RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

ideation

  • It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some don’t. When an ideavirus occurs, it’s often because all the viral pieces work together. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea? How often will people sneeze it to their friends? How tightly knit is the group you’re targeting — do they talk much? Do they believe each other?

    How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea? How persistent is it — is it a fad that has to spread fast before it dies, or will the idea have legs (and thus you can invest in spreading it over time)? Put all of your new product developments through this analysis, and you’ll discover which ones are most likely to catch on. Those are the products and ideas worth launching.

    — Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all; instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness.

    In this scenario, poorer countries will catch up to richer countries, and the world as a whole will reach an economic plateau. But even if a truly globalized plateau were possible, could it last? In the best case, economic competition would be more intense than ever before for every single person and firm on the planet. However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.

    That leaves the fourth scenario, in which we create new technology to make a much better future. The most dramatic version of this outcome is called the Singularity, an attempt to name the imagined result of new technologies so powerful as to transcend the current limits of our understanding.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Before we truly master something novel (which means, before we can effectively limit its indeterminate significance to something predictable, even irrelevant) we imagine what it might be. Our imaginative representations actually constitute our initial adaptations. Our fantasies comprise part of the structure that we use to inhibit our responses to the apriori significance of the unknown (even as such fantasies facilitate generation of more detailed and concrete information).

    There is no reason to presuppose that we have been able to explicitly comprehend this capacity, in part because it actually seems to serve as a necessary or axiomatic precondition for the ability to comprehend, explicitly.

    — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • According to Kurzweil, “the Singularity is near,” it’s inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it.

    But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won’t happen on its own. What the Singularity would look like matters less than the stark choice we face today between the two most likely scenarios: nothing or something. It’s up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

    Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us — the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment — is singular. Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1.

    The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Fundamentally, there is no reason why pleasure, excitement, profound well-being and simple joy at being alive could not become the natural, default state of mind for all who desire it. – Nick Bostrom

    Though it is so often accompanied by descriptions of futuristic gadgets, body augmentation, and distant concerns, the Transhumanist vision provides a reminder that humanity can be far greater than it is today. The human condition is a work in progress. An early and very rough draft of what could be a masterpiece. And the evolution of society begins with the evolution of the individual mind.

    This evolution cannot be left to chance. It must be the result of deliberate design conducted by each person and directed toward the highest values within them. The software framework and the principles of psychitecture are basic psychotechnologies which, if provided and instilled in each individual, could radically advance our evolution.

    — Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Ryan A. Bush

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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