Nobody asks
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“Nobody asked for the internet.” —Marc Andreessen
Back in the early 1990s, Marc Andreessen and a small team were working on developing Mosaic, which would soon become the world’s first popular web browser.
He didn’t know that yet.
At the time, the smart money wasn’t betting on the commercialization of the internet.
And what was the future going to look like in 1993? Push media and interactive TV. Here’s Bill Gates explaining back then what that future was supposed to look like: “The holy grail in the consumer market will be to bring new applications into the home. Chief amongst those applications will be software that will provide two-way communications through a new device we call the TV/PC.”
Granted, you could argue that the device either built-in or attached to your TV today that lets you watch Netflix is proof that at least some of that prediction came true.
But it overlooks the fact that to get there, even bigger changes happened. Among them: commercialized internet becoming nearly as ubiquitous as radio, backed by a massive shift to mobile devices and a complete fragmentation of media.
Very few saw that coming.
Anyhow, my point here isn’t that we are terrible at predicting the future.
It’s that we don’t understand how hard it is to recognize new ideas for their full value, and then be equipped with the skills to sell those ideas convincingly to others. All of that is the job of a creative pro now.
Most new ideas are an extension of an existing one. And entrenched players in an industry have everything to gain by promoting ones that keep them entrenched and minimizing the ones that don’t.
Thus, the “good” ideas are rewarded for being safe. They don’t break things.
We are all prone to this way of thinking. It shows up in the courses we design, the products we name, the things we vote for, the strategies we conceive, the books we write or the music we compose.
So what’s the antidote?
Be willing to experiment more. Be prepared to invest time in learning how to sell your ideas more persuasively to others. Work harder on your critical-thinking skills.
Recognize that our beliefs are biased in favour of fragility and loss minimization. Know also that this bias has a price, as Antifragile (https://www.amazon.ca/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/0812979680) author Nassim Taleb reminds us. The problem, he says, with fragile thinking—unless you resist it—is that it can “make you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects (are) potentially severe and invisible.”
So stop being so willing to just deliver what people ask for. You have a bigger job to do with more at stake than you realize.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. Thank you to all of you who kindly forward this email to friends. It helps me a lot. You can do so clicking either of the green buttons below. Do that now.
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