Again and again Comments Off

Things you have to do again and again and again are the stuff that plagues nightmares. Mundane and brain-dead repetitive tasks are the reason machines are so popular. I’ve read somewhere that the guy who invented the electric door lock, which is the thing you push a button, it starts to buzz and the you can open the door, was invented and built by a system administrator at an IT company who had to get up every time somebody was at office door and let him in. He hated this so much so he started to build an electric door lock he can open remotely. He later calculated that the time it took him to build the prototypes and make a working copy was far greater than the sum of all the interruptions he would have had if he kept getting up to open the door and he worked for that company for the rest of his life. I couldn’t find a reference for this, but even if it’s not true, it’s still a good story. My first thought was that this was a great example for laziness driving innovation, which I still believe is a major fact and it is also a great example of how a repetitive tasks can drive you crazy. You can end up like poor Charlie Chaplin.

My believe in the evil of repetitive tasks was thoroughly shaken by the assignments Michael Bierut, a professor at the Yale School of Art gave to his students. He asked them to find a task that will only take them a few minutes to complete and do it daily for 100 days. The task had to be something creative, but still, it is a repetitive task. Some of the results are amazing.

The underlying fact is that creativity without some sort of discipline rarely generates great results. And hard work is the secret ingredient behind most, if not all, great achievements. Sometimes repetitive is not so evil. Yet doing exactly the same thing, over and over again will kill more brain cells than you could ever hope to count to, even if you did it daily for the rest of your life.

Some examples of the repetitive tasks

Dancing in 100 different places


100 Uses for a folding chair

Post was inspired by Kottke.

Being Clueless Helps Innovation Comments Off

When you set up to build something, be it a new company, a great service, a product that the world can’t live without, one of the greatest barrier you hit is made from stereotypes. Let’s take luggage as an example. It took us so many years to put the tiny wheels on it yet people knew what the wheel was for many a year. And every year hosts of designers were thinking on how to make the next great bag and didn’t think about it. Why is that? Because a bag should look like this and this and that and doesn’t have wheels. So go wild boys and put flowers on those bag but no wheels. Luckily something snapped and they figured it out, after all.

But what if you took a guy that had never seen a bag yet knows what wheels are and you tell him to build some contraption for moving his belongings from point A to point B? Is he more likely to make a box with wheels on it than something that you have to brake your back to carry around? Probably.

Stereotypes kill ingenuity. Not because people are stupid, nor they lack creativity, it’s just hard to make a different sort of bag when you know what a bag should look like.

That’s why interdisciplinary approaches sometimes give incredible results. See Gary Vaynerchuck, who is a wine guy that started using the web tolls that were available in a way he thought it would work, and it did work! Look at Loren Feldman from 1938Media. Comes from outside the whole web geek culture, takes a different approach, which made sense to him, and nails it.

So next time when something you don’t know how to do comes your way, don’t run the other way, just do it the way it might seem natural to you and maybe you will do it differently then the rest and your way will be better.