What We Get Wrong About Breakthroughs

We celebrate breakthroughs as sudden flashes of genius. But most of history’s biggest leaps began as small, uncertain steps taken by people who had no idea where the road would lead.

(Image credit: Ivan Diaz/Unsplash)

In the late 1980s, a young Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó arrived in the United States with a single scientific obsession: messenger RNA, or mRNA.

At the time, mRNA was considered a hopeless idea for medicine. Every grant panel said the same thing about mRNA research: too risky, too impractical, not worth funding. By the early 1990s, her proposals were routinely rejected, and she spent years in poorly funded labs piecing together experiments with whatever meagre resources she could muster.

Throughout the ‘90s though, Karikó kept uncovering small but meaningful advances — slightly more stable formulations, incrementally better results, and faint hints that indicated its potential utility. Although she had nothing dramatic to show, each step made the next experiment possible.

In 1997, she started working with immunologist Drew Weissman after a serendipitous meeting. A few years of trial-and-error later, they finally made a discovery that could catapult mRNA into widespread use. They published their findings in 2005, confident that the world would finally take note.

Almost nobody cared.

Government funding agencies still rejected the work. Karikó was even demoted for failing to secure grants. But she still kept working. And continued making progress.

In the 2010s, something shifted. A few small biotech firms — notably Moderna in the US and BioNTech in Germany — started seeing potential. Private investors began backing mRNA platforms for niche vaccines and rare diseases. These companies licensed Karikó and Weissman’s patents, hired researchers who believed in the field, and quietly built the infrastructure for something the scientific mainstream had written off. The unlikely support from startups, and not government institutions, kept the field alive.

In early 2020, we all know what hit the world. The coronavirus was ripping through cities, overwhelming hospitals, destroying lives and livelihoods, and shutting down entire economies. Vaccines typically took a minimum of 3-4 years to develop. We stared at a long, uncertain, deadly wait for a cure.

Except that it didn’t turn out that way.

The world’s first COVID vaccine was designed in just 48 hours and fully developed in under 10 months — faster than any vaccine in human history.

How?

Because this vaccine was based on mRNA technology — the same work that had survived rejections, demotions, indifference, but had been valiantly protected and nurtured by Katalin Karikó for over thirty years.

It looked like a miracle of speed. But it was actually the slow, stubborn work of a scientist who chose to take the best next step at every point of its journey, even if the destination was uncertain. Very few know about this.

The same pattern plays out across history. And it often involves multiple people working across time.

Thomas Edison is widely credited with inventing the incandescent lightbulb. His version was the first commercially viable one, but before that, countless scientists had already solved parts of the puzzle.

Humphry Davy created the first electric arc lamp in the early 1800s. Warren de la Rue experimented with platinum filaments. Joseph Swan built a working carbon-filament bulb years before Edison. Edison’s real breakthrough was integration — taking existing ideas, improving them piece by piece, and stitching them into a system that could scale. The “invention” was actually the final step in a long relay.

Even with Newton, the apple story makes it sound like gravity came to him in a single afternoon, but his work rested on foundations laid by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Galileo’s studies of falling bodies, Huygens’ mathematics of circular motion, and centuries of astronomical observations.

Even after him, others kept extending the work. Einstein reshaped our understanding of gravity with relativity. Mathematicians refined orbital mechanics. Engineers and space agencies turned those theories into rockets, satellites, GPS networks, and Mars missions. From Kepler to SpaceX, every step was simply a meaningful improvement on the previous one. Nobody saw the whole arc of progress — they just carried the science a little further than the last person.

And it isn’t just science. Business follows the same unpredictable trajectory. What are giants today were once unremarkable, uncertain experiments. When Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail service, its founders didn’t imagine they would one day acquire Warner Bros or become one of the largest production studios in the world.

When Amazon started selling books online, Jeff Bezos didn’t think then that this humble bookstore would one day operate Prime Video, Alexa, Kindle, and the world’s most profitable cloud computing platform. At every stage, new constraints appeared, new opportunities emerged, and the path forward shifted.

The companies that have survived the test of time weren’t necessarily the ones with perfect foresight. But they were surely the ones who kept taking the best possible next step, even when the destination was unclear.

~

I think about this often in my own work. When you run a business, you can get trapped in the pressure of building something grand, something worthy of a legacy. But it can get overwhelming. It makes every decision feel bigger than it is, and every mistake fatal. This is true regardless of any pursuit you’re on.

Instead, if we ask ourselves, “What is the best possible next step from here?”, it feels more achievable, more practical, and also more productive.

Every few months, when I look back, I realise progress didn’t come from dramatic leaps, but from dozens of small, almost forgettable decisions — conversations, experiments, hours of quiet work. None of them felt monumental in the moment, but together they moved so much more than I thought was possible. Sometimes in directions I had never considered viable. That’s why these stories give me so much belief.

Edison didn’t know he would reinvent lighting. Newton didn’t foresee rockets navigating space. Karikó wasn’t chasing a world-saving vaccine. They just kept doing the next thing that made sense. At different points, different people were faced with a situation that would turn their work into a global breakthrough. But on their part, they stuck to a simple, unremarkable process.

The path you eventually walk may lead far beyond what that early vision allowed you to see.

So keep it simple. Take the next best step.

And if you believe in what you’re doing, take the next best step after that. And the one after that.

One day, when you look back, you’ll be astonished by how far those small steps carried you.

~

Here’s a question for you:

In the pursuit of a goal, what works better for you — being driven with the end goal in mind, or taking the next small step? Why?

Or write to us at plainsight@wyzr.in. We’ll include the most thoughtful answer in next week’s edition.

What we’re reading at Wyzr

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. It shows you how small, consistent actions can shape big outcomes over time. It breaks down the psychology and mechanics of steady progress, making it a great companion to anyone rethinking how real change actually happens.

Until next time.

Best,

Yashraj