I love the idea that we should “fail toward the future,” which reminds me of my brilliant mother-in-law. (Really!) In the early 1980s, she put together an interactive database called Arts and Sports, which listed all the venues in the country. It was what would become normal once we had the internet, but she came up with the idea before a wide audience saw the need for it.
She also started a nonprofit that brought parents of Head Start kids to the free museums in DC, with the idea that the parents would then take their kids--her insight was that if you educate the parents, a single intervention is propagated multiple times, but if you just take the kids to the museums, it’s a one-off only. But she was so ahead of her time (this was the mid-90s) that she couldn’t get any funding. Philanthropists were used to providing direct services to kids and just didn’t get the concept of helping the parents (who were themselves in their late teens or early twenties). Now, there are programs like Harlem Children’s Zone, which help parents--and it seems so obvious to all of us that this is a good idea.
It has been interesting for me to watch the country come around to her good ideas--too late to help her projects succeed, but at least she can say she knew the right thing to do long before anyone else did!
This is an interesting story because as someone who quite often checks sports scores, game schedules, standings, and at times steals sports from my phone, the ESPN phone doesn’t sound like a recipe for the massive failure it was. But I think that’s because I’m not remembering 2005 correctly from my 2023 perspective. So it’s really that the phone was a matter of knowing what people wanted before they knew what they wanted or could understand the idea at all. Which, I suppose, is the very type of idea that can be pivoted toward the future and massively successful.
This is great and it's making me think about more general ways in which winning and losing are sometimes really timeframe dependent. An army making impressive advances, then becoming cut off, is an obvious example. Struggling to think of more product failures that set someone up for a massive technology win, though. There will be many, I'm sure. And thank you for the mention!
I love the idea that we should “fail toward the future,” which reminds me of my brilliant mother-in-law. (Really!) In the early 1980s, she put together an interactive database called Arts and Sports, which listed all the venues in the country. It was what would become normal once we had the internet, but she came up with the idea before a wide audience saw the need for it.
She also started a nonprofit that brought parents of Head Start kids to the free museums in DC, with the idea that the parents would then take their kids--her insight was that if you educate the parents, a single intervention is propagated multiple times, but if you just take the kids to the museums, it’s a one-off only. But she was so ahead of her time (this was the mid-90s) that she couldn’t get any funding. Philanthropists were used to providing direct services to kids and just didn’t get the concept of helping the parents (who were themselves in their late teens or early twenties). Now, there are programs like Harlem Children’s Zone, which help parents--and it seems so obvious to all of us that this is a good idea.
It has been interesting for me to watch the country come around to her good ideas--too late to help her projects succeed, but at least she can say she knew the right thing to do long before anyone else did!
Educating people from a proactive perspective rather than a habitual reactionary perspective has a better long-term outcome.
This is an interesting story because as someone who quite often checks sports scores, game schedules, standings, and at times steals sports from my phone, the ESPN phone doesn’t sound like a recipe for the massive failure it was. But I think that’s because I’m not remembering 2005 correctly from my 2023 perspective. So it’s really that the phone was a matter of knowing what people wanted before they knew what they wanted or could understand the idea at all. Which, I suppose, is the very type of idea that can be pivoted toward the future and massively successful.
Fully agree with footnote #5! Even if for me it’s TSN in canada, same idea.
Also isn’t there something in here about the sunk costs fallacy... only like wait long enough
This is great and it's making me think about more general ways in which winning and losing are sometimes really timeframe dependent. An army making impressive advances, then becoming cut off, is an obvious example. Struggling to think of more product failures that set someone up for a massive technology win, though. There will be many, I'm sure. And thank you for the mention!