The Cuckoo’s Egg: The fruitfulness of trivial endeavors

Imagine having the temerity to request an investigation from the FBI because of a 75 cents balance error. This balance was trivial to say the least, however, Clifford Stoll wasn’t concerned about the profit margin. He was simply curious as to why there was this imbalance in the first place, and when things just weren’t adding up, he was quick to discover why. But towards the end of his endeavor, it turns out that his discoveries from a seemingly trivial inquiry, were much grander than anyone could have expected.

The series of events from this book also pertains to the many major scientific discoveries known to man. Take for instance the discovery of penicillin. Penicillin was discovered by a scientist named Alexander Fleming, whom many would describe as careless. Due to Fleming’s preconceived nature, he happened to forget to place a sample into an incubator, which caused mold to form on a petri dish. Many scientists would have called it a negligible error, and just throw it away, but this ‘error’ had sparked curiosity in Fleming, which inevitably led to him discovering penicillin. Let Both Stoll’s and Fleming’s discoveries be an inspiration to us all, that sometimes it is necessary to undermine professional work-productivity in pursuit of finding answers to questions that we impose on ourselves, because they may just lead to a significant discovery that productivity itself otherwise wouldn’t be able to discover.