Life explained through technology
by Yann Girard (author of Confessions of an Entrepreneur)
We all somehow struggle with life. Some struggle more, some struggle less.
Some of us don’t like our jobs. Some of us are in crappy relationships. Others are lonely and dream about being in a relationship. Some seek happiness but can’t seem to find it, whereas everybody else seems to already have found it.
And once we found what we were looking for we want more. We’re never really satisfied. It seems like a never ending journey. A journey with no clear destination. It looks like a race we will never be able to finish. A race we never really signed up for.
A race we were forced to participate in the moment we were born.
Here’s a fascinating thing about life that I realized over the past few years that I felt like sharing with you.
It seems that everything about life and the things we care about so deeply can be explained through technology. Life seems to follow the exact same patterns like technology does.
Life, just like technology follows the path of evolution. Old things are being replaced by new things. Old things become obsolete. Disruption. We strive for more. New is always better.
And the way technology works can be applied to all sorts of different areas of our lives. There is this one thing that pops up over and over again. It’s the only thing that I actually remember from my five years of business school studies.
The technology adoption lifecycle (FYI: I added the critical mass part. It might be located somewhere else. I don’t know).
It splits the diffusion of innovation into many different categories. The first categories are the most critical ones. If we’re not able to attract the first group of customers, our innovation will never reach mass market.
Hence, it will never become a breakthrough thing.
The most important thing for a new innovation or a new product is to reach critical mass. And the way how to reach critical mass is one of the biggest misconceptions of today.
Most of us believe that technology will help us to reach critical mass.
But what it really does is that it hinders our innovation from spreading properly. It seduces us into launching globally and in a highly unfocused way.
As described by Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future the only way to reach critical mass is by starting off highly focused with a laser targeted (and usually small) market.
Just like Facebook started at Harvard, PayPal started with super sellers on Ebay and Ebay itself did it with a highly targeted segment of vintage stuff sellers. Same holds true for Amazon. They started off with books before they branched out into other domains.
Only once these companies became their niche leaders, usually very small and highly targeted niches, they started going into broader markets. Markets, they could easily have been addressing right from the very start. But they didn’t.
Paul Graham, partner of Y-Combinator called it “Do things that don’t scale”, which brings it to the next level. What he basically says is that you need to do almost everything manually in the beginning of a new technology to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
And once you found out what really works and you reached critical mass (by pretty much shaking every single customer’s hand personally) you go out there and start scaling. And that’s where technology really kicks in.
Before that it’s a very tedious and time consuming task.
Technology won’t help us to get there. It won’t make us an overnight success. Overnight success is about building a solid foundation first. It’s about taking your time to figure out what the market really wants. And once you found it you might be able to accelerate growth through technology.
And that can take everything from a few years to a few decades.
Here’s another very interesting concept about technology, which basics we can extract and apply to our lives.
As we all know, everything in life reaches its end at one point or the other and it’s being taken over by something else. The manual typewriter was replaced by the electric typewriter. The typewriter was replaced by the personal computer. The personal computer was replaced by laptops and tablets (or something else. I don’t know).
Your current girlfriend will get replaced by another girlfriend and so on. It’s called the “s-curve theory” or the innovator’s dilemma. Here’s a picture that nicely illustrates that theory:
And these two concepts can be applied to pretty much every single area of our lives. They can be used to explain everything (ok some things) about life.
Or at least they helped me to understand life with all of its ups and downs a lot better.
So here are a few areas of our lives where we can apply either one of the two mentioned concepts or both of them.
Dating
Dating is like entrepreneurship (or introducing a new technology or a product). You only need to get it right once. But to get there you need quite some training and you need to practice a lot.
Most of us just don’t get it right the first time.
You might be the Mark Zuckerberg of dating, but the truth is most of us are not.
If I say most of us, I especially mean me. I just suck at dating. I sucked even more a few years ago. But at least I got better at it over the years.
Hence, for most of us dating should be seen as an exercise. An exercise that prepares us for the one date. The one date we need to get right. Everything else is just a means to an end.
Every messed up relationship will improve your game and help you to shift your s-curve slightly more towards greatness. Towards being great at dating. Being ready for that one date…
New Skills
Acquiring new skills is tough. Learning a language is tough. Even though we try to growth hack our brains away it simply doesn’t work. The only thing that really works is a lot of manual work, persistence and discipline.
Technology might remind us about certain things and make the learning process more convenient but it will certainly not allow us to learn any new skill any faster or better.
The essence is to attain a certain level of skill. A certain level of vocabulary. A certain level of grammar understanding.
And once we get there, once we reach our critical mass we can go out there and either teach what we just learned to accelerate growth or simply move to that country, live there and constantly speak the language.
We need to get there one customer, ah sorry, I meant word at a time. Or practice at a time. Only then will we be able to master a new skill.
Marriage
A lot of marriages fail. I’ve never been married. I only heard about the statistics. So I really have no clue about what I’m going to talk about right here. It’s just a theory that I have about it. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t.
There are hundreds if not thousands of reasons why marriages or relationships fail. But there is one particular thing I want to stress out in the context of this post. And it can again be explained with the above mentioned concepts.
It usually takes years and years of practice to understand the opposite sex and find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.
And once you found this person, once you reach the point of critical mass, gained enough experience you just want to stay with this person forever. You get married. You’re happy.
But then all of a sudden you start to drift apart.
You start developing into different directions. Your interests change. Your desires change. And sometimes even your personality somehow changes. Your s-curve starts to shift to the right. But your partner’s doesn’t.
Your s-curve might shift more to the right than your partners s-curve.
And that’s when you start to drift apart. You don’t get along with each other any longer. You file a divorce.
