You Can Just Do Stuff

People can simply decide to act rather than wait for permission, and freedom is something people take rather than something granted. Illustrating this, a manager recounted realizing that a hard reboot could fix a service outage despite the risk, and a shy student opened a propped-open classroom door with a pair of scissors. The piece also summarizes Dominic Cummings's 2018 paper on ARPA and PARC, crediting their output to a shared vision, intense effort, top talent, freedom from bureaucracy, and speed, with ARPA's Joseph Licklider given a $10m/yr budget.