Better The Devil That You Don’t Know
You learn by living. This is the name of a book by Eleanor Roosevelt, one of my favorites; and I’ve recalled this title not just to re-affirm the simple truth that we do indeed learn by living, but to take it further. We do learn by living, and — this is my take — we learn by exploring the unknown.
What does exploring the unknown has to do with learning at a tech company, one might ask? To be honest, I’m not very comfortable linking back to the word “tech”, as I write about Learning. Any modifying limiter applied to this word looks like a misnomer. Yet, in all obviousness, learning has become infested with modifying limiters. If we work at a tech company, we are supposed to be eager to learn more and more of such and such disciplines; and the AI gear forces us to break our interests into narrower and narrower clusters. Many of us have been there: eager to expand our thinking, we enthusiastically pick our interests at a news app, or at a publishing platform, only to find out later… that we are short on fresh air. In an attempt to fix, we’d then go and rehash those preferred interests, and…. narrow them even more. This time, we reason, I’ve done a good job, so surely those fine-tuned AI algorithms will bring some interesting new information to my screen. Sorry to say that, but — from my experience — it’d hardly be true.
Our company, Quandoo, is one of the world’s leading restaurant reservation platforms. Someone has seen an opportunity in building such a platform to transform people’s dining experiences. But — here’s the part about learning, broad thinking and creativity — what would it take to come up with a vision to transform other kinds of reservation experiences, like, for someone at R&D? I don’t mean hotels, taxis, flights, etc. because these are all obvious. What about a platform for reserving organic produce with the local farmers? Or, for fishing/hunting guided tours? Or.. for other, limitless, pursuits/experiences? You have to get out there and explore to carve out a niche. The proverbial “frazzled dad” of Juicero is a poor guy who’s seen little of life away from their office and their computer screen (which serves them the AI-produced content feeds).
The thing is, AI often stands for “things we know through and through”, and it’s perfect at making us stick with what we were, rather than challenge us to what we can become. There’s only so much you can bite from clustered chunks of content feeds, and they would hardly satisfy this deep inner longing to learn & to explore, if you know what I mean. We started this publication with several incentives in mind, and one of them is this: we are eager to learn from one another, in a human way, through stories which embrace the diversity of our professional, personal, and ethnic backgrounds (Quandoo operates globally).
Care to surprise me ?:)
