Everything You Call Life

Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

— Steve Jobs

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be true at all. Just google “top inventions of all time” and you come up with lists like this, where you immediately wonder, am I really smarter than the creator of the nuclear reactor? Could you really create a steam engine if you were teleported back in time? Let me give you 100 lifetimes, could you create penicillin from scratch? How about electricity? Maybe that was too hard, but surely you could at least create the vacuum tube? X-Rays?

So how on earth is it possible that these people that shaped reality were no smarter than me? At best, it’s false modesty; at worst, it’s delusion. I thought this way for quite a long time.

It’s undoubtedly true that some of these inventions were made by the incredibly intelligent individuals. How many of us could have invented the transformer architecture and kicked off an AI revolution? But the most important aspect is the ability to think with originality and separate one’s self from the herd.

Here’s Steve Job’s own hero, Edwin Land, holder of 535 patents and one of the preeminent scientists of his day:

Just as the great steps in scientific history are taken by the giants of the centuries when they slough off the tentacles of the group mind, so every significant step in each single field, is taken by some individual who has freed himself from a way of thinking that is held by friends and associates who may be more intelligent, better educated, better disciplined, but who have not mastered the art of the fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge. By very definition things which we care about most — the important breakthroughs — do not occur spontaneously in multiple because they are the result of a very special way of seeing, by a very special mind.

It seems that, even among scientists, it is not the smartest or most educated that make the innovations, but the most original. The more educated one is, the more entrenched one becomes in the old ways of thinking. Perhaps that is why, so often, one must possess a certain degree of naivety to challenge the status quo.

It’s might be true that an innovation in nuclear engineering requires a higher IQ than an innovation in marketing, but the required IQ is likely much lower than you think. And that innovation likely won’t come from the smartest nuclear engineer, but rather the most original.

The tendency to assume something is so complex that it simply cannot be understood is a dangerous, self-deriding form of the mind-projection fallacy. In the classic case, you assume because you know something everyone else must, too. Here, the fallacy is inverted. Because you haven’t spent a decade in nuclear engineering, and thus cannot make smart comments about it, you assume those who can are simply geniuses. But what if you committed multiple decades of your life to that field? What if you let it consume you, the way others did? All of a sudden, might those breakthroughs that once seemed reserved only for Einstein and Oppenheimer might become accessible to you, too?

In other words, we mistake insights that were produced by having a certain context as having been the product of raw intelligence. Instead, focus on cultivating that originality and acquire context with work experience, talking to experts in the field, or simply experiencing a problem first-hand.

The more biographies I read, the more I see the truth behind this simple observation from Jobs. Changing the world, in even the simplest of ways, is both challenging and incredibly rewarding. You need to be arrogant enough to presume you can change the world, but not naive enough to assume it won’t push back. But if you do manage to contribute something lasting to what we collectively call life, you’ll be remembered in the annals of history forever. And that should be incredibly inspiring and exciting for all of us.

Unlike other blog posts, this is meant to be a living document that I edit whenever I find a new example. Hopefully the mountain of evidence convinces you. It certainly convinced me.

1. James Dyson

   My tale is one of not being brilliant. I wasn’t even trained as an engineer or scientist. I did, however, have the bloody-mindedness not to follow convention, to challenge experts and to ignore Doubting Thomases. I am also someone who is prepared to slog through prototype after prototype searching for the breakthrough. If a slow starter like me could succeed, surely this might encourage others.”

   —- James Dyson, in Against the Odds

   Dyson wasn’t an engineer or a scientist, and he had never even built a vaccuum before. He was just a men who was fed up with the clunky, heavy, expensive Hoover vaccuums of his day. And five years and 5,127 prototypes later, he invented the first bag-less vaccuum cleaner. Perhaps it would have taken an engineer or scientist only a few hundred prototypes. But it didn’t matter because originality and determination were the missing ingredients, not intellect.

2. Gaston Glock

   Before his gun became a global phenomenon, Mr. Glock managed a car-radiator factory near Vienna and, with his wife, ran a small business in his garage making door hinges, curtain rods and knives. He had not handled a gun since he was a teenage conscript in Hitler’s Wehrmacht at the end of World War II.

