Today on the Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about websites and what stops people from updating them.
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Nothing is Stopping You From Becoming an Entrepreneur
Today on the Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about entrepreneurship and the challenges that entrepreneurs face.
Show Notes
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard
The Myers-Briggs Personality Test
Elon Musk lives in a Virtual World
The Challenges of Entrepreneurship
Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. My name is Jacob. I’m here with Paul, and we are talking about one of my favorite topics today. We’re talking about entrepreneurship. What are challenges that entrepreneurs face? I have been involved with entrepreneur work. Paul has been involved with entrepreneur work since I was in diapers maybe.
Paul: Probably, yeah.
Jacob: Probably. So we’re going to be talking about the challenges that face entrepreneurs today, and so just to get us started, Paul, would you just talk us about, talk to us about what entrepreneurship is? What is it about?
Paul: Well, at its fundamental, it’s starting a business and it’s all of the things that are involved with that. And you might think, “Okay. You know, what’s a business?” Well, a business, you really have to define. I mean, we’re starting a business. What is a business? And I think that the – I’m going to make up my definition for a business and say that it is a service or product which you’re offering to people that they will pay for. So you exchange value for money.
Jacob: Yeah, it’s a value proposition for financial gain.
Paul: Right. So… You know, in the postmodern, might I say, millennial mindset, there are some people that believe you should just give me money because I exist. That’s not what business is about.
Jacob: It’s not about that?
Paul: No. Not currently. It might change, You know, in Star Trek—
Jacob: I thought you were just going to give me money because you liked me.
Paul: I might. I might. But you can’t necessarily plan on eating next week because of that.
Jacob: Based off of that. Yeah.
Paul: Based off of that. You know, and in Star Trek, you know, there’s this altruistic, everything is provided and it’s an interesting paradigm shift.
But that’s not where we’re at least yet. So what do you do? And there are lots of businesses out there. All of those had to be started by somebody. The person who started that, or the collection of people that started that are called entrepreneurs. And that is something that is a deliberate choice. Many people might back into it. And I think on one of our earlier podcasts, we talked about the idea that….So many people might back into this idea of entrepreneurship because they want to bake cakes.
Jacob: Right. We were talking about that earlier.
Paul: Right. So you want to bake cakes, and you say, “Okay, so I’m going to open up a cake shop.”
Jacob: Right. Because I want to do this on my own.
Paul: I love it. Very quickly, it becomes not about baking cakes. It’s about, well, how do I get the flour? How do I pay for the flour and the sugar and the icing and all these different things? And how do I do that?
Jacob: What are the legal ramifications of the company?
Paul: Legal and how do I get a store? And how do I paint the walls, and what are the legal…
Jacob: Yeah. What are the qualifications for the employees and how do I keep everybody on task?
Paul: Well, yeah. I mean, not even… But even just the fact that I have to file taxes. You know, the fundamental business license and all these different things that are… It’s like peeling an onion, you know, that you need to… Oh, well, if you have more than 20 people, all the rules change. And so how do you do that? And there are these sick people out there that enjoy discovering that and I’m one of them. It’s a challenge that I get energy from. But it’s, you know, and there’s always a new thing.
Like we were talking about, “Well, we should do this and this and this.” Well, I, you know, based on my experience, like, well if we do that, we have to get this kind of license and we have to do this and this implication for reporting. And we might have to pay extra taxes on that. The person who had that idea didn’t have a clue about those things, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh. That’s sobering.”
And, and so there’s a lot of wantrepreneurs out there. It’s a well-worn—
Jacob: Is that a phrase unique to you?
Paul: No, not at all. But there’s a lot of people who believe they want to be an entrepreneur, a wantrepreneur. But the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing stopping you from being an entrepreneur. A lot of people say, “Well, if I had money,” or “If I had this,” or “If I had this.”
And I heard a talk recently by an executive, Bob Doll, and he was saying, you know, “We’re all given the same amount of time.” You know, so if you’re aware of the different circles out there, Bill Gates and, you know, they took something. They had the same amount of time. Bill Gates wasn’t wealthy, you know. He was upper-middle class but his parents weren’t, you know, rich. They couldn’t give him a million dollars or something. And he made something happen. He went through the hard work.
And I say, being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
Jacob: Yeah. It is. It is… I mean, in some ways, it’s a bit of a grind, but it’s constant work. It’s constantly innovating, pressing forward…
Paul: Yeah. You wake up every Monday, and you’re unemployed. Because see, when you wake up and you have a job, whatever it might be, all you have to do is get yourself there and reasonably perform, and even if you don’t feel like it, it will happen.
With an entrepreneur, you can’t just show up.
Jacob: That’s interesting. I never quite put it in that category. But that’s definitely how I’ve felt with the entrepreneur work that I’ve done where it’s… If I don’t show up, nothing happens, and then there’s no money.
Paul: Right. Exactly. And…or goal. You know, you’re not meeting your goal. You’re not moving towards it. And one of the, the most difficult things for an entrepreneur to deal with is that transition from doing it all yourself to getting other people to do it. And that’s one of the biggest lessons you need to learn, is you need… It’s not about doing it yourself. You need to figure out how to get other people to do stuff for you. Because if you do it all yourself, you’re limited. You only have 24 hours in a day.
Jacob: Yeah. In this whole category of delegation is what you’re talking about. Actually, I have on my desk because I’m going to be reading in the next couple of weeks, The One Minute Manager.
Paul: That’s a short, good book.
Jacob: Oh, man. It’s super short. But even just the first few pages have been super helpful because this whole category of delegation, I mean, I personally never went to business school, but it doesn’t seem to be very well sufficiently covered in the entrepreneurial literature because it’s… The moment you go from month one to month two, and you’re building momentum, you have to start delegating.
Paul: Absolutely. And it’s the key, I think, stumbling block for a lot of entrepreneurs. So a huge challenge there is that you need to change the way you do things, because now it’s not about me coming up with the best idea and I’m going to paint the picture. That would be great, you know. And I create a business that paints one picture a week. But if I really want to move past that, I need to get other people painting the pictures for me.
And that’s a hard thing, you know, to do. So I think it’s also… You know, a lot of people… Well, I think a lot of people in this sort of wantrepreneur have a romantic notion of what an entrepreneur is. And that’s because, you know, like everybody wanted to be a rock star, wants to be a rock star, because they see the romantic notion of the successful rock stars.
Jacob: Yeah. Or they see, for example, like Steve Jobs was fantastic and he was a visionary, and he did these great things. It’s like, well bro, first off, you aren’t Steve Jobs, no matter who you are. You’re not Steve Jobs.
Paul: Yeah. That’s true.
Jacob: But, I mean, it was, you know, regardless of all the, you know, the ways in which you could critique Steve Jobs, he was a force of nature in terms of just the amount of work that he produced.
