The Ignorance of Growing Up

Hey guys!

Ignorance is Bliss, Bliss is Happiness, Happiness is Ignorance.

(THIS IS A REALLY SHORT STORY BUT IS IMPORTANT TO THE POINT.)

When I was young, in primary school, I was in the school's first chess team. In our second term we competed in our first chess tournament.  Being our first tournament, the team had extremely low expectations and it just a chance to get away from class. Because of how the system works, the last game is always the closest; you're matched with other competitors who have same or similar scores. In the end, I won from a losing position when my opponent made a critical mistake.

The win just, by the skin of teeth, secured third place for us.  Which meant we all got trophies and medals.  For a second semester team with no previous competitive experience, it was quite an achievement.

What I didn't know, was how critical that last game was. I didn't know how close my team was to getting medals. I didn't feel the pressure of my team mates analyzing my every move. I stayed in touch with my opponent afterwards. She mentioned that she knew the stakes and felt the pressure when she made the critical mistake.

(THERE! NO MORE STORY)

Being ignorant about what could go wrong and all the possible consequences that could happen is so often liberating. When we don't have that pressure to perform well, we can concentrate on what we need to do and our own goals.

And that is the worst thing about growing up.We become less ignorant and more educated.

When we're young, we're told we can do anything we want. Teachers get us to write and draw with crayons about what we want to be when we grow up, however fantastical it seemed. Some people drew pictures astronaut or being a firefighther or the Prime Minister of Australia. During sport, our parents would tell us the point of sport was to have fun. "Winning is just a plus," they would always say.

And as we grow up, we realise just how difficult it is to achieve those dreams. How, not everyone gets to be an astonaut or how there's only one Prime Minister and only the winner gets the trophy.

How life gets in the way of our dreams. As our needs and priorities become many, our dreams become increasingly narrow. Its just extremely disconcerting that as we grow up, our dreams narrow. 

I can't help but imagine what would have happened if I went to play that same game, knowing what I know now. Knowing all the things, that could go wrong with every move of the chess piece, knowing that all my teammates were relying on me so that they could get a medal. I don't know if I would have still won, but it definitely would have weighed on my mind.

It isn't so much the pressure that knowledge gives, its knowledge of all the things that could go wrong. Sometimes, knowing less might help us achieve more.

~TastyJacks~

Rotten Apple? Expectations of innovation leaving a sour taste in my mouth

Time for a bit of a change of pace. OK, so one of my many pet hates of recent years involves the tech industry, and more specifically, how they “innovate”. More specifically, I dislike the culture of expectation that has emerged, to the point where companies that aren’t seen to be constantly innovating are seen to be falling behind.

I’ll clarify what I mean: In the time that Steve Jobs was Apple’s CEO, the company blew the world’s collective mind on consecutive occasions through the introduction of “revolutionary” products such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Since Tim Cook took charge, many people lament the lack of innovation, specifically the lack of big-picture leaps in technology. They view Apple’s recent innovations as being purely incremental in nature, rather than the old days of huge new inventions unveiled with each fresh product-launch. And by “many people”, I mean the vast majority of tech websites (see: here, here, here and, my personal favourite (purely for the wordplay), here). 

I do not dispute these facts. Just because Apple has not stirred the proverbial pot recently, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad sign for Apple, or likewise a good sign for competitors. People cannot continually expect companies to churn out innovation after innovation, year after year – that’s simply not the way life works.

These “journalists” lament the fact that these companies no longer have vision, and see it as a point of weakness. What many journalists often overlook is the fact that these companies are just like other conventional companies; conventional companies where product innovations and R&D all cost substantial amounts of time, effort, and money. If these costs cannot be recouped through the marketing of the product itself, then it is simply not worth innovating. The bottom line is that, if Apple can still make a stack of money by incrementally improving its product design year-on-year, then why would it even bother continually re-inventing its products each year?

So then, this poses the question of why Apple is no longer innovating like it used to. In this respect, Everett Rogers’ work on the Diffusion of Innovation model provides a number of answers. As an example, I’m going to use the iPhone, or to define the sector more broadly, the “smartphone” sector. Rogers’ model has stages along the process from which an innovation is first conceptualised, to the point where it reaches full market saturation. These stages are, in chronological order: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards.

In the smartphone realm, Blackberry (and to a lesser extent, Windows) were the Innovators and Early Adopters of a phone which paired internet connectivity (and its web browsing and email capabilities) with the conventional mobile phone. These phones were marketed to businesses, with high levels of success. However, they had limited success with individual consumers, due to their inflexibility and lack of real utility for average consumers.

Following this, along came Apple in 2007 with an offering which was directly targeted at the consumer market, offering a sleeker, more practical and more customisable solution to Blackberry’s offering. It was an instant success. In this sense, Apple were the Early Majority to the smartphone market, with the android system (and its myriad of manufacturers including Samsung) lagging behind a year or so, classing it as a Late Majority.

Finally, just as the market is heading towards the point of full innovation saturation, and realising the error in their ways, both Windows and Blackberry re-launched their smartphones towards 2012-2013. They ditched their business-aimed phones and adopted a format closer the consumer format chosen by Apple. In this sense, they had undergone a transformation from being the Early Adopters to being the Laggards of the market. This just goes to show that having the upper hand as an innovator or early adopter does not always guarantee success, and shouldn’t be put up on a pedestal as always being the optimal thing to aim for. More often than not, a strategy of imitation can be just as successful as a strategy of innovation.

This pattern is replicated over and over, no matter whether the product be tablets, phones, computers, smart-watches, etc. etc. Such a process can be expected each time a disruptive innovation is presented to the market, and it is not always guaranteed on who will seize the opportunity at the right moment and create a successful innovation. Innovation doesn’t always equal success, and as such it is unreasonable for tech writers to continually whinge about having a lack of it in big tech companies.

For more information, see Rogers' book.

#J.Nic#