makerescape

Game development draws a more artistic developer, I think, and artists are somewhat accustomed to having to give up money and security for doing what they love. Have you ever seen a successful union for musicians? And unions sometimes suck all the creativity and great making out of an industry—-think Detroit in the 70s. I personally would like to see more of the industry spread out across startups, with more employees participating in the stock packages that can potentially create truly life-altering one-time payments in the 6 and 7 figures. But the working conditions are very hard. I’ve accepted that, however, as the price I must pay to focus on what I love to do and get paid well for it.

And S10 is a smartphone. I think I’m seeing the matrix.

Cancer also grows

I call it S1 (simple 1, arrogant and ignorant) vs S2 (simple 2, which is elegant and informed), but I’ve only found it possible to attain S2 after navigating the complexity between these two points, which implies that I’m often guilty of S1 thinking as the genesis of getting to S2, if I have the sand for it.

I’ve observed a hard-to-overcome—-approaching mutual exclusivity—-set of trade-offs that exist between what I’ll call capability innovation and distribution innovation. Musk is a capability innovator first—-he designs things that are better than what we have—-and a distribution innovator second. Tesla is now dealing with a distribution innovation—-which is about how to get the newly improved thing out to as many people as want it—-problem, which is what our investor community focuses on most. But Musk keeps thinking first about how to make a better, faster, cheaper, more eco-friendly car, and second about how to get them produced at scale for as many people as want them.

I am so tired of distribution innovation thinkers calling for the firing of capability innovation CEOs.

Seems to me that distribution innovation has dominated the discussion of business for the last 100 years, and this leads to everyone eating shitty Big Macs and corporate scum who use obsolescence as a profit tactic. That’s Big 3. I say let Tesla stay focused on Capability Innovation and let the market wait. We’ll have self-driving cars for free in no time.

Better still, let’s treat capability innovation and distribution innovation as separate businesses, and let’s support Musk in driving the first while hiring someone else to do the second, with the assumption that Musk will soon build a better product built into the whole cycle.

Can anyone share a link to someone who is figuring that out?

Let me explain what I mean by intimidating, because I’m not talking about work-load. The work involved in mapping a current reality is much more intimidating—-in terms of load—-than daily journaling. But journaling—-which I’ve done: I have a box filled with written personal journals—-turned, for me, less into a faithful map of what I’d actually done and more into an effort to reconcile what had already happened to my goals. So if I had a hard day, I would try to recontextualize it, in my journal, in some positive light that showed how it ultimately contributed to my goals. And that became burdensome and painful ... hence intimidating to me as a concept now.

A current reality map, on the other hand, starts with the objective of forensic impartiality. I’m not doing it with any goal to validate my current approach. I’m just trying to actually see what is happening, with a bigger goal to see how what is happening is NOT aligned to what I want to have happen, so that I can innovate in a way that addresses that inconsistency.

And by framing it this way, it becomes more a process of innovation, which is less intimidating to me than the self-advocacy or self-defense or self-delusion I typically experience in journaling.

seeking to add to the discussion of how to cross-apply lean thinking to habit development, inspired by “What you want to do and what you actually do are not always the same.”

I’ve heard innovators say users can’t tell you what they want and use that a justification for abandoning the study of users. But I’ve found that users can tell you what they do, if they are interviewed thoughtfully and with concern for how they feel about telling you something as vulnerable as what they actually do. They yearn to do it, actually. Especially when they feel supported and heard.

On habits, seems like the same thing applies, but in this case you are interviewing yourself. Keeping a daily log of what you do feels tedious and intimidating. A practice I’ve found helpful is creating not just journals, but actual maps of the current reality of the thing you’re seeking to improve. Detailed. With artifacts. Like on a wall. And then a separate activity is to find the places in the reality that least map to the outcomes you are trying to achieve. And then, with these problems identified, you can ask the question: what is the simplest thing I can do now to adjust my behaviors in these problem areas in a way that accelerates my progress towards the outcome I want?” I think I’m going to try this out.