Paul: Well, that’s true. I don’t think it’s that helpful to look at him as a model.
Jacob: Yeah. I don’t either. I would agree.
Paul: Because he’s an outlier. He’s an anomaly. You know, you need to look at… And I think this important for smaller businesses. You know, you have a photo… You’re a photographer. And you’ve got your store, and you know, or your studio or whatever it is. And you’re largely doing that. You will inherently be limited by that fact if you’re the only photographer. And so there’s an aspect… There’s wantrepreneurs who just talk about it. But there’s the wantrepreneurs who are in business who want to be bigger than that but aren’t doing anything to make themselves bigger than that.
Because the first thing you need to do is hire another photographer and say, “Okay. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. This is how you…” And then hire another one. And hire another one. And you know, you can’t just be doing it yourself. The minute you do it all yourself, you’re doomed, because it’s not going to scale.
Jacob: So that’s some of the challenges that present for people wanting to be an entrepreneur. What are some of the questions that they should be asking? So what are some of the questions that they should be asking to move themselves towards entrepreneurial work?
Paul: Well, I think first of all, you need to assess whether you’re wired to be an entrepreneur. And do you… How do you react to stress? Do you thrive in it? Does it compromise your health? I mean, stress is bad for everybody. So it’s really, is it stressful to be going through and dealing with cash flow or dealing with the people doing the work.
Jacob: Have you ever done, like, a personality test?
Paul: I have. Yes.
Jacob: I found that really helpful just in terms of, like, a practical thing. I think people with… So if somebody is listening to this and they’re like, “Okay, how do I respond to stress? Oh, I binge on ice cream.” Well, that’s an effect of how you respond to stress, but actually, you can kind of get some keys from, like, a Myers-Briggs personality test. So I did a Myers-Briggs personality test, and when you start reading through what they call the shadows of your personality, so what you respond when things get difficult where do you go? What are the shadow that…? And it’s helpful to understand.
So, for example, my personality is I’m very relationally-based. And so when I experience the stress of entrepreneurial work, my personality goes to assuming that that’s personally intended, like, so that I inject… Because of my, the positive side of my personalities, I build relationships easily. It comes naturally. But when things get stressful, my stress level takes me to thinking, “Oh, this is personal.” And so—
Paul: Well, it probably is in your case.
Jacob: Probably.
Paul: Sorry. I’m playing to your insecurities here.
Jacob: Yeah. But I would say in terms of trying to figure out how do you respond to stress that’s an easy step forward, to try to determine…get an object analysis.
Paul: Yeah. I think you’re right. You know, I can’t tell you what you’re problems are and what’s going to stop you, what you’re stumbling blocks are going to be. And it’s interesting, I’m working with somebody who is starting a business, and I’ve given them some advice, and they are not following it, you know. So it’s not within their perception that that is the right path to go. And it’s easier to do what they’re doing. And that’s fine. And they will probably get a business that will grow to a certain point, but it will stop at that point.
Either there’s a vast difference between building a small business with like a couple of people and a big — not a big business, but, you know, a 50 to 100, 200 person company. Those are mostly done through deliberate actions of the entrepreneurs, of the founders. It doesn’t just happen. It’s deliberate systematic work that you do.
Jacob: Yeah. So what are other person questions that entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
Paul: Well, are you focused? Can you—?
Jacob: I’m sorry. What were you saying?
Paul: Yeah. Who were we talking about? Again, you know, there’s lots of shiny things in the world. And you’re going to be interested in that, and man, it’s a lot easier to be distracted by that. You need to have a singular focus on what you’re goals are. And you need to be constantly re-evaluating that, you know. Do you doubt your ability? You know, in some ways, you need to doubt your ability, because you’ve got to go and get help. And you have to get that help to invest in you. But then there’s the other extreme of that is if you doubt it, you’ll become paralyzed. “I can’t do anything, because I can’t do that. I can’t do that.”
Jacob: I wonder as well if a question for you to personally wrestle with moving towards being an entrepreneur or being an entrepreneur — what’s your support network?
Paul: Yeah, that’s a good point.
Jacob: You know, whether it’s your wife, your husband, or your friends or family, it seems to me that people who have healthy networks thrive, even in difficult entrepreneurial situations. Whereas people who don’t, they seem to flounder in a way.
Paul: Yeah. It would be interesting. I think that’s accurate for the majority of people. But I think there are the loan wolfs. I think Steve Jobs was probably a lone wolf. And Elon Musk, I get the sense that he’s a lone wolf.
Jacob: Yeah, but he’s in a virtual world of a lone wolf.
Paul: It’s a construct in his own mind.
Jacob: Construct. Right.
Paul: Yes, that’s true.
Jacob: Sorry.
Paul: No, I agree, you know. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, look it up. It’s fascinating.
Jacob: Yeah. It’ll be in the show notes.
Paul: Alright. Okay. So, you know, and as you’re starting a business, there are so many things that you need to do. How do you know those? Well, you can buy a book. That will tell you some of them, tell you one person. But you’ve got to have mentors and people out there that you can follow and ask questions. And I’ve found that it’s a joy to share that with people, you know. “Oh this. You should do this.” Or, “You should do this.” Or, “You should do this.”
Most people want to share information.
Jacob: Yeah. And I think for truly successful entrepreneurs, some of the double joy of being an entrepreneur and seeing something build and thrive is then being able to turn and help other people.
Paul: Well, because you now get to be involved in building and thriving again.
Jacob: Exactly. Yeah. There’s the Russian… Or there’s a Russian proverb that joy shared with a friend is double joy. It’s, I think, especially entrepreneur work, that’s definitely true.
Paul: It is. But I do know that there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have had to go it alone because nobody saw their vision. And, you know, that’s really true. And that being alone is hard with that vision, and it’s a bet that you’re making. And you’re all in. Because you’re either going to be proved right or wrong.
Jacob: It’s a pass/fail—
Paul: Well it’s a pass/fail, but it’s loaded with fail because if you miss on any number of things, you could, you will fail. Whereas pass, you have to be successful on almost everything, you know, so it’s not pass/fail. It’s like, I’m either going to be… If there’s 100 questions on the test, I’ve got to get them all right. And that’s just hard.
Jacob: Yeah. That’s very difficult. So what are some of the external questions that people should be asking?
Paul: Well, I think, you know, this is more work than you can ever imagine. And if you imagine it to be a certain amount, double or triple or quadruple it. It is relentless.
Jacob: Yeah. I’ve had friends talk to me about “Oh, I want to start a company,” and I… Great idea. I’d love to see them start a company, but just making the external observation, I think when they think of work, they think of 35 to 40 hours a week.
Paul: Yeah. It’s not at all that. I, in running my businesses, you know, maybe to my fault, you know, I’ve spent 80, 90, 100 hours thinking about my business every week. You know, it’s you’re always on.
