Don’t You Know That Physics and Psychology Are Different Subjects?
Or, the opposite of a good idea is sometimes a great idea
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Q: How to find great ideas, not just good ideas?
In the movie The Founder, there’s a scene where the McDonald brothers Mac and Dick tell their story to Michael Keaton’s Ray Kroc over dinner.
They had been building food joints in various places since the 1930s. “Now it’s the 1940s and drive-ins are all the rage. I mean they are the hottest thing going, and I say, ‘Dick we gotta get in on this,’” Mac narrates. “Two months later we open for business — McDonald’s famous barbecue.”
“A 27-item menu, uniformed waitresses, bringing your food right to the car. It goes gangbusters!”
But as they continue, they learn that the drive-in model has some built-in problems. It attracts the wrong crowd, the food takes time to arrive, and has a bunch of others overhead costs. They also notice that 87% of their sales come only from three items: hamburgers, french fries, and soft drinks.
So they plan to cut down and redo the whole thing — from scratch.
“We are thinking of shutting down a business, a thriving business, for months. People are gonna think we’re crazy. We were crazy!”
Today, let’s talk about insights. More precisely, let’s talk about finding the kind of insights that can give you an edge in business and in life.
In his famous book, Zero to One, Thiel asks his most famous contrarian question, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
According to Thiel, a good answer to this question can help us unlock the future. Simply put, the future is the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet. What makes it really important is that when the future arrives, the world would look distinctly different from how it looks today.
By that logic, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future won’t arrive in the next 100 years. If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is just 10 years away.
We cannot exactly predict the future per se, but we do know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present. But good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
Now, most of us may not be ready to take up the mantle of inventing the future. But we do know the benefits of having a contrarian but true insight.
In this essay, we’ll discuss a framework to discover such insights.
There are two kinds of ideas. The first kind is the one that makes the most sense, is easily agreed upon, and is backed by logic. The second kind is the opposite. They sound absurd, people never agree on them, and they cannot be defended in a meeting, because they don’t care much about logic.
The first kind are usually good ideas. But the second kind is where great insights dwell.
It’s common advice to listen to customers, and it makes total sense. If you are building software, it makes sense to listen to what your users want, so that you know what to build.
But Basecamp is an exception. It’s a product that has been constantly successful for over 20 years — precisely by not listening to customers. “Just because x number of people request something, doesn’t mean you have to include it. Sometimes it’s better to just say no and maintain your vision for the product.” This is what the founders have to say about their product philosophy.
It’s a good idea to listen to users. But not listening to users can also be a good idea sometimes. Because people often don’t know what they want.
It is all too common, in certain settings, for our behaviour to run directly counter to the supposedly logical beliefs of standard economics.
Logic doesn’t work when you are dealing with people. Time and again, we’ve been warned, and time and again we forget, that people aren’t machines. Instead, we are highly-evolved monkeys. What we do is context dependent. Always!
Logic requires for us to find universal laws. But outside of scientific fields, this is rarely the case. Once human psychology gets involved, it is perfectly possible for a behaviour to become entirely contradictory to logic.
For example, does a tax rise cause you to work less because the returns for your labour are lower, or does it cause you to work harder, in order to maintain your present level of disposable wealth? It kind of depends.
Our very perception of the world is affected by context. In a certain setting, people may love getting discounts and cheap thrills. In another setting, the very people would prefer buying expensive items they don’t need.
This natural love of logical ideas is what prevents us from making valuable discoveries. Just imagine proposing the following ideas to investors:
“We’ll make the buying process really hard. On top of that, we won’t even assemble the furnitures they buy. Customers would have to assemble the them on their own.” (IKEA)
“They’ll be forced to choose between three or four items. We won’t even give them plates.” (McDonald’s)
“Perfectly sane people would pay $5 for a drink they can make at home.” (Starbucks)
“Everybody will post everything about their lives online without a care about security or privacy.” (Facebook)
“The best thing is that people will write the entire thing for free.” (Wikipedia)
“Even though they’ve spent countless hours on this, that too, in their free time outside of their day job, they’ll publish everything online for free — for others to use without giving them any credit.” (GitHub)
“People will buy professional cameras to record videos of themselves and post them online for millions to watch.” (YouTube)
“Your chats with your friends would disappear after they see them.” (Snapchat)
“Perfectly alright human beings, who have better things to do, would get online to watch others play video games.” (Twitch)
“And the fun part is that this drink has a taste that customers say they hate.” (Red Bull)
No sane person would have invested a penny in these schemes. They sound absurd. They are the opposite of good ideas — something no sane person would want to use.
People think they know what they want. But that’s not the case. They often don’t realise what they actually want before experiencing them first hand.
If that weren’t the case, finding great ideas would have been easier. We could just ask people and they would reply honestly: “No I wouldn’t normally pay $5 for a coffee, but if you put a fancy green logo on a paper cup so I could display it to everybody as I walk into the office then I might just be interested . . .”
The fact is, there will never be any demand for ‘really expensive vacuum cleaners that look really cool’ any more than people begging cafés to sell really expensive coffee. But both Dyson and Starbucks are hugely successful businesses.
While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work.
It is only when we abandon a narrow logic and embrace an appreciation for psychological value, that we can truly have great insights. Once we are honest about the existence of unconscious motivations, we can broaden our possible solutions.
In order to have a great insight, you need to ignore what people say. Instead you need to concentrate on what people feel.
What they feel may not necessarily follow any logic. Why do people go to the gym? To say fit and healthy? Nah! Too boring. To look good so that they can feel good about themselves? Maybe! Under peer pressure? Very likely! So they could take gym selfies and post on Instagram? So that they can meet new people (possibly a date) in the gym?
It is only when you are able to discover what people really, really want (through introspection and experimentation) rather than what they say they want or what we think they should want, you are on the verge of having a great insight.
A great insight takes the following form: most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.
Airbnb had a hard time finding investors in the beginning because they had such a great insight that even VCs were flabbergasted. Paul Graham, the highly regarded founder of Y Combinator, was dumbfounded when he was pitched the idea. “People are actually doing this? What’s wrong with them?”
People renting out living spaces for a night has so many red flags that any mentally sound person would avoid it. But Airbnb is one of the most successful companies in the world today.
During the end of the conversation with Ray Kroc, Mac McDonald said something interesting. “See our whole lives we piggybacked off other people’s ides. This time, we wanted something that wasn’t just different, it needed to be ours.”
Piggybacking a good idea would give you at best a good idea. But you’ll never find a great idea like this. There’s no secret formula or a given path to a great insight. The only way to discover them is to stumble on them — by chance. To increase your odds, you need to ask dumb questions, dream up absurd ideas, and try them out. That’s how innovation happens.
What looks absurd now is the norm in future.
Timeless Insight
If you want someone to believe or feel something, first get them to do it.
A salesperson might ask you for something relatively small, such as filling out a questionnaire, which is a trick. This makes it easier to ask you for a larger commitment later. The act of fulfilling the small request leads you to alter your attitude to rationalise your act. You filled out the survey, therefore you must be liking their products as well.
This works best when they have no particular view or belief about the area in question. But if people already have a strong opinion, you will need to call that into question first.
For example, the ‘Get a Mac’ ad campaign was a clever tactic by Apple to play on perceived weaknesses of the PC thereby swinging the target user towards the Mac. Now all they had to do was visit a store and give the Mac a try.
What I’m Reading
Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro- and antisocial behaviors.
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave
Tiny Thought
You have influence when people start noticing your absence more than your presence.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