   —- NYT profile of Gaston Glock

   Gaston Glock, billionaire and founder of the Glock firearms company, had never made a handgun before founding Glock! But he had a simple question: why did guns have to be so complicated? Why were there so many parts, which both drove up the cost and decreased reliability. What happened if you stripped it down to the minimum set of parts and had only those? This question led him to producing a gun famed for never jamming, being ultra reliable, and most importantly, quite cheap for its day.

3. Estee Lauder

   Because it was feminine, all-American, very girl-next-door to take baths. A woman could buy herself a bottle of bath oil the way she would buy a lipstick. Without feeling guilty, without waiting for her birthday, anniversary, graduation, without giving tiresome hints to her husband.

   —- Estee, a Success Story

   It was a time when it was frowned upon for women to buy their own perfume, which meant that even though there were incredibly high margins, they were rarely purchased (usually as gifts by men for women). So how does one go about changing that? Perhaps women don’t go out on dates with suitors remarkably often, but certainly (one hopes) they bathe more frequently. And it just so happened that Youth Dew was coincidentally scented. Estee had combined the high margins of a perfume with a product that was used daily, like soap. And thus the brand that came to define a generation was born.

4. Hans Wilsdorf

   Believe it or not, once upon a time it was frowned upon for men to wear watches on their wrists. Real men wore pocketwatches that lasted a hundred years, passed down from father to soon through the generations. Wrist watches, called “wristlets” at the time, were deemed far too feminine for any self respecting man to wear. Enter Hans Wilsdorf, who single-handedly popularized and invented the concept of luxury men’s wirstwatches.

   —- Little Book of Rolex: The Story Behind the Iconic Brand

5. Sol Price

   Sol Price is widely credited to be the father of modern retail, with dozens of inventions. Sam Walton (Walmart), Jim Senegal (Costco), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have all taken various leaves out of his book. The idea of discounting as a way to increase profits is clearly traced back to Sol. Even more unbelievable was the fact that at a certain time, most places in the US had mandated price floors preventing retailers from providing any real value to the customer. To get around this, Sol invented a membership club.

   —- Sol Price Retail Revolutionary and Social Innovator

6. Sam Zemurray

   Once upon a time, bananas were considered an exotic fruit. Most people in the United States had never even seen one in real life. And the United Fruit Company, the undisputed banana monopolist of its day, felt that the conventional wisdom was to simply discard any mildly yellow banana. These “ripes” were simply garbage that had to be thrown out. Enter Sam Zemurray. What if there were nothing wrong with the yellow bananas at all — what if there was only something wrong with United Fruit’s distribution network that took so long to deliver them? Zemurray takes this idea all the way to the very top and eventually runs United Fruit itself.

   —- The Fish that Ate the Whale

7. Adi Dasler

   Isn’t it strange that every athlete, regardless of sport, wears the same type of shoe? Shouldn’t the demands of the sport require radically different shoes to be made? This was the case in 1924, and this simple question spawned Adidas, which as of this writing is a 47 billion dollar company.

8. Ralph Lauren

   Even as of the late 1960s, there were no menswear designers! There were fashion designers who were men, of course. I pointed to many in my own post How London Lost Fashion. But fashion was a thing for women, and men just bought from brands, not individual designers.

   Enter Ralph Lauren. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that men wanted nice things too. This was a time when department stores didn’t even have individual sections! They just grouped all polo’s together. Ralph went store by store, starting with Bloomingdales, and demands to have the store carve out his own ‘Ralph Lauren’ popup section to market his own goods better.

   —- Ralph Lauren: The Man Behind the Mystique

9. Henry Ford

   Of course everyone knows of Ford and the Model T. But as he was manufacturing thousands of Model T’s, Ford was sad to see how much wood and sawdust was being wasted. If only there was something to be done with these spare parts. Enter the barbeque briquette, a miniature sized grill that could be taken on road trips. This little invention would take the nation by storm and spawn a whole subculture!

10. Frederick Smith

    Even as of 1970, businesses could not get parts on time nor quickly. Frederick Smith had an obsession with finding out why this was the case. After all, wasn’t routing a solved problem? Telephone calls have been efficiently routed using a hub and spoke model for almost a hundred years. As it turned out, nobody had applied this principle to air freight. Boom, FedEx is born — and as a byproduct, the first company to ever offer overnight shipping.

