change Archives - Page 4 of 7

What is possible?

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Every now and again we are forced to re-consider what is possible. Maybe it is due to some form of technology advancement. Maybe it is due to a new scientific discovery. And sometimes it is due to a single person pushing themselves to the limit, and in doing so pushing human possibilities to levels that had previously been considered impossible.

Kelly Slater is a person who has consistently been doing this for 20 years. In fact, I regard him as the greatest sports person of all sports of all time. Anyone who disagrees with this has simply failed to consider what he has done over this period. He has dominated, and reinvented the sport again and again. To the point where we has been world champion 11 times over 20 years and is still competing against and beating surfers who were not even born when he won his first world title. At the age of 40 he is still setting the bench mark. His dominance of the sport is almost embarrassing for other competitors.

He did something amazing this week in the Bells Beach Ripcurl Pro. In fact it is the best manouvre ever seen in competitive surfing. A full 360 aerial rotation – no hands. You can see it below. Just 30 years ago surfing magazines were full of discussions as to whether a simple 360 turn on the wave face was physically possible. And while every year, we think our sport has reached its limit it manages to forge into uncharted territory.

We should use this as motivation and a reminder of what we ourselves can do. That we are never too old and that the only limits that matter are the ones that we set for ourselves.

Enjoy this visual orgy of surfing goodness.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3G3Id3ucuE]

The lifecyle of awesome

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

As far as I can tell the life cycle of awesome is in perpetual decline. Every day we all get sent something that’s awesome. Something that’s great. Something that’s shareable. and every day we make a judgement. A decision whether this piece is worth sharing. There are so many things to share, and so many places to share them, that the stakes get higher and higher for what qualifies – it has to. Which means that when we see something amazing, it’s only amazing for a little while. It means the window is very small and getting smaller.

Today I saw something awesome. A simple video projection come moving art, come installation, come viral video. It was very next level. In fact the guy show sen it to me (Rohan) said it was ‘off chops’. You can see it below. But what I’m really wondering is, for how long can we keep going to the next level until there is nowhere left to go?

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/34605168]

Why failure is scary

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

While technology and lifestyles has shifted radically in the past few hundred years, the human DNA hasn’t evolved very much at all in the past few thousand. It’s one of the reasons why we are becoming obese. Our bodies are just not designed to have some much access to food, and so much automation and leisure time. Another interesting quirk of our DNA is the fear instinct. An instinct which is totally vital for survival, until a a few hundred years ago. In a pre-civilised world, failure could mean being killed while gathering food.

The problem with the fear instinct is that it gets in the way of us doing our best work in a modern world. It can stop us from proposing amazing ideas, and disrupting old outdated methods. The fear we have is not of death, but these days usually only of embarrassment or financial loss, neither of which will kill us.

This fear robs us of our best chance to make a difference, and generate the momentum we need. The best way to overcome this fear to remind ourselves that the fear we are facing is emotional and not physical. And almost every circumstance, what we are afraid of will not stop us from having a second chance.

The world belongs to the discontented

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

The person who was seen as most likely to succeed at your final year of school didn’t change the world. Not yet, probably not ever.

They’ve already had too much success in the early years. Too many congratulations, too many girlfriends, too many party invites, too many A’s on their report card. And so they’ve missed out on the most important ingredient anyone needs to succeed. Hardship.

The harder we have it, the more likely we are to change it. It’s only when we have a level of discontentment that we’ll ever develop the fire inside the belly that is needed to create a better situation.

The system is dead

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

Journalism is dead. No, newspapers are dying. Writing has never been more omnipresent or important.

The music industry is dead. No, more artists are making more music. It’s just not in a record store.

TV is dead. No, TV is different. ‘t now has 6 billion channels with www. addresses rather than 200 numbers to choose from.

Advertising is dead. No, we no longer “tell then sell”. We now collaborate and create before hand. The 4th P is now the 1st.

Print production is dead. No, we print on our desktop. We print millions more pages than ever.

Book stores are dead. No, stories and reading continue to grow via the screen and home delivered books.

Retail is dead. No, it’s growing rapidly. In different places, in different ways, all digitally augmented.

The point is that anything that is culturally or economically important will never die. Humans will find new ways to keep them alive, or more truthfully make them more alive by knocking down the previous barriers to entry held in place but the profitable incumbents. They loved their systems because it made them rich from keeping us out.

My question to all entrepreneurs is this; how are we making the most of the change old dying systems are presenting us?

Compound pain

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

A retail analysts was telling me that many of his clients don’t want to know the truth about where their customers are going – the inevitable move on-line. He asked him why and he said that many of them can’t face the truth, because it hurts too much.

Another truth is that it ends up hurting more the longer you ignore it.

Falling in love with infrastructure

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a list of companies who should’ve done something, yet instead, let someone else do it for them. And in being asleep at the wheel, they will never be as powerful (read relevant) again.

Yellow Pages	should have become…	Google
Encyclopaedia Britannica	should have become…	Wikipedia
RCA / Sony / BMG / EMI / Warner	should have become…	iTunes
Newspaper classifieds	should have become…	Craigs List
Trading Post	should have become…	eBay
Barns & Noble	should have become…	Amazon
Industry X	could well become…	Your startup

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The key point is this. The future doesn’t care about your legacy, or how things were done in the past, it only cares about what people actually want. And people don’t care about your existing infrastructure, they only care about themselves.

There’s a million more of these examples out there, and many more to come. The question is which industry will you disrupt because they are too in love with their existing infrastructure?