Jacob: Yeah. Especially if you are, you know, the CEO of, or the lead on an entrepreneurial work, your headspace is the business.
Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s a cost to that, that your family, to your friends, and you need to weigh that cost. Is the money I’m going to make, going to outweigh that. And you know, my kids are in their teens, I don’t want to sacrifice that and having looked back and say, “Oh, I missed their teenage years.”
Well, yeah. Now we’ve got a lot of money, but they don’t know their father. So, you need to count that cost.
Jacob: Cat Stevens wrote about this. Didn’t he?
Paul: Yes. No…
Jacob: “Cat’s in the Cradles”?
Paul: No. That’s not Cat Stevens. That’s Jim Croce.
Jacob: What?
Paul: Yeah. The cat, “The Cat in the Cradle” is—
Jacob: Cat and the silver spoon.
Paul: Yeah. That’s Jim Croce.
Jacob: Jim Croce. Are you kidding me?
Paul: Yeah. Cat Stevens is a man who has a name that says “Cat,” but oh my gosh. We will have remedial class in pop culture and music on our next podcast.
Jacob: I’m sorry. I got those wires crossed.
Paul: Boy, you did.
Jacob: Anyhow, a “Cat’s in the Cradle” moment. You don’t want to have that as an…
Paul: Well, yeah. That’s dramatically portrayed in that song, you know, that, it basically talks about what your priorities are and one of the things that’s, you know, key to me is I work to live. And that is not necessarily compatible with being an entrepreneur.
Jacob: Right. It certainly… If being an entrepreneur is narrowed enough in terms of life goals, saying, “I want to work to live, rather than live to work,” making that distinction narrows the field even further.
Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s very difficult to be a part-time — you know, working 40 or 50 hours a week — entrepreneur. That’s part-time. You’ve really got to be all-in on this. And you know, come into this with your eyes wide open.
Jacob: Yeah. So, any other external observations before we start closing up?
Paul: There’s so much, you know. There’s legal, procedural, marketing, technical, competition. Just the product, the customer service, customers, love them or hate them, you know, you need them, and they’re great when they’re great, and they’re hard when they’re hard. And you’ve got to deal with that. And you’ve got to be a counselor to your employees. And you know, it’s very difficult, and you can’t just have one thing that you do, like making the cakes. You’ve got to deal with the fact that your baker that you just hired, is now sick. Who’s going to do the cakes today? Well, I know I can, but that isn’t going to scale a business, you know.
And so there’s lots of these crises that occur, and you have to be wired so that you don’t go off the deep end and be, “Oh my gosh. The world’s going to end here.” Or, that can’t be stressful, you know. So I think that’s the biggest thing, is that it’s hard. Not everybody is wired to do it.
Jacob: So it seems like maybe some people shouldn’t be entrepreneurs?
Paul: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You wake up every Monday, and you’re not employed. Nobody is going to do it.
Jacob: And that’s a helpful principle or reality, I guess, to keep in mind with being an entrepreneur. Can you, as your make up as a person, it’s not necessarily a diminishing of your value in the least, but can you handle that sort of, you know, going to bed Friday night. You will be unemployed by Monday morning.
Paul: Right. Exactly. I mean, you know, not everybody can be a linebacker in the NFL, but some guys are wired that way, and they love it. And the hits don’t bother them, at least initially. But, you know, it does take their toll, you know. But, but I would not enjoy that. I would not find that exhilarating, you know. So we’re wired differently.
Jacob: Yeah. So we’ve been hitting a little bit of the negative side of…or just the realities of being an entrepreneur. It does some to me that if somebody has the wiring and composition, I think they can either grow into or be coached into being a fully thriving entrepreneur and somebody who embraces the realities of what’s engag— what they’re engaged in. But can you give us kind of a final, like, positive note for entrepreneurs?
Paul: Well, I think that, you know, I work with a local school, college that has an entrepreneurial area. And what’s interesting is, you know, I’m not a Steve Jobs. I’m a… you know, If Steve Jobs is an A-level, I might be a C or D-level entrepreneur, you know. Maybe even an E. I don’t know.
I understand some of the things about it. I haven’t done as… I haven’t been willing to compromise in a lot of ways or sacrifice. And what I find is, you know, people have this idea for this new widget. And then I say, “Well, is there any competition? Who else is building it? “And they’re like, “I don’t know.”
You know, so this is your tiger to take by the tail. And you need to pour yourself into it. And you know, just like you hear stories of musicians or book writers, “I sent it to 10 companies, publishers, and they all rejected me. And the 11th took it.” Well, you’ve got to keep going. And you’ve got to have that faith. You know, that story of the 10 is J.K. Rowling. You know, she sent it to 10 publishers. They all said no.
Jacob: Well, even… We were talking over lunch today about Stranger Things. And I believe it’s the same type of story where they presented to several major networks, you know, did their own.
Paul: You’ve got to believe in what you believe in and go after it. And, you know, there will be setbacks. I want it to be all peaches and cream, but it’s not. And I would, I would venture to say that I don’t know if the risk-reward payoff is necessarily worth it for all entrepreneurs. I think it’s probably the exception that it’s worth it, because in our own human nature, we will do too much and spend too much time away from our families. And if you could rewind that life… So the successful entrepreneur and they go through, and they have a terrible relationship with their children and their spouse and they are very successful money-wise.
And I’ve met a lot of these guys — Wall Street guys and a lot of the people in, you know, Connecticut outside of New York. And boy, they have worldly standards. They’ve succeeded.
Now, if we rewind that and go back at that critical moment where they choose to be the entrepreneur and redirect them, I don’t think their life would be all that much worse, and maybe even better.
Jacob: Well, and you know, honestly, this is maybe a topic for another podcast, but you and I were talking about this earlier, that at the core of, I think, maybe genuinely good entrepreneurial work, is not the widget or the product that you are trying to achieve or the business you’re trying to build, but it’s the people. So and that includes the whole range of people from your family to the employees to your customers. Are you trying to better them? Are you trying to serve them, help them thrive? Or is this just basically about you and your widget that you want to get out there and get your name up there?
Paul: Yeah, I mean, you know, it is. If Steve Jobs was reduced to the iPhone, I think that would be pretty sad, you know. He was a person. He had a wife that loved him. He had kids that loved him. You know, he had relationships, and I think those are what’s really matters, you know. Yeah, the iPhone is really cool, but I wouldn’t be that, you know. It’s interesting how we sort of, you know, the Wright Brothers, they invented the plane. Well, they were people too, and I’m sure things made them laugh and smile and things like that. And it wasn’t all around the plane.
Jacob: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. Entrepreneurship is about starting a business, but we want businesses and entrepreneurial work that serve and help other people to thrive.
Paul: Absolutely.
