🔮 Living in the future

Breakthrough insights come from living in the future and tinkering directly with what’s new about it—not by having passing ideas about it from a distant vantage point

they’re almost always living in the future, immersed in the process of cultivating new patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting through ongoing interaction with new, empowering technologies and with other people who are also living in the future.

The best problems to chase are those that exist in the future. Pattern-breaking ideas are less about conjuring up the next big thing for tomorrow and more about genuinely understanding tomorrow’s problems before others are exposed to them.

Marc Andreessen and Bob Metcalfe each found their way to a breakthrough insight by solving a problem for themselves. They created a solution to a challenge they were already experiencing while living in the future. There’s a certain magic in crafting something with your own hands, for your own needs.

It’s because we often fall in love with our idea of the solution we want to build before falling in love with a problem that we experience while living in the future. “Falling in love with a solution” highlights the danger that founders, creators, or teams can become so enamored with their particular product or service—their “solution”—that they ov... See more

how “living in the future” can prime you for pattern breaking. In Mike’s own words:

You need to experience firsthand the new powers that inflections confer on people. By interacting with that thing—by using it, experimenting with it, probing its powers—and by interacting with other people who are also living in the future, you begin cultivating new

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Because they were living in the future, they were interacting on a daily basis with the new, enabling technologies of the internet and cultivating new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting through those interactions. The team realized that the winning metaphor wasn’t a digital superhighway, with traffic speeding along a well-defined path, and fixed... See more

It gave them a major advantage in understanding the challenges experienced by the pioneering customers who first adopted cloud computing. Todd and Freddy enjoyed informal yet trusting relationships with those clients, and this allowed Todd and Freddy to get to the crux of the clients’ most pressing issues. Both founders knew that the problems of th... See more

This can lead to developing products that are technically impressive or aesthetically pleasing, but that don’t resonate with users because they don’t solve a significant problem or improve people’s lives in a meaningful way.

You need to experience firsthand the new powers that inflections confer on people. By interacting with that thing—by using it, experimenting with it, probing its powers—and by interacting with other people who are also living in the future, you begin cultivating new patterns of behavior, different from those that characterize the status quo.