Greatness

People who change the world for the better do so because they are led to do it by their conscience. Sometimes it's intuition of what the future should look like. Sometimes it's belief in enriching people's lives. Sometimes it's a feeling about what makes the best experience. Sometimes it's the sense that they are meant to do this.

Once in a generation

When you find yourself in the presence of greatness, there is no way to ignore it. You are stricken by the clarity, the simplicity, and the inarguably correct statements. Their way of understanding is fresh and insightful. Imagine talking with a scientist or mathematician that changed the world: Euclid, Sir Isaac Newton, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Srinvasa Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, or Albert Einstein! Imagine spending the afternoon in conversation with a great leader that forever changed the way society works, like King Solomon, Charlemagne, Emperor Augustus, or Abraham Lincoln. How I would like to sit and exchange musical ideas with a composer who forever changed the language of music such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, John Lennon, or Paul McCartney (I still have that chance, since McCartney is still around!). And what could I do but sit in admiration at the brilliance of the artists and geniuses that forever affected style and ignited our imaginations, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Jan Vermeer, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, or Maurits Cornelis Escher?

When I was an idealistic kid, I wondered about each of these people. I wondered what it would be like to be one of them. Was that even something I would want? How did they accomplish what they did? What sort of difficulties did they go through?

I had so many questions! And I was bursting with ideas also. How should I channel my creative energies? How would people look at my life's work?

It was an interesting motivation, to imagine myself in the shoes of someone great. Soon I forgot all about it, though, and immersed myself in number theory, computer programming, music, and analytic geometry.

I couldn't figure out how they did what they did. All I had was their work to look at. But, once exposed to it, I began to want to create my own music, write my own programs, investigate my own areas of mathematics. It was the start of a journey that I am still on today.

The weight

Talented people are also flawed. It's a bit like they carry the weight of their greatness that is always with them. This theme, with the ring of truth to it, has been expressed in fiction several times. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, a beloved character adept at following clues and making deductions, was only the intense, enlightened sleuth when the game was afoot. During off times, he fell prey to cocaine addiction.

But is the theme of the tortured genius only around because it makes a better story? No.

Beethoven went deaf at the pinnacle of his fame. Einstein had his remorse at unleashing the atom and yet urged Roosevelt to build the atomic bomb. Van Gogh courted madness and tinnitus, even cutting off his ear. Newton's mother abandoned him, remarrying when he was only 3, which left him a furiously competitive, ruthless, and paranoid man who never had any romantic relationships of any kind. Ramanujan lived in squalor much of his life, starving at some points, and yet made discoveries of such genius that even today we are still struggling to decrypt them. When they tried to school him in modern mathematics, he spouted ideas at such a furious pace that it became useless to continue.

So let's look behind the curtain. What makes this happen?

Some people believe, once they have exerted great change on the world, that they deserve more than mere humans. This is a corrupting influence borne of pride, conceit, even megalomania. Such people may make great changes, but they are rarely truly great. This kind of flaw has brought us dictators, generals, and warriors.

Other people find, when they are working obsessively on a very hard project, that it is their destiny to solve the problem. Even that it is their duty to humanity to build it. I know that, once I am wrapped up in a problem, I often think of nothing else. It is this vacuum, however, that leads to the pathways of delusion. Still, you have to get your motivation from somewhere!

It's true that people can be driven to overcome their difficulties in life. If they are hurt by those around them, they might easily escape into a self-created world where they can feel comfortable. Such a world allows them to channel their genius. Or they might be disabled in some way. The compensating behavior for a disability can also become a framework for channeling their specific talents. This was certainly the case in Beethoven's career. In his silent world, he was no longer influenced by the local styles and instead created his own. Work can be a distraction from a painful existence. In Karl Friedrich Gauss' case, the death of his wife and son in 1809 led to a depression that he couldn't shake. Only his work could give him respite from the blackness.

Madness can be an influence that compels the genius to excel. There can be ideas in the head that are literally struggling to get out. Sometimes creation is the only therapy that helps. This was certainly the case with Vincent van Gogh. Nikola Tesla suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, finding it ever necessary to do things in threes and loathing to touch round objects.

Obsession can be a weight as well. Someone driven to solve a problem will exhibit behavior that is simply obsessive. This can drive them to forget about the responsibilities of life such as relationships, food, and sleep.

Producing greatness

To make a great thing is not just something that is done in a few minutes. The first thing you must do is to understand fully what the concept is for what you are making. And write it down. Clarify it. Make drawings. But never lose sight of what makes it great. Spend some time thinking about the concept. Figure out what its value is. Put the concept away and return to it later. It happens that the best things might come to you when you are driving, shaving, or even dreaming.

