Woody started speaking from the podium before my dessert fork even touched the caramel covered cube of chocolate in the plate before me. I was among hundreds of "Special Invitee" dinner guests at a banquet celebrating the 25th year of FIRST. FIRST is an organization that promotes science and technology games and contests – mostly involving student-created robots engineered out of anything from sheet metal to Lego blocks. It's a wonderful group and if you and your child aren't involved in it, you should be.
Woody Flowers, Dean Kaman and the rest of the FIRST youth supporters, repeated this same mantra before the hall filled with corporate sponsors, university admissions officers and team mentors. "We got that!" ended each different speaker. What FIRST has "got" is a cultural infrastructure that gets kids excited about solving problems across the world.
Doesn't that sound nice? "FIRST trains the next generation to solve the problems caused by this generation." I thought it pretty much summed up the whole FIRST experience. After all, isn't necessity the mother of invention? And we certainly have a long list of problems that need solving in a way only engineers are best suited to solve. And I would argue that would include problems of the "social" variety, too, not just the physical problems you might normally assume to be the exclusive domain of engineers and engineering
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But, being the non-conformist I am, after about the seventh time they repeated "problem-solving," I began to wonder if that's all there was. After the fifteenth time, I finally figured it out. Fixing a problem is a good thing, but if that's all you do, you're just treading water. What truly moves our species from one life-state to another isn't problem-solving (that only makes our current life-state more bearable), it's exploration. It's the innate desire within us to go "where no man has gone before," to climb Mt. Everest "because it was there" and sail beyond the horizon just to prove "the world is not flat."
Centuries ago we lived in an Age of Exploration. Today, with physical limits exhausting our ability to explore all but the furthest reaches of outer space (i.e., the universe) and the deepest depths of inner space (i.e., both the oceans and sub-atomic particles), we find ourselves in the Age of Technology. Even last century's greatest of all exploratory voyages (landing a man on the moon) was nothing more than a series of technical problem solving exercises. And, before you get on your "but what about" hunches, the same holds true for the Manhattan project. The components of the atom were discovered decades before. By the dawn of World War II, the theory of the atomic bomb had been fully formulated. The only obstacle that remained was the physically building of it. It is within this transition that scientists cede their ground to the engineers.
And therein lies the difference between the two disciplines. Scientists discover the first step. That next step often reveals problems. Engineers solves those problems. This tango continues in an infinitely iterative loop – and we are all the better for it
If you take the time to think about it, the state of the 401k is not different than any other aspect of life. It was "discovered" in the early 1980's and there problems right from Day 1. There remain problems to this day, but there also opportunities. When we extrapolate current trends, you might just discover the 401k of the future may seem unrecognizable to those of us today, (see, "These 7 Megatrends Will Redefine the Future of 401k Plans," FiduciaryNews.com, May 6, 2014).
This leaves one to wonder, if we had to do it all over again and started from scratch, knowing what we know now, would we come up with the same thing? Or would it be something like what was once outlined in "401k 2.0" (FiduciaryNews.com, December 7, 2010) or perhaps like "Child IRA" (Benefits Selling Magazine, April 2014). Or will the future of retirement plan yield something we cannot even imagine?
Only time will tell, but our principles should be guided by this common sense axiom: "Fixing the 401k is fine, but true progress requires exploration.
Let's not be afraid to explore.
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Christopher Carosa
Chris Carosa has been writing a weekly article and monthly column for BenefitsPRO online and BenefitsPRO Magazine since 2011 and is a nationally recognized award-winning writer, researcher and speaker. He’s written seven books, including From Cradle to Retire: The Child IRA; Hey! What’s My Number? – How to Increase the Odds You Will Retire in Comfort; A Pizza The Action: Everything I Ever Learned About Business I Learned By Working in a Pizza Stand at the Erie County Fair; and the widely acclaimed 401(k) Fiduciary Solutions. Carosa is also Chief Contributing Editor of the authoritative trade journal FiduciaryNews.com and publisher of the Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel, a weekly community newspaper he founded in 1989. Currently serving as President of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and with more than 1,000 articles published in various publications, he appears regularly in the national media. A “parallel” entrepreneur, he actively runs a handful of businesses, including a small boutique investment adviser, providing hands-on experience for his writing. A trained astrophysicist, he also holds an MBA and has been designated a Certified Trust and Financial Advisor. Share your thoughts and story ideas with him through Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christophercarosa/)and Twitter (https://twitter.com/ChrisCarosa).