Jacob: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. I hope that this was helpful for you. We’d love to hear from you if you have any questions, or if you have any comments. Please visit us at Paul Parisi.com where you can find the show notes for this episode and all of our previous episodes and where you can get a hold of Paul if you would like to talk to him personally.
Thanks again. Have a great week.
Also published on Medium.
The Advantage of WordPress
On Episode 29 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about the advantage of WordPress and CMS for business websites. What is a CMS? If you are looking to build a website, WordPress is a CMS that is used by 30% of the internet, and is easy to manage. SaviorLabs can get you set up and running with a world-class website using WordPress.
Ways to Make Small Businesses Better
On Episode 30 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about ways to make small businesses better!
Transcript
Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.
Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. I’m Jacob Young, and I’m here with Paul Parisi. And we’re going to be talking about ways to make small businesses better.
Paul, can you hit us off?
Paul: We had come up with this topic and we deal with a lot of small businesses. I have worked in smaller businesses throughout my career. But, you know, when you do technology and web and stuff like that for these, for these businesses, and when you look at a smaller business, you know, anywhere from one to 50, a hundred people, they have a fundamental thing that they need to come to terms with right now.
One is that the world has changed. We are in an economy of social selling. And the way that a business interfaces to the world has fundamentally changed. So no longer can we say, “I can get along with just a Yellow Pages ad or with a phone number,” or, you know, putting a phone number on the side of my truck. You need to be there when the people who are going to consume your product, or potentially consume your product — whether it be carpentry or painting or interior design or medical services — you need to be where they’re looking for things, and where they’re consuming content. That used to be the newspaper, the phone booth, the Yellow Pages. And it seems like a lot of small businesses are in the mindset that they’ll just wait it out until that changes back. It ain’t gonna change back. The ship has sailed. This is the new world.
And the new world is social selling. That’s what I like to call it. It’s, you know, you’re going to have to communicate with people over the social networks and socially interact with them through a technology to make sure they understand your value proposition.
What’s nice about that is that you can get to know people that you never would have gotten to know before. But it’s not trivial. Just because you put up a website with some salient content on it, doesn’t mean people are going to find it.
Jacob: Right. It goes from everything from not only putting up a website, but having a website that, for example, we’ve talked about this several times, being mobile accessible.
Paul: Absolutely. Yeah.
Jacob: I mean, I had a friend recently tell me that he had somebody design their website for them, and I asked, “Is it mobile friendly?” “No, it’s not.” And I’m like…
Paul: Why do you bother?
Jacob: Why even both putting it together? But so you have from that end of things, all the way over to having a Facebook page, and not just having a Facebook page, but one that actually has updated information, content that can be socialized, because one you have that dynamic available for people, then they start doing the advertising for you. “Hey, I went to Paul’s pizzeria, you know, on 99th South Elm Street. It was awesome. Let me tell you about this.” You know, take a picture. Now you’ve got, not only fresh content on your Facebook, but now you have people who are advertising with pictures of your place.
Paul: Right. And their testimonial or testifying to the fact that this be good.
Jacob: To their 1,000 friends, you know. I always cry a little inside when…
Paul: When?
Jacob: When I see companies that are good companies or good businesses that just do not have this going for them.
Paul: Right. And you know, it is very much, I think, some of it with the smaller businesses is they don’t have… They’re worried about making mistakes. And, they’re rightfully worried about this. Because if you made a website… Let’s say you went overboard, and you spent a lot of money. $15,000 on a website. Integrated it with your catalog and everything, and, because you thought was the thing to do five years ago. Now you’ve got to re-do that. So, oh my gosh. I made a mistake by doing that. I don’t want to be that guy who made that mistake and wasted that money. So I’ll just wait to do it.
Well, the good news is, is that we’re at a point now where we can make more intelligent decisions about that, you know. And we need to get a web presence that both tells who we are and our value proposition, is accessible on mobile, accessible on this, and integrates all of the social platforms.
But it doesn’t stop there, you know. So don’t get yourself into a funk where you say, “Well, I don’t know what to do, so I’m not going to do it.” There are lots of organizations like ours who can help you, sit down and say, you know, “This is what’s good to do. This is what you shouldn’t do.”
And that’s an ongoing investment, you know. It’s not one and done. And I like the use the analogy that if you went into a store, a shoe store, and you saw the same shoes that were there 10 years ago, you would say, “I’ll go somewhere else.” Or you go into a sports apparel store or something, and you see the old logos. And they don’t have the newest logo for your team. It’s like, “Well, why would I go here.”
The counters are dirty, and I can’t see the device behind the counter. Or if I go into Best Buy and the cameras aren’t all laid out nicely. And none of them work; they’re not charged. You’re going to be like, “What the heck with this?” You know?
So that’s the same thing you do on a website. If I come to your website and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t have updated information, I have to get the feeling, as a consumer of your website, that this is the most current and accurate information there is. Because without that, you increase their cognitive load. The whole point of a website and social media and Yelp reviews is to say, “It reduces the amount of work. It reduces the risk on my part.” So if I hear that this person put up a good review of the pizza shop, okay, now I have a way to manage my expectations. And if they say it was bad, well, I still might need to go there because of the time, and I don’t have a place to go other where else. And, but this is going to help me do that.
And I think it also promotes excellence, because, you know, if you get that bad review on Yelp, you’re going to want to fix that.
Jacob: So I’m hearing you say two things here. We were just saying, it’s a new setting. And then you’re saying also, not being afraid to make mistakes.
Paul: Yeah. Well, you will make mistakes, but you have to be playing in this new world. The world has moved, and if you don’t, that is a bigger mistake then having done something wrong. The nice part about that, though, is that we’re at a point in web design where, well, again, if you do it right, you aren’t going to make mistakes. You need a website that is clear, salient, simple, and works on a phone. And, you know, I can’t tell you and number of sites I go to. We have a sister podcast that’s called Save Your Sites where we go through websites and how they could be improved. And we have an unlimited supply of websites which we can review. And that’s, that’s sort of like, you know, why don’t they have their address on here? You know, it’s obvious to somebody who says, “Why?” And they don’t… There’s no good reason, except somebody didn’t see that.
And then when you load it on a phone, you can’t read it at all because it’s too small. So those kind of things.
So you’re going to make mistakes. But I think now with the right partners and looking at other examples of things they’ve done, you can choose somebody who will make fewer mistakes. But don’t let that dissuade you, because just about the time you’re done with your website, wait six months more, and then you’ve got to redo it again. Because you’ve got to clean the counters. You’ve got to re-merchandise the store. You’ve got to move things around, make it look interesting.
Every time somebody comes into your store, if it was exactly the way it was when you first opened, he’s probably going to walk out with buying less. But if you have… If you move the stuff around… You look at merchandising in stores. They’re constantly doing it. You go into a Macy’s. They’re constantly doing things to get people to engage with the product. That’s what we’re talking about.
