Idée Fixe - the Untapped Billion

What's an 'idée fixe' and what you can expect with this newsletter.

👋 Welcome to the weekly edition of Idée Fixe.

First of all, thank you for being here. This is my first newsletter and I’m excited to have the privilege to land in your inbox once a week.

Idée Fixe will be your weekly deep dive into the ideas that matter and dominate our minds for a prolonged period. I’ll take a topic, dive into it and share my findings with you here. More often than not, I use Formula 1 as my excuse to discuss the future of fandom, the business of sports, politics and technology.

What’s an idée fixe?

🎶 According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the term "idée fixe" was coined by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. He used the term to describe the principal repetition in his Symphonie fantastique. As a directive to a musician, “it’s a theme expressed repeatedly, with or without variation, throughout a composition”.

📚 At about the same time, another Frenchman, this time novelist Honoré de Balzac used "idée fixe" in Gobseck to describe an obsessive idea.

💡 By 1836, Balzac's more generalized use of the term had carried over into English, where "idée fixe" was embraced as a literary term for a persistent preoccupation or delusional idea that dominates a person's mind.

In the most simplistic way, an idée fixe is an idea that dominates one’s mind for a prolonged period. Nowadays this has come to include both the delusional and the pedestrian obsessions that we may encounter.

Who are the Untapped Billion?

I see ‘Fangirls’ as the Untapped Billion of the sports industry and they are changing the industry for the better. I’ve found that too often we celebrate the young women in so many industries - music, fashion, art, film and sports… We chase their relevancy and want their economic power. And yet, we still don’t respect them. These girls and women are the Untapped Billion of our society.

Not only should we be paying close attention to them as they are actively shaping the future of so many industries, but they also deserve our time and our respect.