonce’ who left Destiny Child, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Usain Bolt, Alfred Nobel and a million others upon whose individual discoveries and pioneering work the world rotates.
By this minuscule list of achievers, I try to make the point that one of the obstacles to progress occurs when too many persons get involved in an undertaking and the broth is spoilt. When, therefore, you hear something is going to Cabinet don’t be fooled into thinking that cabinet is a place where the geniuses reside and out of which would occur the splitting of the atom. Committees and groups of pseudo experts are assembled for the purpose of holding back progress just to satisfy some members delusions of grandeur; that they were involved – if only numerically. The Buddha was right, you got to do it yourself.
L. Siddhartha Orie