Life, Lessons & Love

History Doesn’t Repeat

November 18, 2020

Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

The same themes return again and again, but always in new contexts, with new antagonists, protagonists and participants.

Those who forget their history are not doomed to repeat it, because they are not alone in the journey—inevitably, there will be others who do remember, and there will always be many different agendas.

But those who forget their history lack the competitive advantage that comes with understanding the implications of the patterns from the past.

More fundamental than history, perhaps, are archetypes. Myths represent humanity’s efforts to consolidate the lessons of history into stories which can be transmitted to the future: “The nature of reality, and lessons-learned.”

Looking to more recent literature, if we examine Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, we see how art and story that seemed to be more fiction than science are now more science than fiction.

We see a similar pattern of rhyme in our culture: In the 60s, feminists expressed their desire for liberation by burning their bras. In 2020, conservatives expressed their desire for liberation by burning their masks!

Before my first phrase, “hows it works”, one of my earliest words was “build.” It was the answer to what I wanted to do. Build!

In World War II, there was a group that specialized in building known originally as “Construction Battalions (CBs).” On March 5, 1942, the name Seabees was formally recognized.

At Paragon Systems Development Corporation in 1986, in the lobby of our new office in Reston, we joked about the long hours we spent in our client’s office. Kiddingly, perhaps even ruefully, we concluded, “The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes just a bit longer.”

When I formed FTLapps, Inc. in 2011, as I built the company website a month later, I built an “About” page where I included our corporate values. As I concluded edits to the page, I decided to adopt the motto we had coined for Paragon back in 1986:

“The difficult, we do immediately; the impossible takes just a little bit longer.”

Googling for the sentence nearly ten years later, I was shocked to discover that the FTLapps, Inc. website About page wasn’t the primary source for those words.

Long before Paragon or FTLapps existed, the Seabees had several mottos. Among them was:

“The difficult we do at once. The impossible takes a bit longer” – Seabees Memorial | Wikipedia

Sometimes, history does repeat.