The year is 1665. Bubonic plague ravages England. 22-year-old Isaac Newton flees Cambridge University, retreating to his family home in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. For the next 2 years, he will engage in solitary research. We know Newton for his famous discoveries: calculus, the laws of motion, the law of gravity, optics. But less well known are his extensive experiments in alchemy: he spent years attempting to turn base metals into gold before a science of chemistry, and his numerology research.

Newton also investigated eyesight. He took a "bodkin" - a thick blunt needle - poked it under his eyeball and around to the back, and pressed until he saw spots. He drew what he saw in his notebook.

We define BODKINISM as the philosophy of embracing real-world experiments, even though they may be dangerous and not guaranteed to succeed, in service of a greater goal.

BODKINISM exhorts us to 
- act rather than theorize
- muster extraordinary courage
- not be deterred by the opinions
or judgments of others
- pursue big and important goals
- realize that "failures" are
part and parcel of discovery

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If you adopt the philosophy of Bodkinism, we hereby anoint you a BODKINIST. Together, our experiments poke behind the eyeball of humanity's collective perception, on our quest to nudge history towards a better trajectory.


@shaunmartin
@kk_ong

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