Parsing Thoughts

"What?"

I know that was your reaction when you read the blog title. I mean who wants to defend boredom?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to be the flagbearer of the 'Save boredom' movement. You ask "Why?".

I had two conversations this week with my peers around this topic. One wants to buy an iPad and the other one wants to buy a super-smart Android phone. They claim this will propel the boredom out of their life, increase the amount of free time they have and improve their creativity enormously. Picture a smart lady getting her work done on her iPad with some cool app while travelling to office; sounds sexy right?

Well...you are WRONG. These shiny devices do kick the boredom out of your life - but at what cost? Boredom is essential for creation and creativity; in fact boredom breeds those two. Do you think the geeks would have created games like Mario if they'd felt no boredom? Would Thoreau have written Walden had he not got dull in his cabin in the woods? Would you have invented those paper games in your childhood if you had not felt the killing ennui of Indian summer afternoon? The answer is NO.

Boredom helps you stop, it helps you become a blank slate and then draw something on that slate. You start thinking of ideas and ways to entertain/amuse yourself. And in the process you end up creating something new. That's the WOW of boredom...of not checking your mail every 2 minutes, of not completing another level of Angry Birds when you find 5 mins of free time, of not tweeting another status update. iPad, constant net connectivity, smartphones take that boredom away from you. A 9-year old boy in Cincinnati named Caine has created this amazing arcade from cardboard. Give that boy an iPad and he's done for with the arcade.

The question is, in today's hyper-connected life, how can we find boredom?

The simplest way is just shut off everything and sit inside a park near you or even just sit & stare out of your bedroom window for some time. Hold yourself back if you start getting restless. If that's too much for you, start by doing one thing at a time. If that's too much too, start by assigning one device to work/creation and another one for consumption/fun.

So do you want to join my 'Save boredom' movement? Then stop yourself from switching on that television set next time you catch yourself yawning! 

P.S. I could write this blog only because I couldn't find anything good on morning TV and was getting bored.

Okay, let me clarify.

I no longer believe in education in its current form. We all go to colleges, get a degree, get out and start doing jobs. And then we almost put a full-stop to the learning process (We do go to some occasional offsite training organized by the employer, but more offsite than training happens there). This not only reduces our productivity but makes our job as well as life more & more vegetated as we grow old. And then we start cribbing about our life. The reason - education that stops at a degree. In fact, I will also go on to say that so many of even our society's current issues are a result of this arid, dull, greedy form of education.

We complain how politicians are doing wrong to the country but do not take even the first step to learn about, say, RTI and how to use it to find what your local politician is doing with all the money he gets from Govt.

We don't want to acquire new hobbies. Instead we watch same old reality shows on television and then complain how bad TV shows have become.

We marvel at someone who's found time to write a novel while parallely doing a job, but never even take the first step towards writing a short story.

We are learning not what we want to learn, but what we need to learn. To make a living. That's not too bad. But then, we live off that same learning for years & decades and cry foul when some new technology comes along and takes away our jobs.

This needs to change. We need an Education 2.0.

What will it be like?

Schools/Universities just teach boring stuff useful to make a living (Frankly I believe we all mostly live off what we learnt till only Std 10; after that 'career' took over) and they are late to catch on to useful curriculum for making a living too (It takes them years to even change state capitals in our Geography books. My brother writes programs in a language called Ruby whereas his teacher doesn't even know what Ruby is).

More schools/colleges or introducing another degree based course is not going to solve the issue. But what if anyone could teach something he's really good at to someone who's interested in learning precisely that skill. The skill may be very simple such as delivering good presentations or making sushi or ball juggling. It could be just for fun or it could be career oriented. But just imagine how many people could benefit from that! It's not a Open University delivering another degree, but it takes a form where every nook and corner in your city becomes a hub for learning something new. The onus is on you.

That's what I call Education 2.0 -  a form of education where learning doesn't stop at a degree but becomes lifelong, fun and peer-to-peer activity. Frankly, I have learnt more in my coffee-shop conversations than all my college classes combined.

Are you game?

Recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the latest release 11.10 i.e. Oneiric Ocelot. Though this version has a lot of improvements (most notable are Software Manager & Unity Dash), the network manager is really buggy.

