"The love of Jesus will give you an ever-clearer vision of your call as well as of the many attempts to pull you away from that call. The more you are called to speak for God’s love, the more you will need to deepen the knowledge of that love in your own heart. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when your roots are deep can your fruits be abundant. The enemy is there, waiting to destroy you, but you can face the enemy without fear when you know that you are held safe in the love of Jesus." -Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

This is one of the most influential fantasy series by J.R.R Tolkien. The Rings of Power are a metaphor of political power, and as they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Rings powers cannot be used for good, even by the seemingly good people. The series is also critical of socialism and was reflective of the author’s disdain of industrialization and modern technology.

1. Past progress as a one-time event misses how much of progress is incremental. A breakthrough never occurs in isolation but is the product of many little discoveries, often meaningless by themselves, that someone links together.


2. Assuming that big current problems will prevent future progress. This misses that most progress feeds off big current issues.


3. In real-time, it nearly always looks like progress over the previous decade has stalled, seeming to confirm that we've reached the limit of our innovation. This is because it often takes a decade or more for breakthroughs to be noticed. We will only recognize the best work of the last decade in the years to come.