Passion Comes From Patient

Almost a year ago, I was passionately discussing one of John Hagel’s concepts (“Engagement vs. Passion”) with my wife. Out of nowhere, Faisal, my seven-year-old son, shared the title of this post. He looked at us and said, “Passion comes from patient.” I was speechless; his statement was too complex to be unpacked by me. Faisal’s statement resonates with John’s “Passion of the Explorer” concept, so I told him I know who can unpack such a complex statement. I immediately unlocked my smartphone and sent a tweet to John Hagel. Generously, he replied.

I immediately shared John’s reply with Faisal, but in my son’s language (Fortnite). Do you want a seven years old’s explanation of John’s passion of the explorer? Let’s do it. literally! This is Faisal’s debut on Medium.

Hello to all. Finally, I am writing on Medium :)

When my dad explained to me the passion of the explorer (I didn’t understand some of the difficult words), but it’s meaning was natural to me. It is our (kids) second nature: this is how we see the world. I am confused a bit, why do I have to explain such a simple thing? But it seems, in your (adults) world this is a big deal.

Let start by saying, I love Fortnite, and I want to be the next Ali-A or Ninja, and yes, soon I will have my YouTube channel. My eyes catch anything includes Fortnite. During our recent vacation, all my purchases were from Fortnite merch. Maybe this is what John means by a Commitment to a domain.

I like the feeling of getting better. With this game, my skills are improving every day: starting with one kill all the way to (on average) seven kills in a game. Whenever Fortnite releases a new game mode I master it and looks for the upcoming one (more challenging one). My dad advises me to hide, but I do the opposite, I run into the middle of the battle. One time I remember facing a pro-player who killed me nine times, by the 10th time I gave him a swift headshot. He never showed up. I guess this is the meaning of Questing disposition.

I learn new skills with my friends at school, my family members and enemies: if someone kills me, I watch him so that I can avoid my mistakes. Watching Ali-A’s YouTube channel is a great resource, I apply the new techniques with my friends, and we exchange what we know. This, my friend, is the Connecting disposition

Before going any further with this post, I presume that some of you got annoyed with Faisal’s KPI (how many kills) to measure his improvement with Fortnite. I, too, got annoyed the first time I heard it. So, we (Faisal and I) went through a thoughtful discussion over this topic and reconciled that such KPI can only be acceptable in the bits’ world, not in the atoms world. Below is how Faisal treats atoms: one of Faisal’s rescue episodes (rescuing newly born, abandoned cat).

Now let’s dive into the core of this post. A new theme emerged while I was observing Faisal practicing “passion of the explorer” to improve his performance with Fortnite. Although I was not directly part of his learning process (i.e., the three layers, commitment to domain, questing disposition and connecting disposition), Faisal kept updating me with every single development (e.g., mastering new move, finding a glitch, getting new skin, you name it). So, I started asking myself that maybe, and I am just saying maybe, the passion of the explorer needs one extra layer (a fueling, energizing layer). I noticed that a simple high-five from me to Faisal, such as after winning a game, greatly amplified his passion.

It is well known that passion can be sustained by incentive models that are empowered with mindset and with heartset’s conventional metrics. However, with the above example, it seems that there is a new framework that is capable not only to sustain passion, but recharge it, energize it and amplify it. “Spiritset,” a made-up word by John Hagel which embed within it a new way of thinking. Let us explore it while I share with you our serendipitous journey with John Hagel.

The conventional wisdom that pup ups whenever we see a long tail is merely manifested in a purely economic way: two worlds ‘heads and tails’. The head utilizes its resources (technology) to address the needs of the tail. Repeat the cycle again and again and monetize it, end of story. The head stays on the top, and the tail remains at the bottom. The head will only help you to do what are you currently doing but in a more efficient way. In other words, if you are residing at the end of the tail, you can’t even imagine the possibility of climbing such a curve to reach the top. Not everyone is Jack Ma.

John flipped the long-tail concept; he reversed its mechanics. He showed me a clear path: a ladder to climb instead of a steep mountain. John allowed me to experience, with him, The Power of Pull.

The Power of Pull — Granting Access

To me, John’s thoughtful response to my tweet was an invitation. John was practicing the first level of the power of pull: access. His reply stood as generous access to his world. He even went beyond the tail (in Blue Ocean Shift’s language, ‘non-customer’ and in Prosperity Paradox’s language, ‘non-consumption’), by granting my son VIP access (front-seat access to John’s world).

