Bakken closed his speech with the bumblebee metaphor — the popular (if scientifically imprecise) notion that by all aerodynamic reckoning, the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. Yet it does, because it doesn't know it can't. The bumblebee 'gets those wings going like a turbo-jet and flies to every plant its chubby little body can land on.' The metaphor worked on multiple levels. First, it was about ignorance as an advantage: sometimes not knowing the obstacles is what allows you to overcome them. Second, it was about persistence: bumblebees don't stop and reconsider their flight plan, they just keep buzzing. Third, it was about defying expert opinion: just as aerodynamicists said the bumblebee couldn't fly, plenty of experts said Bakken couldn't build a wearable pacemaker. Coming from a 79-year-old inventor whose devices were being implanted somewhere in the world every six seconds, the advice to 'soar to the heavens' wasn't motivational fluff. It was the lived philosophy of someone who had spent six decades proving that the impossible was merely the not-yet-attempted.