Naveen Jain says moonshot thinkers should ask why instead of how. When you trace water shortages back through agriculture and cattle farming, you find bigger solutions: cultured meat from cow stem cells, plant-based alternatives, and controlled farming methods that create real opportunities.
Chapters
Asking the right questions allows you to focus on the problem you're going to be solving. Every time you go to an expert, the question they always ask, how do we do that? And a moonshot thinker like you should be always asking, why are we doing it? So the experts think about how to do it. Moonshot thinkers come out why to do it. Most innovations fail because they end up solving the symptom of the problem rather than solving the root cause. And sometimes solving the symptom may give you a short time success until someone comes and solves the root cause and then you're completely out of business. And let me give you a couple of examples of how that happens. Now for example, everyone knows the lack of fresh water is one of the biggest problem facing humanity. Now if you are an entrepreneur and thinking that I want to go out and solve the problem of fresh water, and you come up with a nano filter that is able to actually take a dirty water or desalinized water and start to think about how do we get the fresh water out? And you really focus on solving that problem. And one of you moonshot thinker asked a question and saying, wait a second, why do we have the shortage of fresh water? And suddenly you will realize the reason we have a shortage of fresh water is because majority of the water is is being used for agriculture. And then you say, oh, so agriculture is really the root cause here. And what if we can build hydroponic agriculture, aquaponic agriculture, aeroponic agriculture. And now you think you have actually found the root cause and you really focused on solving the agriculture problem. Until another moonshot thinker asked the same question, why do we have all these agriculture? And the soon you will realize what once you ask the question, where does all this agriculture going? You will realize that majority of agriculture is there to feed the cattles. You now need to figure out how do we solve the problem of raising the cattles. And obviously we are raising these cattles to feed people the meat. I'm not suggesting that now your job is to make everybody a vegetarian, but your job is to say how do we feed people the meat they want to eat without having to raise the cattles. So what if we do what the nature does, take a stem cell of a cow and only create the muscle tissues because that's all people eat. They're not eating the eyes, they're not eating the ears, they are eating whole bunch of other things that when you raise the cattle you have to have. What if you can simply take the same stem cell and only create the muscle tissues. And now once you do that, you are able to now have plenty of agriculture for humanity. So when someone says, how are you going to live on a planet when the population goes from 9 billion? You can say, you know what? Simply solving the problem of cattle allows you to feed twice as many people. Now you think you have actually solved the real problem until another moonshot thinker comes about and say, wait a sec, what if we can simply have a vegetarian meat that means a food that's made out of plant, but tastes exactly like meat. And now once you do that, now you have actually gotten rid of even the idea of having a biofactories that create the muscle tissues. And you can see these things are not some dream someone has. These are the problems that are being solved right now by entrepreneurs. So there are companies today that are actually taking the stem cell and creating muscle tissues. And their entrepreneurs are going beyond and actually creating the meat that is made out of the plant protein. And both these ideas are actually the ideas that will free up the agriculture for twice as many people and will free up the fresh water for the humanity. So if you want to solve problems like that, you have to always ask yourself what is the root cause of that problem rather than the symptom that you currently see. Once you identify the pain point you have, then you need to understand what is the root cause of that pain and solve that root cause, not just on the surface what the symptom is. Big problems will push the humanity forward. The bigger the problem, bigger the opportunities, and the more people you are helping, bigger the enterprise you'll be creating it.