With such access, John granted us the right to connect with him — to tap into the broader resources of knowledge, products (e.g., books), as well as other people (communities). John showed us how to expand our reach: a path to escape from the long tail.

The Power of Pull — Access — Call to Action, Engagement and Guidance

A month after the first encounter, I published a very long post. I sent the link to John to thank him for being a source of inspiration. He retweeted it with a kind comment! Further, he guided me to expand my knowledge by referring me to one of his books. As a part of the access process, John ignited my curiosity with a compelling call to dig deeper. You can notice from the above that he didn’t forget Faisal. He wanted both of us to climb the ladder.

The Power of Pull — Attraction

Within the following few months, John applied the second level of pull: attraction. John pulled us to him by exposing us (some of my posts) to a greater population, which leveraged my chances to be noticed by both ends (head as well as the tail).

The Power of Pull — Achievement

Everyone can gravitate to the power of pull, even its inventors. For those who don’t know, John has been recently pulled into poetry. While reading one of his poems, I vividly noticed his teaching, theories, and concepts being condensed within each line of the poem, so I mapped each part of the poem to one of his relevant articles.

John liked the idea. Maybe it was a sign to be pulled to the third level of pull: achievement. As you can see, climbing such a ladder is like a marathon, during which someone might get tired. To energize me, John enabled me to feel the excitement within the achievement level. Indeed, it refueled my passion and encouraged me to pursue a new level of performance.

The following month, John cemented my position on the ladder by acknowledging my humble effort. At the same time, as you can see, he never forgot his youngest follower (my son Faisal). He pulled Faisal with a call to action — and not just any action. This time, John waited to see what Faisal would do. I cannot portray the joy on Faisal’s face when I convey to him John’s messages.

The Power of Pull in Action

Throughout the year, I was fortunate to experience the true meaning of the power of pull by one of its creators. On December 6th, John certified ( at least this is how I like to view it) my mechanism of “seeding serendipity,” which was built on his concept “shaping serendipity.” His words (via tweet) amplified my chances to reach and connect to a diverse group of amazing people from different continents. I experienced the true essence of serendipity: unexpected encounters that sparked opportunity-based narratives that are empowered by potential creation spaces. I truly felt that I was entering a broader learning ecology called “scalable learning.”

To be Continued

The amazing thing is that the adventure has only begun! Indeed, it is continuing. Yes, John invited us to a new cycle of pull!

The beautiful thing about the power of pull is that it will pull (or gravitate) you, if you are nearby. Recently, a new member has been pulled to the cycle (Reem, my 3-year-old daughter). Faisal’s (Guinness Record) of being John’s youngest follower has been broken. Reem sometimes runs around at home claiming that she is John Hagel :)

Lessons Learned

At least three themes emerged during this journey:

1- Transition Period

You will experience that your approach (or system) will shift. This will be a gradual transition from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. It can also be thought of as a shift from your standard way of doing things to a more flexible approach (i.e., a shift from “my way” to the right way).

2- Shift in behavior

When you are operating on the tail, you will be consumed by a competitive mindset. The higher you climb the ladder, the more this type of mindset will diminish. Your conviction will move toward a collaborative mindset.

The above shift in my conviction weren’t merely driven by a materialistic collaborative mindset. Instead, a new form of collaboration emerged: a collaborative heartset and a collaborative spiritset. My happiness was not solely driven by my egocentric success. I was getting even more excited about the progress of others, even if their progress was “conventionally” considered as a competitive territory. Getting exposed to others’ growth will amplify your chances of personal growth. I was witnessing how my “egosystem” was fading, and at the same time, a new ecosystem was emerging (a true willingness to work with others). I guess this is how it feels when you move upward on the collaboration curve by harnessing the three levels of pull.

3- Buckle-up the journey is bumpy

The trajectory of such learning journey cannot be articulated on a flat surface with an incremental upward movement. The ladder is, in fact, a simple moving average. Under a magnifier, you will realize that your passion cannot escape the gravitational forces of life (ups and downs).

