Category: entrepreneurship

When I was a child, a very high priority for my parents was that I ate all of the food that they put in front of me. I was told to finish all of my dinner, to clean my plate, and on many occasions I was instructed to stay at the dinner table until this task was complete. The rest of the family would be in the living room watching Happy Days, and I’d be sitting at the table with a full stomach watching my half eaten dinner go cold. While I’m sure my parents believed it was so I had enough nutrition, I actually don’t think that was their motivation. My parents where children of the depression & WW2 era. A lack of omnipresent food shaped their view on waste. To leave food was sin that was to be avoided maybe even risk hunger the next day. In all probability it was more about not appreciating the effort that went into providing for a family, it was being thankless.

In most western countries the cost of food has been dropping consistently since the 1950’s. Not only has the amount of food available increased, but the type and variety of food has too. The food chain has benefited dramatically from petrochemical enhanced agriculture, air travel and open trade. And so my (our?) parents desire to make us eat everything available seems like an outdated idea. An idea which is now culturally entrenched and just may be contributing our widening waistlines.

Information is the food of the mind. And just like our stomachs the type and amount we feed it has an impact on our mental faculties. For the first time in my life I now have all the information I could ever desire available on demand. Which is a major shift from what I grew up with. I often wonder if I would have been more scholarly if I had the access to the interesting things I do today. I grew up in an age with 3 TV channels, 2 local newspapers, a handful of radio stations and magazine rack at the local newsagent. Yes, there was a library, but hardly a book from the current decade resided in it. In fact, if I narrow that down to the stuff I was interested and assessed it against these mass forums I had access to the information available was very limited indeed. Fast forward 20 years since the launch of Mosaic, and there is a verifiable deluge of data on the nichest topics. In many ways, I feel the same way about information as my parents do about food – like it is a terrible waste not to consume it all.

It makes me wonder if there will be some ‘information’ equivalent to the obesity crisis we now face due to poor rich eating habits. Will our addiction to information and digital entertainment result in some mass crisis of the collective mind? Or is it already happening? Maybe we’ll face some kind of ‘idiocracy‘? A collective information overload which injures our brains to the point of a mental illness epidemic….. One thing for sure is that while demand for information continues to climb, the supply of data points for profit will continuously be filled.

Just like food, it seems as though there is more demand for junk information. And while, we all enjoy the short term hit we get from ingesting it, we know it adds little to our cognitive ability in the long run. One problem is the ease with which we can justify paying attention to the junk web. For so many of us being informed and up to date with the latest meme is seen as some kind of personal requirement to generate commercial and social worth. This presents us with an obvious problem akin to the heady consumer days of the TV industrial complex. The idea that consumption was a beacon for success. However, in this instance, people believe that data consumption equals intelligence.

While none of us really know if this overload will have a long term impact socially or commercially, or if we’ll adapt in some way, I’m sure we all suffer from it daily.

What to do?

The same thing we do with food. A balance of nutritious intake, with the occasional treat. Maybe an 80/20 ratio. Decide what we really need to know about and find a good filter which provides it. Avoid the meme train and choose to know about something that matters, rather than know everything about nothing.

In short, the future is about enlightenment through exclusion and knowledge via focus. This is something excessive data consumption can never provide. One thing that tops knowing about the latest meme or some piece of web junk is creating something of long term value. And this is something we can never achieve while a disproportionate amount of time is invested in reviewing what others are doing.

For decades taste makers decided what we had access to and could like. During this top down retail and media driven process they gave us some great trends and sometimes even created crazes. But even when something was really amazing, they had to move on. Move on to the next thing that would generate the same fervor and newness that the previous thing did. Something new to sell and generate replacement revenue. So the TV shows would get cancelled and the supporting products would disappear from the shelves to make room for the next thing. It was reasons like this that Break Dancing and BMX bikes disappeared from my world far sooner than I would have liked them to.

The good news is that there is no longer a need to change our preferences. As a result I’ve found my way back into the old school BMX community. The so called taste makers no longer have control over distribution and promotion – we do. And this has some important implications for us as entrepreneurs, marketers and people. None more important than this over riding thought:

The timeline is long. Fads now have the potential to become enduring communities. Ideas and things that got lost along the way are being reinvented by the few who didn’t forget, and their communities are blossoming in this digital spring.

But most of all – we need to remember that a digital world allows everything become just a little more permanent.

I was reading this post from Seth Godin today. it got me thinking about the channels we use to publish our thoughts and to control our personal brands. On the one hand it makes total sense to choose a popular digital channel or two so that ‘we’ can leverage their audience. But their is a flip side risk that it might be time to consider as enter the back end of the social web decade.

What if these channels just disappear? Or more specifically, what if a channel we have chosen to invest in just disappears?

It is not as if it isn’t possible. The digital graveyard is full of potential and one time behemoths that got it wrong and evaporated. While some may not have died completely, it is certainly true that when they die (the host) then we (the parasite) are very likely to die with it.

The answer is in the question. We must have a channel or repository where we retain an element of control or ownership. Maybe it’s our own .com address. Maybe it’s our own forum. The point is we must reduce our personal brand risk in the same way reduce our investment mix through diversification. Have assets we control, assets where we share control and assets which others control. Sometimes I worry about the investment I have made in twitter while they still struggle to turn a profit.

Given our digital footprint and personal brand are now as important as formal qualifications and career experience these days, our portfolio of personal digital channels should replicate any good investment strategy, where we have a mix of control and leverage. While it’s never a good idea to invest in too many areas, it’s also good to invest in some assets that we have total ownership over them, rather than something we just have a share in or make a contribution too.