Jacob: That’s excellent. So it seems to me like you’re then kind of hinting at the next category of planning. So talk us through that.
Paul: So the whole idea here is, you know — what is it? — the phrase “Failing to plan, is planning to fail.” And that’s really what it is. You have a responsibility, as a business owner, to effectively communicate your value proposition. That might be a product. It might be a service. Nobody is going to do that for you. I mean, in a Yelp world, people may help you with that. But you need to give them something that’s absolutely clear. And if you come in and don’t plan what you’re going to do, you’re not going to do it.
And, you know, it’s very, very difficult. If you look back at the last year on what you’ve done, they’ve either been reactive things or planned, proactive things. You can’t let things go by just the tyranny of the urgent. You need to really get away from that mentality.
Jacob: And I think that maybe one way to kind of break this down is to say you need to plan. You need to plan for your growth personally, as the business leader, and then you need to plan for your business to grow. Obviously there’s a five-year plan, however you’re going to move things forward, you have to think about what’s the plan for that plan to be executed.
Paul: It’s planning to plan. And then also setting goals and not that you’re going to hit all your goals. But it gives you some metric by which to judge whether you’re successful or not.
Jacob: Yeah. And I think in terms of a book that I’ve been really helped by in the last year that I would recommend for you along the lines of planning to grow personally, is The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It’s a book aimed at entrepreneurs and, actually, kind of touches on some of these things we’ve talked about, because entrepreneurs or small business owners almost always get into the industry because they love, for example, to bake cakes. And they want to bake cakes for a living.
Well, when you start being the business owner of a company that bakes cakes, it’s a different experience. Well, that’s great that you want to do that, but plan to grow into that role of leading a company that, for example, bakes cakes. So, but it’s that planning for your own personal growth because that’s going to be effective in leading your company to grow as a business as well.
Paul: Yeah. We have a podcast that’s coming up that talks about some of the core issues of entrepreneurship, and we should revisit that as well. But entrepreneurship, it’s in vogue right now. And I think it will continue to do that, be in vogue. But it has particular challenges. Now, we’re talking about small businesses, really, here. Businesses that are somewhat established and I think that there’s a difference here. And most entrepreneurs, because they’re starting in a vacuum, will have a website that explains what they’re doing. The issue is as you become complacent over time, what do you say?
And you have to be relevant contemporarily. In other words, right now you have to be relevant. You know, so we’re in New England, and leaves are starting to blow, so, you know, the people that clean gutters should have an updated website and an iPhone way to book them, you know. Doing that in February or March isn’t going to make that much difference. Now they might build it during that time and, you know, deploy it later, but the point is, is that, you know, our relevance, it has to be contextual.
Jacob: Well, I think that’s a perfect example, because, obviously, like, you know, leaf cleaners or whatever are going to only be doing their business, at least in New England, at a cer— you know, a two or three month period, but you can’t start designing the website or the landing page for that in September. You have to plan ahead. And you have to plan to do that in, like, March.
Paul: Right. Exactly. For the next September. You know, but there’s also things not with just seasons, but what’s going on, you know. There’s one store that I get their texts on, and it says, “Oh, you know, because of the hurricane, we’re going to extend our weekend sale two days.” And they’re doing a good job at that. But like if you’re a builder, get your house tightened up for winter, or whatever that value proposition is, it has to be relevant to reality. And that’s an important takeaway, I think, that it’s, you need to think about that.
And what we’ve done and I recommend is what’s called a contact calendar, is to really look at a calendar and right down, well, what am I going to talk about this month? What am I going to talk about this month? What am I going to talk about this? This month?
Now you have to be a little bit flexible with that, because things might come up, you know. So if you sell home heating oil, and you know that the prices are going to go up, you want to be opportunistic and say, “Order now before the prices go up.” Or “We’re, we’re having an issue with the Middle East, so there might be a rise in oil prices. Protect yourself now.” So you need to be aware of that, which you are, because you’re already in the market. But you need to communicate that insight to the next person.
Jacob: You need to have a plan in place of how to capitalize on those observations that, to you, seem obvious. And making them accessible to the people that you are trying to either appeal to as a customer base or you’re already serving as customers.
Paul: Absolutely. Well, yeah. Don’t ever underestimate the amount of work you need to do to keep a customer because everybody out there is trying to take that customer away from you. So if you’re not doing anything to say, “Hey, we’re just as good as the new guys, and we’re…we know you.” Even just, you know, “We like you.” Or, “You like us. And remember that good service we gave you.” Remind people of those things is critical. And so making sure that you’re banging the drum for your business is a huge, huge value.
Jacob: Yeah. I mean it’s this principle people don’t think about you as much as you do.
Paul: Yes, that’s true. If they do, you might have a problem.
Jacob: Those are the… The people who do think about you as much as you do are the people you don’t want commenting—
Paul: That’s right. Exactly.
Jacob: —on your YouTube and Facebook pages. So the last category then, is investing versus the status quo. Talk us through that one.
Paul: Well I think there’s an enormous amount of personal inertia to overcome this idea of the status quo. We are all busy. We are all, you know, overloaded with things and just things keep us really, you know, going, going, going. And so we will default leave at the status quo. And we need to really approach things from the point of view of, “Wait a minute. What am I going to invest in today?” You know, there was a Microsoft campaign, probably 10 years ago, “Where do you want to go today?”
And it was really a brilliant thing because they were saying that their technology helps you go where you want to go. So if you’re not thinking about that, nobody else is. And if you work at a small business, you add value by saying, “Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And let’s overcome the status quo. How can we improve? How can we be better?”
You know, we have to constantly look at how do we make things a better experience for our customers because there’s such competition. And if you don’t do it, somebody else will, and they’ll take your customer away.
Jacob: So it seems like it would be even worthwhile to think about how you can either delegate to somebody on your team or hire somebody on, either part time or full time to help manage these or have a contract relationship, for example.
Paul: Well, I think there’s two aspects to that. I think everybody on the team should absolutely be thinking this way, is “How do we do better? How do we improve?” And that, I think, has to come from the top down, but it has to be, it has to be nurtured. People are not going to extemporaneously just know how to do that. They have to challenge the status quo and say, “Well, why is it we do it this way? Is there a better way to do it?” And sometimes the answer is going to be, “No. This is good enough for now.” But I think you’ll find that there will be some germane issues that you can say, “Wait a minute. Yeah, that does need to be addressed. And let’s put a plan in to do that.”
So that’s, I think, critical, a critical way to look at it. If you are the business owner or president or CEO or chief bottle washer or whatever it might be, you absolutely have to look at that. And, you know, the changing, the changing landscape of your business.
The world has changed. And one of the things we can be certain of is change will continue.