So what can you do about this? How can you prevent drifting apart?
I guess, a great way of preventing it is to grow together.
To try to shift your s-curves towards greatness together. That sounds nice in theory. But how does that look like in real life?
As mentioned earlier, I don’t have any real life experience with marriages. But here’s a great example I’ve observed recently. Again, it’s about one of my favorite writers, James Altucher.
He seems to be doing exactly what I just described.
To me, it looks like he’s growing together with his wife along the s-curve. And they also seem to shift it more towards greatness together.
What he basically does is that he learns so many different things about life by interviewing a lot of inspiring and successful people. And you know who his partner in crime is on his podcasts? His wife!
Even though his wife doesn’t have any experience (what’s experience worth anyways?) that’s related to his experience at all, he drags her along (willingly or unwillingly I don’t know) and she learns as much as he does.
They share one s-curve.
And they use their combined strengths to shift their s-curve towards greatness, instead of doing it all by themselves. They even wrote a book together called “The Power of No”.
Maybe this is the way for an ever lasting marriage. Or maybe they’ll break up tomorrow. I don’t know…
Love
We can only truly love other people once we learned to love ourselves. I don’t mean it in a selfish kind of way. I mean it in a way that if you’re not completely and absolutely comfortable and happy in your own skin you won’t be able to love someone else.
Instead, you’ll be busy complaining about this and that, be busy trying to figure your own life out. You’ll simply be too busy living your own life. Caring about your own stuff. And then you simply don’t have the time and patience to accept, to love someone else.
And loving yourself takes time. Accepting yourself the way you are takes a hell lot of time. Loving yourself takes a hell lot of time. Hell, even figuring yourself out takes a hell lot of time.
It’s a tedious process. A process I’m currently going through myself. One baby step towards critical mass at a time. One slight shift of my s-curve at a time…
Success
Success comes to the ones that constantly plant their seeds. The ones that don’t bet on just one single horse. The ones that are patient, persistent and willing to grab every opportunity that will bring them closer to success.
Most people will wait for success. They believe in overnight success. To them, opportunities look a lot like hard work. So they stick to what they already know. They stagnate before they ever really reached critical mass.
If you’re not constantly willing to innovate, aren’t flexible enough and not willing to reinvent yourself over and over again you’ll stagnate. And you’ll never be able to evolve along or shift your s-curve more towards greatness.
Your seeds might never grow into a beautiful flower…
Failure
Failure sucks. I hate failure. I don’t want to fail. But sometimes failure is the one thing that pushes us onto a s-curve that finally works. A curve that will allow us to ride it all the way to the top, until another s-curve comes along and disrupts our current s-curve…
Happiness
We’re all on our own little pursuit of happiness. We all want to be happy. What is this happiness anyways? Does it even exist? I don’t know. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just something brands, commercials and the TV wants us to believe in.
So that we buy more things. So that we put more money into their pockets…
So we buy things. Things that make us happy for a while. Things we actually don’t need. And the moment we realize that we wasted money on things we didn’t really need, we get upset.
And to be happy again we need to buy even more things. And then the things we own start to own us. It’s a vicious circle.
What’s for sure is that we won’t find happiness by pretending that we’re happy. By posting only happy pictures, inspirational quotes and super smart things on Facebook. No, this will never make us happy.
It might even drag us into a dark place.
A place where we start to believe in the things people post on their walls. A place where everybody else seems to have found happiness. Everybody except us.
Posting happy things won’t make us happy.
It takes a hell lot of practice and time until we reach the critical mass of happiness. Until we will be able to not only be happy but to also spread happiness to everybody else out there.
The critical mass of happiness is about building a solid foundation.
Happiness needs a solid foundation, just like a house needs a solid foundation. The foundation includes a lot of different things. I believe at its core is the ability to love yourself first. What else?
Well, someone a lot smarter than me said you need to be healthy. You need to be physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. You can read more about this here.
Jobs
We all hate the 9 to 5 grind. Well, I actually I don’t know about you. But I definitely hated it. Doing the same mind numbing things every single day. Things nobody really cares about. Drawing and working on slides for weeks and weeks. As if these slides would be able to change the course of humanity…
Even though we might hate our jobs, we hold on to them. We hold on them them just like an incumbent (a dinosaur company) holds on to their current business. A business that’s declining in revenues, margins, perspective and future.
We know that we already reached the critical mass at our current jobs. We’re already past the point of scaling our careers. And now we’re stagnating. What we now need to do is to reinvent our lives. Our careers. And we know it.
But we feel stuck. Super, mega stuck. We don’t know what to do.
We’re afraid to disrupt our own lives. Just like the incumbent doesn’t want to disrupt his own business. They close their eyes at the obvious.
Instead we start to believe in incremental innovation. We hold on to a life that only incrementally gets better. One decade at a time. We’re stuck on that one s-curve.
We’re barely moving along the curve anymore. That curve that won’t exist anymore in a few years. That job that will be gone in a few years.
That curve that might ultimately lead to a wasted life, wasted potential because we were too afraid to disrupt our own lives. Deep in your heart you know what to do. How to shift that curve towards greatness.
You just need to accept and embrace it…
I could probably go on with this list forever. But I somehow got the feeling that I repeat myself. I get bored. I want to write about something else. I want to create something else. Something more beautiful. Something amazing.
I feel like it’s about time to disrupt my own writing once again. I want to disrupt my own writing with something even better. Hell, I want to disrupt my entire life. I want to reach critical mass as soon as possible and then jump on to the next s-curve. I don’t like stagnation.
As a matter of fact I want to jump onto the next s-curve right now. I don’t want to wait any longer. I don’t want to wait for the future to arrive. I want to shape it instead…
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