To produce it may take many, many tries. I have mentioned before that a large fraction of things tried often must simply be thrown away. This is the way it is when I am solving an unbounded, difficult problem with no general closed-form solution. Examples of this are common.

When Thomas Alva Edison was working on the light bulb, he tried 2000 different materials before he settled on the carbon filament. Isaac Newton spent a laborious eighteen months working on his Principia, itself the result of a decade of thought. In it, he developed the infinitesimal calculus, laboriously rewriting it in standard geometrical terms so astronomers of his day could understand it.

When producing a great product sometimes the product is not the only thing you have to produce. It is clear in many cases that you have to build a whole system of capabilities for it to live in. A context of usefulness.

For Edison, it wasn't enough to create the light bulb. He also had to create a generator of electricity so there was an ecosystem to support it. When Newton was writing his Principia, he had to incorporate and prove the work of people before him, like Johannes Kepler, whose second law, shown above, had already been empirically verified.

For Steve Jobs, it wasn't enough to produce the iPod, iPhone and iPad. He also had to build the iTunes media store, the app store, and several other web services. These are considered to be essential to the success of the iDevices.

You learn things along the way to creating and perfecting it. Some aspects of your product don't even occur to you until it gets used.

This wasn't the case with Albert Einstein, whose General Theory of Relativity finally provided the framework that superseded Newton's physical laws. While it was introduced in 1915 and correctly accounted for the procession of Mercury's perihelion (part of its orbital mechanics), it wasn't until 1959 and later that a systematic series of precision test had verified many of its provisions.

Productizing greatness

Most inventions are not so theoretical. With these, you get a chance to make sure they are right. And the best inventions, the ones that really have an effect, are productized.

If you are making a product, decide what it is that you want this product to be. Do you want it to be the lowest price product so you can sell a lot of them? Or do you want it to enrich the life of the person who buys it? You must deeply care what happens after they buy the product. It's not about what they will do with the product. It's about what the product will do for them. You must understand how it will transform their lives. How will they feel about the product? You must find a way to own the customer because they believe that their life is better. What you don't want to happen is for the user to not care at all about the product. Then it will just sit in a drawer. Instead of being on their person at all times.

To ship a product without first perfecting it is not a good thing. So, when developing the product, use it for everything. Keep on improving it and its main modes of use. Make sure that everybody using the product will appreciate it as a fundamental advancement. Ensure that it will change their lives as well as the nature of all products that come after it.

Fearlessness

Great people don't fear change. They embrace it, right? No, that misses the point! You should realize it's much more than that.

Change is their most valuable tool. Let's look at a key example that is already changing things.

In the recent conference call, when asked about the iPad, which appears to be cannibalizing Mac sales, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said this:

We’ve learned over the years not to worry about cannibalization of our own products. It’s much better for us to do that than somebody else to do it. The far, far bigger opportunity here is the 80 million to 90 million PCs that are being sold per quarter. There’s still over 300 million PCs being bought per year, and I think a great number of those people would be much better off buying an iPad or a Mac. So that’s a much bigger opportunity for Apple, and instead of being focused on cannibalizing ourselves, I look at it much more that it’s an enormous incremental opportunity for us.

Instead of fearing the cannibalization effect, he is using the effect to gain entry into a larger market. He's seeing the forest for the trees. Disruption thus becomes a useful tool and a cantilever to huge potential growth.

Disruption is necessary for change. So, if you want to change the world, think about what comes next, and how that process of disruption will occur.

The Nail That Sticks Out

There is a rule in conformist societies (and companies) that implicitly limits their evolution: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. This rule almost single-handedly leads to stagnation.

Why Hammer It Down?

When a civilization is structured, the nature of specialization helps to build an intricate machine of the society, where individuals must do their specific part to keep society going.

And when various winnowing forces such as feudal warfare, disease, or sequestering on an island keep a society's population constant, or force it to grapple with a shrinking base, the structure of society must be tested and tempered. The machine that society has become must operate in lockstep to survive. The pressure on an individual to carry on his parents' trade and role models becomes very strong indeed. An individual with new thoughts, swerving from traditional roles and creating disruption, cannot be tolerated. And such rules are born.

Culture thus evolves to accommodate and sustain this pressure on the individual.

However, this doesn't happen quite as easily when a civilization's population is sufficiently large during its structure-formation stages. When services can be performed by a small fraction of the population base, there is actually pressure to move away or to do something different. Progress is rewarded, not squelched.

For the same reasons, competition also leads to progress.

On an island there is practically nowhere to go, since the barrier to moving away is essentially life in exile. But consider for a minute the case study of San Francisco, where the population has held nearly constant since the 1950s. There it is possible to move away but sweeping changes are still difficult to accomplish. Yet culture continues to evolve. Mass transit was developed. Even urban renovation continues.

