We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anyone who has ever been married or raised kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

A simple alternative is to start with a majority. Focus on people who already buy in. Go out and find people who are as enthusiastic as you are, who are willing to support your idea, to strengthen it and help you work through the inevitable glitches along the way. Even if that majority is only three people in a room of five, you can always expand a majority out.

That’s how you can begin to gain traction and build a sense of shared mission. As you begin to work out the kinks, you can embark on a keystone project, show some progress, build a track record and accumulate social proof. That’s how you get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling success. As you gain momentum, you can build support through peer networks.

Real change doesn’t come from persuading the unconvinced with more information. It is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drives genuine transformational.

Yet the Netflix founders remember events differently. They claim that not only did Antioco meet with them, but actually laughed when they proposed that Blockbuster buy Netflix for $50 million. “That night, when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all sixty thousand Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal,” Hastings would later write in his book, "No Rules Rules."

As I’ve previously explained, Antioco’s version of the story is more credible, but that’s really beside the point. What’s relevant is that for the Netflix guys, the humiliation felt very real. They were on the ropes, trying to survive, and cooked up a pitch to the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, only to be rebuffed. That, more than ambition, drove them to reinvent their business, make it work, and become a 800-pound gorilla themselves.

That’s why we always need to be careful about competitiveness evolving into a will to dominate. When you humiliate people, you don’t defeat them—you motivate them. And sometimes, you create your most dangerous competitor. If you’re not careful, you can sow the seeds of a humiliation cycle and inadvertently trigger your own demise.

That’s the cycle leaders need to learn to break. You need to design for collaboration by making respect visible and repeatable. The desire for recognition is a basic human need. If you don’t satisfy it constructively, it will emerge destructively.

The most likely scenario is that the future will look a lot like the past. Many things will be improved, some will be transformed, but adoption will be uneven, with some organizations and industries moving quickly to put new applications into practice, while most will lag behind. As progress fails to meet expectations, disappointment and disillusionment will set in, and focus and budgets will shift elsewhere.

If you are truly an AI expert, with the knowledge and skill to shape the technology, you can still expect to do well. There will never be a shortage of organizations that need people to help leverage technology to do important work for them. But if you are just chasing the wave, you will be tying yourself to the ebbs and flows of market sentiment.

The truth is that you can’t separate a technology from the environment in which it operates. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, to build for the world you need to understand what it means to live in it. Technology becomes powerful when people who understand solutions learn to collaborate effectively with those who understand the problems that need to be solved.

So while there is clearly a need for genuine AI experts, we still need experts in every other human domain. You’re much better off betting on yourself than betting on a technology you have little or no agency over.

Yet while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and lead to genuine insights. Asking, “What kind of change is this?” is essential to building a strategy to overcome challenges. Investigating shared values is key to getting widespread buy-in. Analyzing sources of power is how you identify institutional targets for action.

The truth is that every great breakthrough starts with a question. As a child, Einstein asked, “What would it be like to ride on a bolt of lightning?,” which led to his theory of special relativity. He then asked a second question, “What would it be like to ride an elevator in space?” and that led to his theory of general relativity.

Change leaders often feel they need to have all the answers, but what they usually need is to ask more—and better—questions. That’s the essence of the Changemaker Mindset: it’s not about building consensus around a plan and executing it, but about building a coalition to explore possibilities that lead to a better future.

Notice how the bulk of the profits went to Apple, which designed the product and the experience, and relatively little to the supplier that developed the technology that made it possible. That’s because the technology for developing hard drives was very well understood. If it hadn’t been that supplier, another would have eventually developed what Jobs needed. The iPod, however, was something new, different, and uniquely suited to its time.

To explore, you first need to come to terms with your own ignorance. It has little to do with intelligence or diligence. Einstein is revered today because he broke new ground, but was diminished because of where he was not willing to go and became, in the words of Robert Oppenheimer, “a landmark, not a beacon.”

That is why innovation needs exploration. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted. But to be an effective explorer, you need to put your assumptions aside. Purpose isn’t something you start with, it's what you discovery along your journey.

And yet, venturing with no idea what you will find requires existential rebellion. Because without knowing what you will find, you will need the journey itself to sustain you. Not all who wander are lost.

Once a cascade begins, it takes on a life of its own.

Corporate leaders in America today face a similar dilemma. Their first responsibility is to their stakeholders, whatever their own personal feelings. Yet among those millions taking to the streets are employees, customers, shareholders and their family members. Hoping you can stay on the fence is dangerously naive. It is only a matter of time before someone in your corporate community is affected by ICE and CBP violence: an arrest, getting roughed up, pepper-sprayed—or worse.