Whenever your network connection, especially a DSL connection, drops on its own, the network manager stops showing any available network profiles in its drop-down menu. Basically there's no connection you can connect to even though your network cable is plugged in.

Though I even went to the extent of installing an alternate network manager (wicd), I found a simple workaround for this problem - just restart the Network Manager. How to do this:

1. Open the Terminal using Alt+F2 or from dash
2. Paste this command: sudo service network-manager restart

And you're done! Once you issue the command, the network manager will restart in 2-3 sec and automatically connect to your default DSL network profile.

As I've mentioned before, I am really getting into the world of Infographics. An infographic can be a really powerful tool to get quick insights from large amounts of data. Mint, one of the top business newspapers in India, has been very good at publishing a lot of well-made full-page infographics. One such infographic I recently came across is on the online behaviour of Indian consumers. It's based on a global study done by TNS.

India currently has around 100 million internet users and many studies predict it to go up to 300 million by 2014. That's a lot of growth! And fast! No wonder the e-commerce space in India is really heating up. This study further corroborates the potential for e-commerce in India.

Coming back to our topic, here are some take-aways from this infographic:

People's attitude & behavior

An Indian consumer interacts much more with brands online than his/her global counterparts. However, the percentage of total advertising spend by Indian brands on online advertising is still quite low. Considering the shrinking ad budgets of most FMCG, Auto, Electronics companies etc, they can really start focusing online. And it seems they are slowly realizing this.

The mobile e-shopping in India is yet quite new. This is mostly because of the low penetration of smartphones in India. I believe there's lot of scope for entrepreneurs to come up with jugaad solutions here.

The role of consumer voice

Whether it's India or anywhere else, people do trust their friends' reviews. Interestingly in India, we equally trust a stranger's review as well. As the same TNS study says even one bad review can make people re-think their assessment of a product/brand. But does this mean your brand should play it safe online? The answer is: No. Only about 10% of the online consumer voice is 'complaints'; so there's 90% positive content out there as well.

Most popular Activities

Note that all the three top online activities of Indian consumers have to do with Videos. Considering that a good video can get you a lot 'Up' in Google search results (as SEO experts will tell you), this is definitely a medium Indian brands can focus on. Even for small companies - why not create an ad video that has lot of potential to go 'viral' on YouTube - much better ROI.

The path to buying

Notice how long the bars are for Online and Consumer Voice in almost every product category as compared to Offline and Brand Voice! The takeway - create communities (or Tribes as Seth Godin likes to call them) around your brand. And with the zero cost Pages social networks such as Facebook and Google+ offer, this has become quite simple. But the team maintaining the page must be engaged enough and your content should be helpful. Additionally, such online brand Pages can give you a treasure trove of consumer data.

Here's a video containing interesting tidbits from the TNS study:

Between the time I got the idea of writing a blog-post on the above subject and actually typing out the matter, I spent almost half an hour making Posterous load the 'New post by web' page. Only when I had almost given up, the page somehow loaded and here I am, typing the post. 

This just goes on to show how much we are begining to crave for stuff that just works. At least I am. Why:

 -- Out of every 5 ads I watch on Indian TV channels, 3 are life/health insurance ads. Have you ever looked at the sign up form for an insurance policy? It just plain sucks. Why can't they make an insurance form that's easy enough to understand. (Didn't Google simplify their privacy policy?)

-- The remaining two ads are by telecom companies (I am a bit exaggerating here, but you get my point). You have to, absolutely have to, type in 15 digits before the call even connects to their customer care!

-- I don't even want to talk about software.

My point: We have thousands of products claiming to do thousands of things; but very few actually doing what they claim. Only imagine what the world would be like if products stood true to the one claim they make. No marketing mumbo-jumbo needed.

In fact, there are many companies which have made billion-dollar valuations because they do just the one thing they claim. They just work:

1. Dropbox -- Online back-up. Plain and simple. And their tagline actually is 'It just works!'

2. Spotify -- Listening songs over the internet without ever buffering. And millions of song on offer. Spotify just works.

