The Dick Fosbury Effect
There are some things that only one soul is meant to see.
Long before Dick Fosbury stood on the Olympic podium in 1968, before the world called him a genius, or strange, or revolutionary he was a teenage boy in Medford, Oregon, failing at something everyone else seemed to do well.
The scissors jump. The straddle. The Western roll.
All the accepted high jump techniques he couldn’t master them. He didn’t fit in. Not even his body seemed to want to cooperate. In his own words, he was “probably the worst high jumper in the state of Oregon.” He kept trying, but the more he tried to mimic the standard, the more he failed.
And it was in that failure in that sacred frustration that something miraculous began to form.
One day, instead of leading with his foot like everyone else, he twisted. He turned his back to the bar. It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t rebellion. It was instinct. Or maybe… it was a vision that had been waiting for him his whole life.
He didn’t even understand what he was doing at first it just worked. It felt right. His body wanted to float backward, not climb forward. And when he followed that strange, personal truth, the bar stopped being a barrier and became a gateway.
He wasn’t just jumping anymore. He was obeying something higher.
How did he see it?
That’s the great mystery.
There are people in this world who are shown things no one else sees. Ideas, movements, ways of being , they are whispered into the soul by something beyond logic or expectation. And they’re not given to committees. They’re not voted on. They come to one person, in quiet moments, like seeds carried by the wind of a different dimension.
Dick Fosbury was one of those people.
He didn’t invent the Fosbury Flop out of ambition. He received it out of necessity. He had nowhere else to go so he followed the one doorway no one else could see. A door only he had the key for.
We are each given a spark a talent, a vision, a sound only we can hear. Sometimes it doesn’t fit in. Sometimes it gets us laughed at. Sometimes it looks upside down to everyone else. But if it’s truly ours, it will not let us go. And if we are brave enough to follow it to trust that lonely vision we change the world just by showing up as ourselves.
That’s what Dick Fosbury did.
In one interview, Fosbury said: “It felt natural. It felt good. I had never cleared a height that easily before. I knew I had something.”
That was the beginning. He didn’t plan it. He didn’t model it after anything. He was simply responding to a problem in a way that felt intuitively right to his body.
That practice session was the seed. In the months that followed, he refined the movement. People laughed at him. Coaches discouraged him. Some called him a “clown.” But he kept doing it because it worked.
“My mind said ‘Don’t do that,’ but my body said, ‘Go for it.’”
what he did experience was an inner knowing. A physical “aha” moment. A felt sense that his body had stumbled into a secret no one else had yet uncovered. In his later life, when people asked him why he tried it, he would say something quietly powerful:
“I didn’t think about it. I felt it.”
In his autobiography “The Wizard of Foz” (2014), Fosbury wrote that he was a highly visual thinker, a little awkward, and not always confident in words — but his body knew things before his brain did.
We call this The Dick Fosbury Effect — the moment when a single person sees a solution no one else sees and trusts it enough to show the world. It’s not always welcomed. Sometimes mocked.
This effect doesn’t happen by accident. It seems to happen to people who, Experience repeated failure or misfit with the system, Don’t give up, but instead surrender to their own uniqueness, Solve problems not by force, but by grace
That’s the message behind the Fosbury Effect, There are ideas meant for you. And only you.
If you ignore them, the world stays the same. If you follow them, it flips beautifully, impossibly upside down.
Orange peels : “The product packaging of the future”
During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a strange thing happened in grocery stores across the globe.
People came home and began washing their groceries. Not just produce — everything. Bags of chips. Water jugs. Yogurt containers. Banana peels. All scrubbed with soap, as if a potato chip bag was carrying a virus. It seemed mad. But in that moment of mass paranoia, something powerful revealed itself.
What if the problem wasn’t just germs? What if the problem was that our packaging isn’t alive — it isn’t helping us, it’s threatening us?
That’s when the flip happened. A new idea came through
What if we grew our own product packaging?
What if we used orange peels , rich in natural antibacterial oils to create custom containers for other foods?
What if the outer shell of an orange could become a universal container , compostable, germ-fighting, beautiful?
Nature already knows how to build protection: The orange peel shields moisture and nutrients, It resists mold, bacteria, UV light. It biodegrades elegantly, with zero waste, and it carries antimicrobial oils — like limonene — that kill germs on contact.
Now imagine this, What if humans no longer harvested oranges to eat them…But instead rewrote the seed’s blueprint — not with pesticides, not with plastic, but with intention? Every seed is an instruction book. It knows what shape to take.But what if we — gently, respectfully — modified that instruction? What if we said to the orange: “Don’t grow pulp. Don’t grow round. Grow this shape instead. Grow a hollow hexagon. Grow a cylinder. Grow a compartment shaped like a toothbrush holder.” This isn’t science fiction — it’s biofabrication. And the orange? It becomes a partner. A living manufacturer. Not grown for food, but grown for form. citrus fields bloom in geometric rows — each fruit not round, but hexagonal, rectangular, oval depending on its assigned function:
A soft but sturdy orange-shell cup, A peel box with germ-resistant lining, A child’s toy nested in biodegradable fruit armor, Shipping materials grown in crates of living orange peel packaging.
The Invisible War Needs a Screen
There are some problems you can’t punch, can’t kick, can’t even see.
Germs — viruses, bacteria, spores — are microscopic enemies. They float in the air, rest on every surface, cling to our hands, our food, our breath. And because we can’t see them, we forget them. Until we’re sick.
This is where The Dick Fosbury Effect appears again. Most people accept that germs are invisible and always will be. But some of us , a rare few ask: What if they didn’t have to be?
Monitors That Show Germs Dying
Imagine walking into a hospital, a school, a food court — and instead of a “Wash Your Hands” sign, you see a real-time display:
A microscopic live feed, Germs landing on a surface, Germs interacting with copper or citrus materials, Germs dying, visibly, right in front of your eyes.
A live death feed — not of violence, but of protection at work.
Just like security cameras deter theft by reminding you you’re being watched, these screens would: Deter unsanitary behavior, Educate the public visually about hygiene, Build trust in public environments, Reinforce that cleaning technologies are active, effective, and intelligent. You wouldn’t just believe a countertop is clean. You would watch it cleanse itself.
The Fosbury Parallel
When Dick Fosbury turned backward and jumped, people laughed — until they saw it work. He didn’t just explain it. He demonstrated it. This concept is the same. You can’t just say, “This copper kills germs.” You have to show it. Let the public watch the germ die. This flips the psychological script. Cleanliness becomes visual, dynamic, even entertaining. It’s not just science. It’s visibility. And that’s what the world needs to believe again.
If you see something the rest of the world hasn’t yet imagined — and you dare to believe it’s real — you owe it to the world to make it visible.