Jacob: Yeah. That’s for sure. So, just in conclusion and to kind of wrap things up, the five things that we’ve been looking at are for five things to make a small business better is recognize you’re in a new economy; recognize it’s going to be okay to make mistakes, but make mistakes anyways. Or would you rephrase it differently?
Paul: Well, you’re going to make mistakes.
Jacob: You’re going to make mistakes.
Paul: And deal with it. Get over it.
Jacob: Get over making mistakes.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, don’t let that paralyze you from not trying. You have to try or you will die.
Jacob: Yeah. So new economy. Try or die. You have to plan to plan; you have to plan ahead. Recognize that you want to keep your content contemporary and relevant to what’s going on for your business today. And then, as a part of that as well, is constantly fighting the status quo to be innovating.
Paul: Absolutely. Nobody is going to do it if you don’t do it.
Jacob: Excellent. Thanks, Paul. This has been The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. If you’d like to hear more about Paul or hear more about how Paul has been leading Savior Labs to do these very things, you can visit us at PaulParisi.com or SaviorLabs.com. Hope you’re doing well. See you next week.
The Apple Has Fallen Far from the Steve
On Episode 28 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about Apple the Iphone 7 taking out their headphone jack.
Introduction
Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation. My name is Jacob. I had the privilege of hosting Paul, and we are going to be talking about the iPhone 7 today, not just the iPhone 7 but specifically the lack of a headphone jack on it.
Paul: Wait a minute. You’ll telling me that took the headphone jack out?
Jacob: 3.5. Straight off.
Paul: Wow.
Jacob: This has been—
Paul: But I’ve heard you could drill a hole into them and it’s behind there.
Jacob: I was going to bring it up. That’s one of my favorite parts about this whole story. They…there’s like a guy loaded up a YouTube video, putting his iPhone 7 in a vice, and then all through the YouTube said, “This will not work.” And then thousands of people still did it.
Paul: Well, we don’t know about the thousands. Yeah. But at least there was more than one.
Jacob: There was at least a few.
Paul: More than zero.
Jacob: Yeah. More than zero. I would like to think of it as a thousand.
Paul: Do you think they need to turn in their humanity cards or what?
Jacob: I think it calls into question the quality of our our public education. I just… I can’t imagine.
Paul: What were you thinking is the question, really. What were you thinking?
Jacob: It’s a, it’s a hidden feature that you…
Paul: So Apple took it. Actually, they built it in. They just covered it up.
Jacob: Right. Right.
Paul: Interesting.
Jacob: So the whole—
Paul: That would have been really stupid of Apple to do that.
Jacob: Yeah. So I haven’t actually… So I have an iPhone 6, and I’ve actually refused to go to the iPhone 7.
Paul: Because of this issue.
Jacob: Because of this issue. I could easily do it with the way my plan is set up. But yeah…
Paul: So there’s no financial penalty or disincentive financially.
Jacob: No. We’re through Sprint and, if you lease your phone know, and so it’s just, whatever, $5 and month, and you just go get the new phone. But so, I wanted to bring it up as a topic to talk about because there’s a lot of issues in it.
Paul: Well, I don’t really think it’s that big a deal. I mean, my toaster doesn’t have a headphone jack and neither does my microwave, so I’m really not sure. But, you know, I don’t carry those with me, you know. So that’s a good point. That’s a good point.
Jacob: We’ve previously not been used to using your headphone jack on your previous toaster.
Paul: No. No, all the toasters I’ve had to date have not had headphone jacks. They’re all Bluetooth headphones. Yeah, it is interesting. You know, it’s a, as Apple spun it, which I think was a mistake…
Jacob: I think they said it was brave and courageous.
Paul: Brave. Courageous. Courageous, you know, and, you know, I don’t know. People in the floods recently had firefighters rescue them. I think that’s courageous.
Jacob: Strikes me as courageous.
Paul: Yeah, you know, I don’t think changing, you know, making a decision, a difficult decision, to remove the headphone jack… You know, it would be… It’s, it’s a pretty big space, relative to the amount of space that the headphones and the, uh, the wires that go to it and all that, it’s a pretty big space in the, in the microcosm inside of an iPhone. So I can understand that that space was there.
Jacob: It was valuable real estate.
Paul: Valuable real estate. That’s a great way to put it. But you know, they didn’t take it out of the iPad. You know, so I think it’s a little disingenuous to say, “We’re taking it out because we think people should use wireless.” You know, it’s wireless or nothing.
Jacob: Yeah, well, and you know, some of the story was, “This is a hundred-year-old technology. We’re finally coming up to—”
Paul: Yeah, so it light. I mean, you know… You know… As I was saying, you know, I think the iPhone 8 is going to do away with the screen, and the earphone, you know, microphone, and everything. It’s going to be, basically, an ethereal… You know, you’re going to open the box. You won’t be able to see, taste, touch, or use it, but it’s an iPhone 8.
Jacob: But it’s interesting. So the whole category, though, of taking away the headphone jack, it has some… As I was looking into this, and I’ve been watching articles, it has some collateral damage. I don’t even know… Either they intentionally and spitefully did this, or they didn’t think about it, and there’s kind of the collateral damage. So one of them is, for example, like there’s a device called the Square that plugs into the headphone jack.
Paul: The was immediately my thought, is the peripheral devices that depend on the headphone jack, what are they going to do?
Jacob: What? They’re going to go into the adapter for the thunderport? So, there’s that, but then also, because now that the headphones are basically, linked, you know. So they have the wireless headphones, somebody… There’s been some major concerns about how that affects music in terms of, because now you have a device that has to be authenticated and synced to your phone, and there could be a way for Apple to say, “Well, if you haven’t bought your music through us…”
Paul: Oh, sure. Absolutely. They could downgrade the quality and do all sorts of—
Jacob: Or not even allow you to sync it. So it’s…
Paul: Well… Yeah. That would be interesting. So you can’t listen to this non-properly purchased music of these headphones because we have control of the wire. That’s an interesting comment. The, the interesting thing I heard is that, the quality is better. Well, the quality isn’t necessarily better. A wire is pretty darn good for quality. There’s a lot of debates in audio file circles, about the quality of cables. And there’s people who charge enormous amounts of money for cables. It’s a very mythical thing.
But there’s this well-known test for, double-blind test with audio files, So they did the A/B testing. They did these interconnects that were very expensive. I mean, ridiculously expensive. That was A, and then they switched it over to B. And the people, very critical people, very, you know, very astute listeners, couldn’t tell the difference.
You should ask the question now, well what were the connections used for B. Well, they were coat hangers twisted together.
Jacob: No kidding.
Paul: And if you understand the physics of, metal wires, you know, electrons, you know, yeah. There’s a little bit of difference here, but it’s not extreme.
Jacob: It’s… I had somebody once try to tell me, like, this cable for your guitar will transmit the signal faster than the other one. I was like, the physics don’t change.
