The Fastest Reward
Yesterday, I got around to start watching the General Magic documentary.
In the United States, the film is available to stream on the Showtime app:
“The ideas that dominate the tech industry and our day to day lives were born at a secretive Silicon Valley start-up called ‘General Magic,’ which spun out of Apple in 1990 to create the first handheld personal communicator (or ‘smartphone’). The film combines rare archival footage with powerful honesty from the ‘Magicians’ today, reflecting on the most influential Silicon Valley company no one has ever heard of. Featuring legendary members of the original Macintosh team, along with the creators of the iPod, iPhone, Android, and eBay.”
The team was comprised of both a veteran all-star team and a collection of the best young technical minds on what ended up as a failed business.
General Magic was ahead of its time and the technology of the early 1990s could not support the company’s vision, which ultimately was correct.
In the hours between watching the first half and the second half of the film, news broke that the basketball legend Kobe Bryant died in an accident.
Of course, across multiple media and sports, the tragic passing was mourned.
But in the past week, another notable figure, Clayton Christensen, passed away at an older age, 67, as a result of complications while battling cancer.
Christensen was a professor at Harvard Business School and author of two well-regarded books, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business and How Will You Measure Your Life?:
The experience of reading both books was enlightening in different ways, with the former more professional and the latter more personal:
“First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.”
“In the instances studied in this book, established firms confronted with disruptive technology typically viewed their primary development challenge as a technological one: to improve the disruptive technology enough that it suits known markets. In contrast, the firms that were most successful in commercializing a disruptive technology were those framing their primary development challenge as a marketing one: to build or find a market where product competition occurred along dimensions that favored the disruptive attributes of the product.”
“In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”
“You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.”
Accidents happen. And diseases startlingly pop up. This is nothing new.
How we decide to spend our time is up to our free will and decisions:
“It turns out that that decision is one of the most important decisions I ever made because it turns out my whole life has been filled with an unending stream of extenuating circumstances. And if I had said ‘just this once,’ the next time it occurred and the next time it’s easier and easier.
And I decided it is easier to hold to our principles 100% of our time than it is 98% of the time.”
Per Kobe Bryant:
“We all can be masters at our craft, but you have to make a choice. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be. There are sacrifices that come along with making that decision.”