The time to act is now. If Renee Good or Alex Pretti were one of your employees or their children, what would you want to have in place for them and their families? What legal, medical or psychological support are they and their coworkers going to need? You have to start preparing for that eventuality now.

In much the same way, you need to begin to audit your partners and suppliers. Make sure the people you do business with share your values and those of your stakeholders. If they are supporting or engaging in activities that could harm your corporate community, don’t wait for an incident. Cut ties.

Most of all, you need to be explicit about your values and make sure you are living up to them. That doesn’t mean taking a political position, but it does mean being clear where you stand. As someone who has had to rise to the challenge of running a business during a revolution, I can tell you from experience that someday you will want to look back on these times, reflect on what you said and did, and be proud of the actions you took.

They are usually sorely disappointed. Decades of evidence show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes usually don’t result in changes in practice. There is also a large body of research that suggests providing people with the right information is unlikely to meaningfully influence their behavior. People aren’t blank slates—they bring prior beliefs and biases that shape how they respond to new ideas.

The truth is that change isn’t some kind of hero’s journey to some alternative future state. It is a strategic conflict between that desired state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. It has sources of power keeping it in place and those sources of power have an institutional basis.

That’s why you need to begin to think about how you will overcome resistance from the start. You can’t just wait until you encounter it and react, but must work to anticipate it and devise strategies in advance. That’s what makes the difference between successful changemakers and mere frustrated dreamers who once had an idea.

Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the incredibly popular course "Building Power to Lead," defines power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations and that gets to the meat of it. People don’t encounter our ideas in a vacuum, but in a sea of other ideas, ambitions, prerogatives, and priorities.

For people to adopt an idea, it needs to cross their thresholds of resistance, points at which joining in no longer feels risky or costly. To get them over that hump, we need to access power and influence, which comes in three forms: hard power, soft power and network power. Hard power creates incentives. Soft power persuades. Network power builds momentum and propagates the idea forward.

These don’t work in isolation, but in combination. Hard power can force a decision, but risks resentment. Soft power can win buy-in, but without connection to authority, it can’t deliver results. Network power can get you access, but not action. When you use all three in tandem, you can unlock the power to achieve what you want.

So don’t just ask whether your idea is good enough. Think about how you are going to access the power and influence you need to set it up for success. That, more than anything, will determine whether you succeed or fail.

Francis Fukuyama noted at the time that we had reached an endpoint in history, when one model had achieved dominance over all others. Yet even as he laid out the rational case, he invoked the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or “spiritedness,” to warn that even at the end of history, some would insist on going their own way, no matter the consequences.

The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Today, we can see the consequences. Populists aren’t so much “anti-elite” as they are anti-institution, and today’s media environment rewards those who undermine institutional authority. The result is a world that feels far more divided and dangerous than it did even during the Cold War.

Our mistake was that we were far too triumphant about a “unipolar world” to recognize that we needed to redesign our institutions to adapt to a new era. We are still largely living in a society governed by postwar institutions designed for how the world was nearly 80 years ago—no Internet, no cheap air travel, global GDP roughly five percent of what it is today.

Today, much like after World War II and in 1989, we are in the midst of a fundamental realignment. To build a different future, we need to rethink our institutions—what values we want to embed in them and what our relationship to them should be. How should schools educate? Corporations produce? Governments serve? And the media inform?

We don’t need saviors or messiahs. We need to redesign and rebuild institutions that can serve and sustain us for the 21st century.

That’s what he meant by the term “existential rebellion”: to create meaning for yourself in a universe that provides none. In two decades researching innovation, transformation, and change, one constant I have found is that you can’t control your luck. Anything can happen. “Sure things” often fail, while low-probability events occur all the time.

We can easily imagine a world in which Einstein remained a clerk in a patent office, doing physics in his spare time; Ramanujan died an anonymous pauper, his genius never recognized; and William Coley’s vision of a revolutionary cancer cure remained a pipe dream. But each persevered against an indifferent universe, and we’re all better off for it.

We can’t control our luck, but we can decide for ourselves how we seek meaning. Einstein spent the final decades of his life in Princeton, NJ, working on theories that would never pan out. On his deathbed, Ramanujan defined a new class of mathematical function and the number that bears his name. Dr. Coley, now recognized as the “father of cancer immunotherapy,” died surrounded by his loving family who were dedicated to his legacy.

And, like Sisyphus, we can imagine each of them happy, and maybe hoping for a bit of luck.