11. Harry Snyder

    Then In-N-Out arrived. The Snyders’ burger shack was tiny, it had no indoor seating, and there was little room for a full-fledged drive-in with carhops. Harry, an amateur electronics enthusiast, came up with an idea that would compensate for these deficits. He dispensed with the carhops altogether and replaced them with an invention of his own: a simple two-way speaker box made out of a few off-the-shelf electrical components that was connected to the eatery’s kitchen. That way, motorists could order at one end of a driveway into a small white box attached to a pole dug into the road and then proceed over the gravel drive-through lane to pick up their food at the other end.

    —- In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-The-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain that Breaks All the Rules

    That’s right folks — not Wendy’s, not Mcdonalds, but In-N-Out invented the concept of the drive through in 1948! Wendy’s first drive through wouldn’t come until 1971 (23 years later), and McDonald’s not until 1975!

12. Coco Chanel

    In 1910, Coco Chanel thought it was rather odd that so many men would have strong feelings about women’s clothes. The world thought it was only natural (most fashion designers were men, after all). But Coco was deeply unsatisfied. Why couldn’t clothes be fashionable and comfortable? Could it be that these revered men had no idea because they weren’t wearing these clothes?

    —- Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

13. Malcom McLean

    As early as 1881 people had already thought about containerization. Freight was increasingly becoming inefficient. On both ends of the ship, people would manually load and unload a random assortment of boxes however they saw fit. Lack of standardization meant that ships didn’t even have a fixed capacity, and the skyrocketing labor costs made transport incredibly expensive — ” so expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway around the world.”

    So in the 1950s, Malcom, a trucker by trade, is still wondering why 70 years later nobody has solved this issue. Why do truckers like him have to spend so long waiting and loading cargo? Why not just drop a container off the ship directly onto the truck? Even in the 1950s, veterans of the shipping industry assured Malcom that containerization would never work. It was just an academic theory. These same veterans would dismiss Malcom as a simple trucker who didn’t know the complexities of naval shipping.

    Many titans of the transportation industry sought to stifle the container. Powerful labor leaders pulled out all the stops to block its ascent, triggering strikes in dozens of harbors. Some ports spent heavily to promote it, while others spent huge sums for traditional piers and warehouses in the vain hope that the container would prove a passing fad. Governments reacted with confusion… Even seemingly simple matters, such as the design of the steel fitting that allows almost any crane in any port to lift almost any container, were settled only after years of contention.

    —- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

    Luckily, we had a trucker with incredible determination who would not be thwarted.

14. Herb Kelleher

    Strange as it may seem, even as late as 1970, airlines didn’t distinguish between business and leisure travelers. There was no marketing or fee differentiation. Herb Kelleher, of Southwest Airlines, was the first to have a rather basic idea. What if we gave leisure travelers with flexible schedules deals on left-over capacity? This simple idea, and the many implications that followed from it, let Southwest Airline to be profitable 47 years in a row (it took a global COVID pandemic to end that streak, by the way). The next closest airline was just profitable for five years in a row.

    —- Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success

15. Marc Rich

    Even as of the 1970s, oil was traded under long term contracts. If you needed more oil today, you were simply out of luck. Unfortunately, oil was particularly prone to price shocks and massive fluctuations which made long term contracts painful for both parties. (Ironically, these price fluctuations were precisely why many in the industry had clamored for long-term contracts for so long.) Enter Marc Rich. What if you could trade oil instantly, at whatever price was the going rate this very second? You might have to pay a pretty penny as premium, but you could, if you needed, guarantee an immediate delivery of oil then. This question ended up birthing an entire new industry: spot trading. Today 40% of all oil trades are done via spot trades.

16. Larry Gagosian

    Isn’t it weird how all fine art is bought from museums or from auctions? In the 1980s, this was still very much the case. It seemed odd to one Larry Gogosian because surely, the largest collections of art were all owned by various collectors. What if you could just buy from the owner of the art instead of waiting for it to come to auction? Tapping into this invisible market has vaulted Larry into becoming the most successful art dealer in history.

17. Blake Scholl

    Why isn’t there a supersonic jet? Such a simple question, and yet no clear answer other than, well, nobody bothered after the Concord failure. That’s all it took for a product manager at Groupon (I’m not kidding) to decide to go ahead and do one and make Aviation history. You don’t have to be an aeronotics genius, just “soaked in high agency”.