Sometimes your passion will fluctuate and consolidate, and other times, it may benchmark itself with S&P500’s bearish behaviors. For that reason, make sure that positive people surround you. In the above illustration, my passion was showing an alarming bearish behavior, until I received a birthday wish from John. His tweet made me fully understand how small moves, smartly made (written), can set big things in motion.

The Serendipitous Journey in an Illustration

I hope that the title of this post “passion comes from patient” is becoming more relevant to you, regardless of your current residency (being within the head community or the tail community).

If you are like the most of us (in a tail community), it is good to know that you can reposition yourself to higher ground by linking your passion of the explorer to a higher source.

On an institutional level, if your residency permit placed you on the head (e.g., being a leader, CEO, executive, etc.), you too can learn from the above journey. You must be patient in your quest to find passionate followers, employees, etc., and you need to understand that it is your responsibility to nourish their passions, even if you are not directly part of the team or the work flow. If you are a CEO or a big shot executive, try to find a passionate employee in your organization, invite him/her over for coffee, and celebrate his/her hard work. Then sit back and observe the improvement in his/her productivity for the rest of the year. A tap on the shoulder for a job well done can do wonders.

As some of you know, my posts always reach a sudden junction: Faisal calls it a “platform destination,” where I usually try to embed our discussion within the context of platform thinking. So, can the above be applied in the platform universe?

Can platform businesses venture beyond aggregating the means of value creation all the way to elevate value creation to a whole new level? Yes, they can. John just shared with us his dream on institutional transformation. You don’t want to miss it.

Why must platforms transform their models? Ask yourself, does Uber drivers want to pick up people from point A to point B for the rest of their life? Do you think their dreams are fixated on delivering foods? Sooner or later, they will move on and leave the platform. Why don’t such platforms design such reality (exit) to capture the most of it, or at least to prolong the exit, by giving them more values (new experiences).

Uber is mastering the jobs to be done, but there is more. In fact, there is much more to be captured. These platforms need to look at the totality of our experiences rather than a tiny slice of it.

For example, Uber’s job to be done is to enable drivers to fulfill riders’ needs to move from point A to B. In other words, Uber focuses on one question: “Where?” Can you imagine what they might achieve if they start asking a deeper question? Rather than simply asking where to go, what if they start asking “Why?” Can you imagine what value might be created by asking this simple question? Unlike “where,” the “why” is exemplified in John’s concept of “context to be shaped,” as reflected in his article “Contextual Age.” Picking me from the airport to the hotel is a tiny single job to be done (maybe only monetizing one hour) what about the other 23 hours? Asking why will enable Uber to enhance my experience by matching me with the best fit driver. I humbly believe that value creation must evolve. For those who are interested, they can visit my previous post (“Infinity Jobs”), which covers this point in more detail, or this post which is a bit shorter.

Likewise Airbnb, Uber too can venture into the experience sphere. Only if they start asking why (i.e., putting some effort to understand our context), only then will they unlock meaningful new value propositions on top of their core value proposition. By doing so, the platform itself can grow and unlock new verticals as well as horizontals.

John repeatedly state the following statement:

“The more efficient we become, the longer and harder we have to work to get that next increment of performance improvement.”

It took me a while to understand his words within the platforms’ context. The above statement is a warning: a trap, used by some platforms, to keep us in the long tail so that they can milk us, cheaply. When a platform merely gives us tools to do what we are doing, but in a more efficient way (scaling our efficiency), they are sentencing us to work longer and harder, merely to get the next increment of performance. Yes, they are helping us to improve incrementally, while they are growing exponentially (by aggregating our collective incremental improvement).

Let’s take Medium as an example. In the above journey, do you think that my writing experience improved because of the tools (efficient writing and sharing) provided by Medium? No. My writing experience was enriched when I was able to meaningfully get connected with amazing people such as John and others via Twitter’s network. Thus, if Medium will not provide tools that can help us to evolve, we might go somewhere else. Or someone else might pull us. Sounds like disruption’s drums are rolling.

Let’s explore another example.

Once upon a time, an entirely new economic model underpinned by platform-based businesses (aggregators, orchestrators, platforms, etc.) discovered large distributions of uneconomic niche markets. They aggregated the means of value creations and efficiently orchestrated the core interactions within such niche markets. The rest is history. The future, as John is envisioning it, will bring mounting performance pressure: today’s business model will not be able to accommodate such pressures.

