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Help One, Help Many
Author and Founder of Not Impossible Labs Mick Ebeling explains how the Not Impossible Labs philosophy can seem simple, but produces innovative and impactful results.
At Not Impossible Labs, we’re driven by a belief that’s as profound as it is simple: “Help one, help many.”
We find a problem — we call them absurdities — for a single person, we then dogpile on that absurdity until we come up with a solution, then deploy that solution into the world so that anyone can use it, build on it, tweak it, or repurpose it however they like. When we first started doing this 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have described it as “our process.” It was just how we worked. How we accomplished these crazy absurdities we set out to solve. But yes, with a decade under our belts, we can now go ahead and call it the Not Impossible Design Process.
Imagine an artist trapped in a body that can’t move, a teenager in a war-torn land who’s lost more than his arms — he’s lost hope. Or a legendary jazz pianist unable to play due to hand tremors. These are people with absurdities that seem impossible to solve. These were our “Ones.”
Our First “One”: TEMPT
Before Not Impossible was born, I was gripped by the story of Tony “TEMPT” Quan. Here was an artist of extraordinary talent, paralyzed from head to toe by ALS. I was outraged by the absurdity that this brilliant mind was shipwrecked inside his own body without the ability to speak, let alone to create.
Hit hard by TEMPT’s plight, I committed to finding a way for him to paint again using the only part of his body he could control: his eyes. This commitment set us on a journey that was anything but straightforward. We faced deserts of failure, mountains of frustration, and jungles of resistance. But our brilliant team kept going, inspired by TEMPT’s resilience and our personal commitment to him. After a lot of trial and error, we came up with a prototype that combined a pair of cheap sunglasses, duct tape, zip ties, and a few LEDs with some incredible code that allowed an old web camera to track TEMPT’S eye movements: the Eyewriter was born. Suddenly TEMPT was able to create his art again using only his eyes. The perseverance that kept us going was one hundred percent due to the galvanizing power of TEMPT himself – our “One.”
The journey didn’t end there. By sharing our designs and code open source, we sparked further innovation. Directly inspired by our Eyewriter, engineers at Samsung developed the Eyecan and extended the gift of communication and creation to thousands more people worldwide. Today, affordable eye-tracking technology is everywhere. When we started working on the Eyewriter, most ocular controlled communication devices were upwards of $15,000. Today on Amazon, you can buy more than a dozen eye-tracking devices for under $300.
Are we responsible for this? Not entirely. But it’s certainly true that the accolades and attention that the Eyewriter earned, along with the inspiring story of TEMPT himself, played a vital role in spreading the word that, with a purpose and a little imagination, the technology could be made affordable and accessible to everyone. This ripple effect is just one example of how focusing on a single person’s problem can unlock widespread impact. Helping one leads to helping many.
“Help One, Help Many” Works @ Work
The “Help one, Help many” approach isn’t solely about philanthropic or social endeavors. It is a powerfully reductive approach that empowers you to take on any kind of seemingly overwhelming challenge, whether in your personal life, in your community, or especially at work. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve introduced our Help One, Help Many technique to our corporate partners who were bogged down in decision gridlock and were then able to regain their focus and move forward.
Zeroing in on a single problem around a single person, reduces everything down to a more relatable, human level. It makes it easier, and more exciting, to get started no matter how intimidating the challenge might seem. Solving the problem of how to help paralyzed people write with their eyes feels like a huge problem. Hacking together a device to help one man — TEMPT — seemed… well, not exactly easy, but certainly within the realm of the doable. One man. One pair of eyes. One device.
We’re lucky. Over the years we’ve built an amazing community of hackers, engineers, thinkers, and doers who come together again and again to solve some very thorny problems, or, as we say, to make the impossible NOT impossible. But you don’t need a team of experts to make a difference. The beauty and the power, of “help one, help many” is that it works at every level — from the global to the local to the personal.
So, I’ll leave you with 2 questions:
What do you see as absurd?
Who’s your one?
OK, one more question….What the heck are you waiting for?
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