BORING
It doesn’t really matter where you are, it might be Dubai, Singapore, or Chicago, and most coffee bars look exactly the same. If you are looking for a co-working space, you quickly discover that the name and ‘story’ are the biggest difference between the options. If you want to buy a home in Amsterdam, it probably looks like this:
Brands of today:
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We are turning the world into a boring place.
Why?
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BORING.
When we are young you imagine a world you are excited about, full of adventures.
While growing older, we get conditioned by the world around us; we are too busy being liked, and we have the constant urge to be praised. As a result, we train - or improve - from a place of anxiety, constantly looking for prescriptions instead of the sincere urge to better understand things.
We look to 'others' (or things) to see what is possible, instead of being open and ask ourselves the question; where are the limits?
If somebody else can do it, I can do it.
In the 1940s, the mile record was pushed to 4:01, where it stood for nine years, as runners struggled with the idea that, just maybe, the experts had it right. Perhaps the human body had reached its limit.
On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier, running the distance in 3:59.4. As part of his training, he relentlessly visualized the achievement to create a sense of certainty in his mind and body.
Barely a year after Bannister’s accomplishment, someone else ran a mile in under 4 minutes. Then some more runners did. Now, it’s almost routine.
The reason why we build boring things.
Let's circle back to the web. It's BORING.
Rory Sutherland writes in his book Alchemy that people are afraid to come up with surprising idea's. We basically use the things we learned from someone else, and pass on the information On.
Sutherland; “when you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic”. And magic is exciting, the opposite of boring.
When a pilot is taking off I'm happy he uses his 'logic' brain, but at the same time, the people who survived the Hudson flight are more than happy that the pilot was creative and used his intuition.
The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.
Rory Sutherland
How do we turn the ship around?
Well I think the fasted why is to burn the ship down and start over.
Most new things we start - and become a success - don't make a lot of sense at the beginning. if it did, it already existed. Take Wikipedia for example: 'Let's create a free encyclopedia!' In hindsight, it makes sense, but at the beginning, it really didn't.
We form opinions around topics with the goal to be praised; we don't really explore what it is really about. For example, Twitter launched a feature recently that warns you to read the article first before you retweet it. This feature perfectly describes the attention span of Twitter users; people.
Places like zora.co are the things that excite me even I don't fully understand the whole NFT world yet, but it is definitely not boring!
This new technology - non-fungible tokens - seems to give a certain group control, inspiration, and tools to explore new and interesting ideas. It doesn't always make sense, but as I mentioned before, Wikipedia didn't either.
The point? Technology unlocks new potential ways to make things less boring. Another thing that all these tools have in common is that there is no team behind the art/creation. It's always an individual who is curious to explore a new domain. The interesting voices in the journalism/media world are the people with a newsletter. Maybe we had it all backward, and that innovation and new ideas come from the individual, not the collective.
Creative and new ideas often don't work right from the start; it's only via an iterative process they come to life. We need freedom and patience to let this happen; we need to play, and unfortunately for this, we are always too busy and rational.
“Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.”
Our goal is to create an environment where people can play and create. This is a bumpy road, and we fail our way to success.