They must give equal weight to both ends of the curve (the head and the tail). They must dive to the bottom of the tail and try to rediscover their true treasures “us” (i.e., Hosts, Guests, Tweeters, Readers, Drivers, Riders, Video creators, Viewers, etc.) and empower us with a new set of tools that can help us to grow beyond their direct domains, to create new markets and unlock new demands. They must help us so that we all (collaboratively) venture from pressure to passion. I think Apple is moving in this direction through “Today at Apple” sessions. Watch minutes (33:33 to 42).

Let explore YouTube and Salman Khan (the founder of Khan Academy).

For a decade, YouTube was only fixated on one job to be done: creating videos. As a result, YouTube merely captured values such as subscribers, views, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, comments, likes, etc., whereas Salman Khan evolves from teaching from a closet to running an Academy that revolutionized education. His work was noticed around the world (including Bill Gates), while YouTube was content with numbers (views, subscribers, etc.). Although it is fair to state that Google is among the founding partners of Khan Academy, we are not talking here about funding. We are talking about enabling and empowering users of such platforms to discover themselves as well as to explore new realities.

Can you imagine what value YouTube could have achieved if they supported Salman Khan during his early days with the right tools to empower him to have better access, attraction, and achievement? Maybe now we would have YouTube Academy!

Unfortunately, YouTube’s values (“four essential freedoms”) are supported by efficiency-based tools. A simple share tool will not lead to the creation of new impactful voices. A descriptive-based search tool will not unlock new opportunities. HD videos will not revolutionize education (or anything else). A simple transactional based subscription tool will not gravitate our shared interests and collide our passion.

The above tools worked perfectly as a catalyst for efficiency innovation in the past decade; the coming decade needs tools that can help us create new knowledge. We need a smart set of tools that can differentiate YouTube not merely from a monetization model or features effectiveness. A differentiation strategy can take us from descriptive and static ecosystems to prescriptive ecosystems, from transactional ecosystems to relational ecosystems, from consumption to creation, from usage to impact (i.e., big shift in business models)

Let us examine a few of YouTube’s recent statistics:

1.9 billion monthly active users

30+ million daily active users

5+ billion videos shared to date

40 minutes average viewing session

5 billion videos watched per day

300 hours videos uploads per minute

Wait a moment! You are telling me that a company (YouTube) managed to figure out a way to bring 1.9 billion humans in one place, and it figured out a way to capture (on average) 40 minutes of their attention, and all that this institution is asking those humans to do is just to give a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, etc.? Is this a joke? Indeed, it is, and it will continue so long as markets’ short-term forces drive such institutions.

So, If you are serious about creating new knowledge, new demand and new markets, start reading these books:

We started with Faisal, so let us end with Faisal. Dear EpicGames, if you want to monetize my son’s happiness, don’t simply look after my credit card.

Give my son more than just a game; enrich his experience and awareness. Honestly, you are doing that, but you are not able to articulate it to us (parents) in a meaningful way. Show me reports/statistics that can grab the attention of my wallet.

Your descriptive statistics at the end of each game is of no use to Faisal nor me. Provide us with predictive as well as prescriptive statistics. Reports can show how my son is performing under pressure, in a difficult situation, how is he cooperating with his team, how he is collaborating with others. How is he helping his friends? Is he generous (if he has a lot of ammo and guns, does he share them with others of his teammate to concur a more significant challenge?) How many times does he revive his wounded colleagues so that his team become stronger and increase the chances of winning? As a parent, if I am seeing that my son’s strategic decision-making capabilities are improving and that his judgment at challenging situations is progressing, I will be willing to pay — a lot.

So, Faisal, what do you think about such a report?

Dad, now we are talking! normally, I am not a big fan of your ideas, but this one (if it going to get me v-bucks), is amazing. EpicGames please do something.

At the end (or shall i say the beginning) both Faisal and I, would like to say something to John: We cannot thank you enough for your generosity, knowledge, and support, and for giving us such a once in a lifetime experience. Please accept this humble post as our way of expressing our appreciation.

See you all soon… One more thing, how about showing a few claps for a seven-year-old boy?

You are most welcome to connect via https://twitter.com/KhalidiAlmadani or https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalid-al-madani-2009a1160/