Paul: Yeah. It’s really hard to slow down electricity or speed it up. And so, you know, there were some people who were saying listening to it through the headphone— or the thunderbolt port, was better quality, so much better quality. I’m not sure that that’s the case. There’s an A-to-D converter, analog-to-digital converter or digital-to-analog converter that does the headphones. They still have to have a digital-to-analog converter to get it into the thunderbolt port or out the thunderbolt part. So the same translations are occurring.
Now I will say, you know, you go and buy good headphones, and they’re going to sound better than cheap headphones. So I’m not, I’m not saying that that’s wrong. But the here… You know, here it is, you know. For… You had sort of hinted, you know, why did they do this. I don’t know. I mean, they, they… I think Apple does have, as part of its psyche, that they need to be ones who push the edge and challenge the, the status quo.
Jacob: And that was my question. Is this the floppy disk innovation of the phone, you know? The mobile phone, you know, dropping the floppy disk from being in the desktop suite was a huge deal.
Paul: Yeah, but the reason it was dropped is because it wasn’t needed. You know, you had USB sticks. So the evolution, you know, when you had 360k floppy, one of them — that was all you had — then you went to 1.2-megabyte floppy. Then you went to the 1.44-megabyte floppy. When you had to super drive, which was 2.88, and then memory sticks came on. So it’s like, “Well, why would I need a floppy?”
And they kept having them for years after that. And then it was, “Well, I just never use the floppy,” and, you know, stores didn’t even stock floppies. So we took the device out. So there wasn’t a need for it, but you know, people still do listen to music on their phones. And, so there… You know, it’s sort of like, you know, we’re going to do the hard thing here of removing that. But why wouldn’t they do that on the iPad?
Rumors are coming out that next week, they’re going to, uh, come out with a new MacBook Pro. And one of the commentators or reviewers said, “I think it will still have a headphone jack.” So, you know, if you’re saying this is an intellectual exercise that we shouldn’t have headphone jacks, because too many headphones are killed in the wild. Like turtlenecks. I mean, how many turtles are killed to make those turtleneck sweaters? And you’ve got to draw the line, you know.
So the little headphones that are out in the wild, they want to stop harvesting them. And we’re going to rescue the headphone. Well, no. That’s not really the case. So It’s a pretty bold thing. I’ll betcha one of the things that drove it is it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to make that, because that’s an expensive piece of equipment.
Jacob: Yeah. Well, and that’s certainly part of the equation. I mean, do you think that this is a sort of thing where they are going to be on the front edge of this new, of a new wave of mobile device technology? Like, all, you know, Androids, iPhones, across the map now are not going to have headphone jacks? And are they being disruptive? Or, you know, how does that kind of play out into the field of this decision?
Paul: You know, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t think a lot of people are going to follow it. It just seems silly. It’s such an entrenched technology, and all of the devices, the iPhone 6 can work with wireless headphones. So it’s not an improvement. It’s taking something away that I’ve come to expect and especially if I’ve invested in expensive headphones. You know, alright, yeah, I can get an adapter and plug it in…
Jacob: But yeah. So you’re saying that this seems like another instance of Apple feeling like they have to be “The innovators.”
Paul: I think so. I think that they have, you know. They have been the innovators, “the” innovators. And I think they need to do things that are innovative and the problem is, is that this product lifecycle, there’s not a lot of innovation left, you know. And, uh, you know, there’s this whole concept that we as consumers are addicted to innovation. Uh, we expect it. We expect things to get quantum levels better.
But you know, you go and you… You know, I’ll offend some people here, drink a glass of milk, they aren’t improving milk much these days, you know. It’s pretty much leveled off, you know. And you know, we had TVs that were made out of big bulky glass. Now we’ve got flat-screen TVs. You know, now we’ve got HD. Now we’ve got Ultra-HD, and you know, there’s that constant drive for better. Most people who sit in front of an old TV and a new TV can see the difference between non-HD and HD. And I think most of the people who were faced side by side with an HD and Ultra HD would see the difference. They would say, “Wow. That’s really amazing.” And they’d be motivated to do it.
This is a little bit of a contrarian, you know. Because it’s sort of like saying you don’t get something better. We’re just going to take something away. And, and that’s an interesting choice. You know, it’s an interesting way to go.
Jacob: Well, the other part of it that’s interesting to me is that, as I understand it, they don’t… The phones now will not come with the wireless headphones. So now it’s like $160 or whatever to get the headphones, which to me, is just an additional price hurdle that I’m like…
Paul: Well, it’s a way to drive more revenue.
Jacob: Well, it’s definitely a way to drive more revenue, but does it favor the high-end market more so than like the everyman sort of…
Paul: I don’t know. I mean, I am shocked at the number of people I see wearing, Apple watches.
Jacob: Well, that’s true.
Paul: And they’re expensive.
Jacob: Like $500?
Paul: At least. And an iPhone is expensive, and you know, we have… If you look at it, you know, 40 years ago, or 20 years ago, you would have never seen a teenager walking around with a $500 device. That would have been unthinkable. But now we’ve normalized that. And I mean, I got them for my kids, you know, and that’s an amazing change that has occurred through external forces, that my children need to have a $500 device, if not even more than that. But let’s just say $500.
So, you know, Apple, it’d be interesting to see, of the people who buy an iPhone 7 or buy an Apple device, buy the Apple accessories for it. Because you can get $29 Bluetooth headphones, you know, you can get them with a wire, you know, that go to a beltpack or a backpack, you know. And you know, so there’s lot of ways to get it. So if I’m Apple, I need to do things to increase revenue. They are reaching the apogee of their profitability.
That’s a crisis for a business. So what am I going to do? Well, let’s take the headphone jack out and make people buy Bluetooth headphones. And they know that a large proportion of those are, by default, going to buy the ones that Apple make, you know. And I do think it will cause innovation. It will cause innovation in battery technology. It will cause innovation in all these different areas. So there are byproducts.
Jacob: Right. Byproducts that are benefits to the industry.
Paul: Absolutely. But, uh, they made it occur, and I think it’s profit motivated, which isn’t bad. That’s the way it, you know, it works. But I do think, you know, there becomes this whole area here, you know, in this, sort of the addiction to innovation. And, there’s two types of innovation. One is disruptive, and one is incremental. We’re in the incremental place. Now it would be cool, you know, you don’t realize innovation until you see it, you know. I mean, there’s some people like Steve Jobs who see it before other, other people.
Jacob: Well, and the… Yeah, when you’re talking, the moment I think of, like the disruptive is that famous talk where, “Just one more thing,” and he drops the iPhone. I mean, that totally demolished the entire industry, and everybody was recovering.
