Which One Are You?

Consumers make things scarce for others by devouring things. Contributors make things abundant for others and themselves by creating things.

It was 1981.

The price of copper was shooting through the roof. The world was consuming this increasingly precious metal faster than we could find it. It was being used in electrical wiring, coins, and millions of miles of telephone wires.

Our hyper-consumption was causing us to run out.

In 1982 the crisis escalated, causing the value of the copper in a penny (1/100th of a US Dollar) to increase above the value of the coin itself!

So the copper penny was replaced with a counterfeit made mostly of cheaper zinc.

Our consumerism had backed us into a corner. It would take a contributor to get us out of it.

Then one such contributor (actually a group of them) had an idea to replace the limited resource of copper with the nearly unlimited resource of sand.

Fiber optics (sand melted down into fine glass cables) were born. By the late 1980’s they had begun replacing copper telephone wires. The scarce was replaced with the abundant and the world was better off.

All because of creative contributor.

So how about you? Are you constantly taking from the world or adding to it?