Practice a Double Win Approach
Over the years, I’m still very much inspired by the works of the two much respectful entrepreneurs — Luis Von Ahn and James Boon. Both contributed to the world significantly but in different ways, one digitally and one physically. As I’ve been pondering about their works, I’ve found there is a similarity in their approach. Before I go further, let me start with a brief background of theirs.
Luis Von Ahn, the creator of CAPTCHA (also re-CAPTCHA) and Duolingo, a very prominent entrepreneur in the Internet world. Most of us have used his creation in some ways. He came out with the concept of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test), a tiny distorted alphabetical image that appears on many websites asking visitors to type in the displayed letters and numbers before allowing them to the next page. This is a genius idea of Von Ahn to separate humans from the programs that tend to cause high traffic to the sites for automated processing. Von Ahn created the tool with his advisor — Manuel Blum when he was doing his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He won the MacArthur “Genius Grant” award in 2006 for his work.
While this may seem to be a perfect solution, Von Ahn did not rest on his laurel. He was obsessed that the CAPTCHA can do more than human verification. In one of his statements, Von Ahn said the 60 million CAPTCHA users have been spending 150,000 hours every day. He wanted to capitalize the wasted hours.
In 2007, Von Ahn released re-CAPTCHA, an improved version of CAPTCHA. In re-CAPTCHA, the change is more substantial behind the scene, every time a users pass through the tool, their inputs help to confirm the blurry words extracted from the old books, and the impact? Unknowingly to most of the users, they are digitizing millions of books and make it searchable on the Internet every year — this is a double win approach. Smart, isn’t it?
On the other hand, James Boon, who is lesser known to the Internet world, but is a much-respected person in Cambodia and Colombia. He founded The Elephant Branded products on a whim, the products made out of recycled materials. During his earlier career in Asia, on a particular trip to Cambodia, he noticed there were many cement bags scattered everywhere in a village — a typical scene as the country was undergoing massive development. The people were poor and the basic necessity was not there. An average school kid did not equip with stationery and school bag. The situation struck at James repeatedly.
He started to think about how he could help the local community under such a scarce condition. Luckily, James has known a local person — Pry and his wife, Mi. The couple has been sealing school bags using recycled materials and giving it to school kids. This dawned on James that they can train other villagers (mostly women and old folks) to hand-made school kits using cement bags, a readily available material. To make the products more elegant and marketable, James got help from designers in the West to design products. And the best part is James created a brand for the products — The Elephant Branded. The name derived directly from the cement bags they’re using to hand-made the products. Every product sold will match a school kit donated to the schools throughout Cambodia.
Today, James has over 30 associates in different parts of the world (I’m considering becoming one) to sell the products to the world. The impact of James’s initiative was huge. The local villagers able to earn some money from home, the environment becomes cleaner as they clear the cement bags, the school kids are happier because they are equipped with beautiful school kits. This is again a double win approach.
So, why am I telling you the stories of two unrelated persons? Wait a minute, there is a similarity in them. Von Ahn and James have used the same thought process in their work — the input produces value besides the output. In Von Ahn’s re-CAPTCHA approach, he didn’t want to waste even micro key-stroke energy by the Internet users to digitize millions of books every year, and the outputs are safer websites. The same goes for James, he wanted to help the villagers to have a cleaner environment and school kids to have basic needs. He re-used the cement bags as the input, and the villagers and school kids have a better living as the output. It is a wonderful thought process, isn’t it? The process itself has been producing values.
While I may not able to create such big impact projects as Von Ahn and James, it’s still possible to copy the same thought process and create something that is beneficial at the personal level, and I’ve found it pretty motivating. I’ve been trying to practice this approach in my day-to-day life, such as my routines below.
1. Feeding stray dogs while doing my daily morning jog. (The dogs are happy, and I’m healthier and feel more committed to going for exercise every day)
2. When doing dishwashing, stack the cleaner plates at the top so the water used to clean upper plates flow down and makes the lower plates cleaner (This may sound weird to some of you).
3. Change your 1:1 with your boss to a walking 1:1 (exercise plus collaborating)
4. Convert mundane data quality check work to fancy indicators (so users can notify you when there is an anomaly in data).
5. Writing articles for Medium while improving my grammar.
You get the ideas. Doing work using the double win approach, regardless of the outcome, I still find it motivating and make a good effort sustainable.
Thank you for reading. :)