Paul: Right. Yeah. It disrupted it, really. And it was a change, and all the pieces were there for everybody to put together. But nobody did, and it’s like the minute it was shown, it was obvious. That’s a disruption. Incremental is, okay, let’s, let’s, you know, make the screen harder. Let’s, let’s do this.
Jacob: Make it waterproof.
Paul: Make it waterproof, and so, you know, people, have different sort of elasticity with, you know, if you see something disruptive, it’s like, “Wow. That’s cool. I gotta have it.” But you know, when I grew up, and with technology, I’m one of those people that says, “That’s really cool. I gotta have it.” Most people aren’t that way. They look at it, and they say, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s nice. Oh, well, mine’s fine.” If they’re in the market for buying one, they’ll buy the one with the cooler feature, but not the majority of people don’t say, “New feature. I’ve got to go buy it.”
So that incremental, disruption… I’m sorry. That incremental innovation is not as profit making.
Jacob: Well, I mean, I look at the… So they cut out the, the headphone jack, I’m like, “Well, how does that improve my life?”
Paul: Right. That’s true.
Jacob: I mean, you know, that’s how I look at it. I’m like, if the next iteration is supposed to be an improved product for whatever I use it for in my life, it’s not obvious to me how cutting away something that I… I mean, I have lots of headphones, you know. So, so now you’re adding an additional problem for me to figure out how to connect my iPhone, my iPhone with my existing headphones.
Paul: Right. And it’s interesting, you know. There’s a lot of human… The way humans interact with technology, and one of the things that I’ve noticed with people wearing headphones on an iPhone, or you know, even from the iPod days, is that if you walked up to them, they’d yank the things out of their ears. Now that’s a very different thing. And it was… It was… I didn’t require thought. So you’d just reach up, pull it out, and you’d be conversing with people. Now you’ve got these detached little things. You’ve got to pull them out, and okay, what am I going to do with these?
Jacob: Oh, my gosh. The first thing I saw when they said, “Hey, we’re going to have wireless headphones,” I imagined myself wearing them, and I knew that what would happen is right when I was walking over the street grate, that they were going to fall out.
Paul: Yeah. That’s true. That’s probably true.
Jacob: You just thought, I’m walking across the street in the city, and — boom! — gone. There goes $150 right now the drain.
Paul: Well, $75. You’d only lose one.
Jacob: Right. Okay, yeah.
Paul: You can probably only buy them in pairs, though. So you’ve got always that extra one. It’s like shoes. Oh, man. But I think that, you know, that the… I think we need to be careful, you know. There’s… We’ve talked a lot in the past about cognitive load. And, if anything, I’ve always looked at technology as a way to reduce cognitive load. I don’t want to have to remember that this is this. I want to write it down and have the system remind me that, “Oh, you had to be at this point,” you know. I’d like it to be — and they’re getting there, you know — that “You have to be here at 5:00. It’s 3:00. We’ve checked the traffic. It’s going to take you half an hour to get there. So you need to leave at 4:30.” You know, that would be really nice, you know. And, you know, deal with that fallout of, of that real information.
But one of the things I noticed with iOS10 rr0, two major things. One, it’s a lot slower. And, uh, I had an iPad, have an iPad Air 2. Very happy with it; had it for years. And that’s one of the, that’s one of the issues that, Apple has had is they haven’t been selling as many iPads, because people are happy with them.
So I upgraded to iOS10 and everything is slow, I mean, to the point… You know, I use Outlook, Microsoft Outlook on, on the iPad and on my iPhone. It was almost unusable. And, uh, am I keeping you up?
Jacob: Yeah. Sorry. I just… When you mentioned Windows 10, I just think…
Paul: I see. Did I mention Windows 10? I don’t think I did. So… I mentioned Outlook. So it was really slow, so what did I do? I went out and bought a new iPad, because, you know, the processor is much faster. But, my gosh, they just came out with a new gee-whiz thing, and it forced me to spend $700 on a new iPad. That’s not nice. You know, they effectively obsoleted my machine.
Jacob: Right. The forced obsolete, obsoletion.
Paul: Obsolescence.
Jacob: Obsolescence. I was an English major.
Paul: Yeah. “Was” is the operative word there.
Jacob: But that forced—
Paul: If you’re in Canada, would you be a Canadian major?
Jacob: I said, Can— I said, “Oh, he’s a… He’s from Canadia,” the other day.
Paul: Well, this do say “Ca-NAH-dah” up there, so, a…
Jacob: Yeah. So that forced obsoleshence.
Paul: Obsolescence.
Jacob: Obsolescence is uh incredibly frustrating with products, because I’ve noticed that it’s about, like, uh, you know, it’s about the 18-month mark of a two-year contract that is just…man. It just, like, gets filled with sand.
Paul: So that was one thing. The iPad got so slow that I had to replace it. And the other thing was, is the swipe to unlock. I was… I had muscle memory for that, and I still find myself fumbling over, okay, now I’ve got to hover my finger over the button. That muscle memory was so ingrained in me. And okay, so you say, “Well, that’s no big deal. You’ve got to change it.” But it’s another thing that is… It’s another little log that goes on the cognitive load, uh, and, you know, I look at that, and there’s some way you can turn it off, but I don’t think it’s exactly the way it was before, uh, and I just look at that decision, and I’m saying, “Oh, you know, now I have to press and click.” I’m like, “Why do I have to do that?”
And you know, there was a choice made. And I’m sure there was a big, you know, executive meeting about it. You know, we’re going to do this. And I’d leave well-enough alone in some areas.
But again, they’re trying to push toward innovation.
Jacob: So do you think, just as we’re concluding on this, do you think that other makers in the industry are going to follow suit? Or are they going to kind of brush off this innovation from Apple?
Paul: Well, what did, what did, did Google and the new phones include a headphone jack?
Jacob: I’d assume as much.
Paul: I think they did. I think it would have been in the news had they not. It will be interesting to see who adopts it. I don’t think they will. I don’t think they’re going to follow suit.
Jacob: It will be interesting to see if Apple regrets this and puts it back in the iPhone 8.
Paul: Yeah, boy, I don’t know. They’re not good at that.
Jacob: Yeah. They don’t retreat very much. Do they?
Paul: Yeah. They don’t. They don’t. And yeah. But again, you know, hey, they should be intellectually honest and take it out of all their devices, because, you know, those little headphones in the wild. I mean, who’s going to protect them?
Jacob: Well, thank you for listening to this episode of The Edge of Innovation, talking about the iPhone 7 and the deletion or the, saving of the iPhone jacks. I think we’ll put it like that. Right? We’re saving iPhone jacks by not having them in the iPhone 7 now.
Paul: Saving headphone jacks.
Jacob: Headphone jacks. Yeah.
Paul: Save the headphone jack.
Jacob: Save the headphone jacks. That should be our mantra now for the iPhone 7. Thanks for listening today, guys. And we hope you have a good week.
Also published on Medium.