Cultural forces can also promote or prevent stagnation. San Francisco's culture has changed over the last few decades significantly, and this has prevented stagnation. Pockets of culture remain and provide alternatives to what could have been a regimented, conformist society. Particularly after the 1906 earthquake and two world wars acted as winnowing forces.

Culture and Its Influence

Culture can also be a force that leads to societal stagnation because culture provides us with laws, through morality, and peer pressure, and thus imposes its will on individual behavior. When culture is too regimented and strict, this can lead to suppression of new ideas. In the middle ages, Copernicus' views of a solar-centric astronomical neighborhood were suppressed in favor of an established view. Even Galileo, whose views were provable in ten minutes with common everyday objects, had his views suppressed.

Culture can come from religion, this is true. But it can also be influenced by war and other external forces. After a war, for instance, a local culture's survival can be threatened and so the pressure of sticking around to keep the culture alive can become paramount.

The conformist society also promotes a rigid class structure with despotic rulers. The fear of being hammered down is constantly reinforced by this.

Copying

So, what does a structured, conformist society do when it is presented with external forces that threaten to overcome it?

It evolves.

But it does so by examining the advantages of its external threat and duplicating them. In this process the society applies its machine-like efficiency to survival. The society is already efficiently shaped for the purpose of retooling and adapting. Feudal warfare and the constant advances of weapon-making have shaped the society to this task.

What a society must never do is to kill off its talent, and thus its greatest advantage. It is this capability that keeps it alive during times of adversity. It is the talent that keeps a society mobile and adaptable.

Disruption Then

But there are inherent adversarial forces that even the talented cannot surmount: disruptive forces.

Technology can provide disruption like no other force.

I have talked about disruptive technology before and its effects on brick-and-mortar, the dissemination of information, the replacement of old gadgets by new ones (cameras, televisions, games, and music media).

I have also talked about the disruption of fossil fuels and their eventual replacement by battery energy storage.

Disruption Now

Right now there is a disruption in mobile technologies that is challenging the old guard of desktop systems. This is a serious problem for the old guard. Either they must embrace the change or they must use disinformation to fight it. And the second option only really postpones their inevitable death. Adapt or die. Never was this more at issue than at Microsoft.

Their core talents were in the desktop Wintel paradigm, which is quickly fading. Megalithic applications like Office and Word are quickly being replaced by the lighter mobile applications, which can be sold over the air. The advantages of an adaptable, mobile enterprise are obvious.

Now Microsoft is being criticized for implementing two different interfaces in Windows 8, provoking some usability researchers to declare that users should just wait for Windows 9.

As for the advantages of the mobile enterprise, consider for a moment the Apple store and the Microsoft store.

Here's a YouTube video contrasting the traffic of the two stores on Black Friday, the massive shopping day after the American holiday, Thanksgiving.

Microsoft copied the spartan wood tables and lighter ambience of the Apple store, yet their inability to embrace mobile point-of-sale systems seems to be costing them.

At Apple stores, the salespeople help you one-on-one, and use an iPhone with an integrated credit-card reader to complete your transaction. You even sign for the credit card transaction on the iPhone. The first time I visited an Apple store, I got the sense that it was the future of the in-store buying experience.

Let's contrast that with the Microsoft store experience. A friend of mine went to a Microsoft store to buy a Surface tablet. He was directed to a single place where the sales took place (sounds a bit like a cash register doesn't it?). The point-of-sale system crashed, complicating the transaction significantly.

While Microsoft stores might start using iPhones with integrated credit card readers, it seems improbable that a Microsoft employee would actually suggest that. Perhaps there is a Windows 8 Phone alternative? Well, if so, why aren't they using it?

My point is this: Microsoft has almost 100,000 employees. They should have some fraction of those employees building apps for their Windows 8 Phone ecosystem. They can't afford to catch up by attracting developers at this point! That would take precious time. They should already have such a point-of-sale system in their bag of tricks. Don't these guys think ahead?

My suspicion is that somebody probably wanted to do just that, but he got hammered down.

New ideas and new concepts replace old ones. Many of the trends that shaped the progress on the desktop simply do not work in the mobile computing space. Even Moore's law seems outdated, as I mention in one of my more recent posts Keep Adding Cores? It's clear that computers are simply built differently as a result of this disruption. When you consider that batteries are the power source, then power management becomes central. Efficient and targeted computation becomes highly desirable, rather than general processor computing.

What Disruption Comes From

Disruption comes from people.

People with new ideas.

New ideas whose value can easily be demonstrated to a large number of people.

If everybody sees the value then they want it.

When everybody gets it, this results in significant change.

Change in how people spend their time. Change in what people buy. Change in how people think.

So disruption comes from that nail that didn't get hammered down: an individual with radical new ideas and a conviction that his or her ideas can succeed like nothing else.