SS01/03 | Idea lego's and how nothing is truly original.
The danger of curiosity is that only in hindsight do people know whether it’s led them to brilliance or madness, or somewhere in between.
✍🏽 | Context
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have grown up with legos in your childhood or any kind of building blocks alternative, this shorticle will be a no-brainer.
I’ll use LEGOs as my point of reference as it’s what I personally relate this to you can do the same or use any [insert generic name] game alternative.
The concept of legos is to use individual blocks and build a pre-designed set. Good, we got that. The magic of Lego and why still so many adult fans like myself understand that ethos goes beyond the pre-designed kit.
I remember as a kid and even when I first started earning my own money, this is what building was all about, it's what got me equally obsessed with The Sims. Taking elements of an existing pre-planned structure or system and using its components to build new things. This fueled my entrepreneurial character from a young age and even more so when I decided to make the creative industry my main source of income.
Very similar to this physical building and compounding, we can see the same with ideas and concepts.
"No innovation is a single event".
Creativity and building brands, products, and businesses are like remixing. Period.
If you think you’re the only one doing something chances are you don’t challenge yourself enough to explore and exploit beyond your interests. In some shape or form, the foundation has been or is being built for your breakthrough idea. Find solace in that.
Our minds have only been exposed to this much global data and ideas of others outside of our geographical realm for a little over 30 years… let that sink in.
Access to the internet is what made a lot of ideas that seemed impossible, possible. Now many of these achievements were not necessarily achieved through the idea of building blocks (composable) but they unlocked “impossible” in peoples mindsets which made them attempt to do it themselves and the next person after that decided to do it even bigger and better (*think world records).
🚧 | Lego mental models as part of "Brand"
Now if we bring this back to what most of my content revolves around, entrepreneurship and brand. Brand is like compound interest. Each building block you have (whether you build it, design it, ideate it, or acquire it), is added to another one (if your building brand in a holistic manner, that is) and another one which overtime builds the equity of the brand and increases its value.
Blocks can be: brand identity, product, IP, roadmaps, communities, etc
So this being done is a process that takes time, consistency, and patience. Once it’s in a recognizable form and respected by people through their trust to buy into it, the average person will probably ignore the work that went into building this structure you’ve made. They see the end result.
So what happens next is they take some of your Lego blocks and start laying their foundation, this is sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. The thing is, it shouldn’t matter too much as the structure is built out of many blocks and functions as an instrument [insert strategy block].
🧱 | Lego mental models as part of "global ideation"
Now, that covered a somewhat brand-level take. If we look at ideas in general and how they build systems, this too can be dissected the same way.
The space and time between an idea and its execution by that same person are getting smaller and smaller. With takes like “build in public” even more so. Many things are built in parallel and symbioses with each other whether we realize it or not.
Not so hypothetical Example: me having the crazy idea of building an alcohol and lifestyle brand native to web3 with a high degree of CCO might take me some time to get off the ground, due to many factors. But me having this idea is not new or innovative, it’s a product of my interest, and the echo chamber these interests curate on my social feeds and network.
Subconsciously you start to use blocks you see here and there and start building your own structure with them.
Now outside of the example, when people build on other people's ideas, they can sometimes go to market much faster, accumulate money faster build teams and structures around it and that becomes the new building block for us to take and build a new structure with it.
Depending on your personality and what you set out to achieve, this is a thing to find comfort in. I personally have been building my own brands for the past 10 years, first was a bamboo bike company that came out as a building block of my dissertation. It thought me a lot and is also what opened my mind to actually consider the creative aspect of business as an interest. From there I started a company in China and grew that for over 7 years. The building blocks there were remixed by others and I took some myself to build new structures. Fast forward and Wellpal was born. With Wellpal there are 2 more building blocks that are building their own structures now and building them parallel in totally opposite industries brings a certain kind of creativity that opens truly exciting possibilities for traditional products.
This trajectory is very familiar for most entrepreneurs.
🧬 | Lego mental models "current events" evolution
Web3, DAO, and NFTs.
Now, this thing is not a pesky mosquito that is going away if you ignore it. And any business that is not yet directly involved in its evolution still needs to be looped in. The space is the wild Wild West and pretty much the early years of the World Wide Web. Cash grabs left and right, scams, things that don’t make “sense” and the list goes on.
Now you need to go into it with a clear and open mind and observe the signals. The signals lead you to some projects (insert building block) that may look impossible and they might even fail to some extend (think constitution DAO or many of the breached NFT projects), but because the space is so new and the early adopters have built this ethos of learning and community building, different from when the internet started to commercialize, it made the pessimist in me a bit more of an optimist in the last year. Now full disclosure I wasn’t totally new to it as I already was a geek in 2008 and bought bitcoin…. Was sooooo infantile back then that if your computer crashed (pre-Mac student days), it was gone. Did so 2-3 times lost it and gave up. Technology is crazy until it passes the acceptance phase and becomes a norm and you want to shoot yourself in the foot for not taking it more seriously.
People are building projects that simply would not have had the possibility in our current “standardized” internet and system and they are building it faster, this means failure can be faster, and actual sustainable growth can emerge faster.
The space is creating building blocks that make traditional systems and businesses truly start evaluating their “innovation claims".
DAOs signals are truly something to observe and analyze as this new way of building brands and businesses is what will shape the future of new business models. Combined with their transparency and decentralized nature, the building blocks used are even more visible. They are the true embodiment of “build in public”. At least they can be used as such if you want to. As with everything human nature will find ways to fuck up good intentions for personal gain. It’s inevitable and not enough ground to not think this evolution is here to stay. Our current situation is no sunshine and rainbow farts either.
📼 | The era of business model remixes
This new atmosphere and the culture it is built upon is spinning off more building block remixes in 1 year than some of us have seen in a lifetime. It’s a period of experimentation.
You can choose to get caught up in all its intensity and FOMO and make impulsive decisions, or you can take some time to understand the inner workings of it and how the blocks are laid out and fit together and see how you can build an existence within this eco-system for the long-term.
Sometimes when things move fast, it’s good to take a slower pace. It isn’t going anywhere but I do recommend you to be intuitive towards it and study its workings.
Find another point of comfort in the fact that NO ONE IN THIS SPACE IS AN EXPERT. Some bought an ape and flipped it for 10x doesn’t make you an expert. Makes you fortunate and lucky. Most of this web3 stuff is still built on speculation especially the things that are most entertaining to the masses (enter NFT project of the second). The real excitement is what this technology will mutate into, what remix we can make with it. At least for me, that is.
You don’t need to be an engineer, or a developer, or artist, you simply need to know how building blocks work and start observing signals and play around with them. Build a prototype business model with some of the building blocks available and add your own unique twist.
Lego was on to something. As with many other of my favorite brands, I’m eager to see what they do with this new abundance of technological and cultural evolution.
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See you in the next one. 🤍
Sai
Looking for a little encore? 👇🏽👇🏽