3. Zappos --  A shoe company built around customer service. And it delivers.

4. Virgin -- The company that enters established industrues. And then changes the landscape.

You can't retain a customer for long by sales/marketing gimmicks if your product doesn't deliver what it's meant to deliver - properly. The sad thing right now is, in so many sectors, almost all companies have equally bad product/service offerings. Need a Branson to shake up some things here! Anyone listening?

P.S. : Obviously I am gonna chuck Posterous in a few days. @a4agarwal: Are you listening?

Bestvendor has surveyed about 550 startups and come out with this awesome infographic on the tools that they most commonly use - ranging from emailing to accounting to collaboration. Do give it a look.

P.S. > This is my post after a brief hiatus. Plan to post regularly now on.

P.P.S. > Hooked on to the concept of Infographics right now. Check out http://www.informationisbeautiful.net and http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com to get started.

That sounds absurd, right? But creativity is indeed subtraction.

Art is not just something that you put into it, but it's also what you leave out.

A book is not just what's written in it, but what is written 'between the lines'...or what is left out for the reader to infer.

A consummate artist knows that in a symphony the white spaces of silence between the notes are just as important as the sound itself.

This applies to individuals and brands alike. An individual can become successful only when he passionately pursues that one thing and leaves out everything else. A brand becomes well known if it sticks to just one core message and communicates it well.

Think over it...

P.S. Check out this wonderful post by Austin Kleon which inspired the above article.

Listening to these songs a lot these days...thought I should share them with you.

Many a time in our quest to create an awesome product/service/whatever, we forget to take care of the simplest of things. And this mistake is committed by even the most technologically advanced, creatively revered brands too. The recently heated up browser war is an excellent example of this.

Mozilla recently came out with its Firefox 4 browser. While the browser is functionally amazing, there are many small interface annoyances. They have left a lot of vertical screen space unused with just the Firefox menu button occupying that part; and this look doesn't change even in the maximized-window mode. Small thing...but lot of people are complaining about it. (In fact, Lifehacker already has a post on fixing these annoyances!)

Microsoft has also come out with IE9 (and let me assure you this is the best Internet Explorer so far!). IE9 actually has a very neat interface unlike its predecessors and it loads fast. But if you are the kind of person who has tons of tabs open and toggles between them a lot, you are at a loss. While IE9 supports the ctrl+tab shortcut, it doesn't support the ctrl+pgup/pgdown shortcuts supported by every other browser. Again small thing...but such small things may make your customers switch to your rival product.

There's an old video on TED in which NYT Technology columnist David Pogue illustrates the same point in his amazing style. Do check this out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html

Let’s admit it. We all want content to be free. Every blogger has written about it at least once. Every self-proclaimed business guru is telling how it's a FREE economy (Heck, they've even invented a term called Freeconomics for it...I figure Chris Anderson is behind it all.) And every audiophile downloaded Radiohead's last album when they released it for free on internet.

But this has really turned the days into nightmares for all the C-suite executives in Industries like News, Media, Publishing and Music. WSJ, NYT are all experimenting with pricing their online content; but many a blogger has already posted workarounds for that. Sometimes I wonder why they are even trying to SELL music cassettes and CDs in India when all the songs you want are just a click away on certain Pakistani sites. Chris Anderson really suggested some good ways for the authors/musicians to make some money in such economy. But are there any lessons in all this for the traditional companies in these industries?

The answer lies in what this 26-year old did. Amanda Hocking is the bestselling 'indie' writer on Amazon's Kindle store. According to her own blog, she has sold over 900,000 copies of her nine different books since April 2010 and at the prices she is charging that works out to be millions in dollars. The secret of her success is two-fold:

1. She charges $3 for many of her books and as low as $0.99 for some (you can buy 1 song in iTunes store at that price!)

2. She taps into her social networks, comprising mostly of book-bloggers, to generate buzz around her offerings

Essentially, she's keeping her costs low (both publishing and marketing), using modern channels to get her message across and creating a tribe. Is your company ready to do that?

P.S: I figure this post would give more motivation to indie artists than traditional companies. But that's good too.

(The inspiration for this article came after reading what Seth Godin wrote on his blog today.)