The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation

success3

As you learned in the first two parts of this series on success, my first Independent Study Project (ISP) for my gifted program was on the Brain and Nervous System, and I was able to achieve success by mimicking a technique I had observed from older students. However, the following year in Grade 6, every other student started creating board games to achieve their synthesis objective. If I used the board game idea again, that aspect of my project would be no different from anyone else’s.

Mimicking Can Lead to Saturation

Essentially, what we saw from then on out for the next few years was a saturation of board games at the annual ISP show case. Instead of being something new and cool to check out, it became almost expected – in a way, it became almost standard to have one.

The problem with this type of saturation is that the value for going this route decreases. There is nothing special about a product that is being made everywhere and by everyone. In the same way, once everyone started churning out board games to achieve the synthesis objective, the impressiveness of a board game I produced would decrease relative to its value the year before – when I was the only student who made one in my class.

We can see this type of situation developing all the time. Take any great product that’s the first of its kind in the market. Demand will be super high and supply will be low because only one company is making it – as a result, the value of the product is high. Conversely, once competitors enter the market with similar products, the value of each of these products decreases because the supply has increased. Eventually, the market becomes saturated with similar products.

In Grade 6, I decided to do my project on Flying Machines – essentially looking at the development of aircrafts through history and how they functioned. But once I realized that the ISP showcase would be saturated with board games, I decided to completely avoid that route and look for a new cool idea.

PowerPoint

The year was 1999, and my family had just started using Microsoft Office 2000, which came with a slew of really cool software. One day my brother was playing around with the Office 2000 software and opened up PowerPoint.

Now, all of you probably use PowerPoint slideshows today for many things, such as presentations. And as guys know, I even use PowerPoint now in making my videos. Back then, however, PowerPoint was a pretty new tool for us (and I think it was pretty new to most people overall). I’m not sure if PowerPoint was a standard tool in high schools yet, but it definitely wasn’t being taught or promoted in elementary schools.

I didn’t know what it was, but I saw my brother fumbling around with it and trying out some cool animations, and I thought it was pretty darn cool. So I started playing around with PowerPoint whenever I could. I didn’t use the Help function or try to read up on it because I found it much more fun to experiment and learn through trial and error.

After creating a bunch of random slides and testing the cool animations and sound effects, I realized PowerPoint could be used for my ISP. In terms of the evaluation of my ISP, my project would stand out again because just like the previous year, I would be using a method that was relatively original compared to everyone else.

When I finally did my presentation on Flying Machines using PowerPoint, all of my friends were amazed by how cool the presentation looked. Nowadays, I think that sitting through a presentation with flying bullets and laser sounds could get kind of annoying, but back then when you’re eleven years old, things like this are pretty awesome.

More than even my friends, my gifted teacher was absolutely astounded by the work I had put in teaching myself to use PowerPoint – as a gifted teacher, this was the kind of initiative by his students that he loved to see. I not only got a perfect mark on my ISP (something I never heard had been achieved before), but my gifted teacher asked me to create a workshop to teach my peers the basics of using PowerPoint.

Innovation

Eventually, as expected, everyone else started using PowerPoint. And of course, once I got to high school, PowerPoint became the standard for presentations. In the same way as before with the board game, presentations now became saturated with the PowerPoint format.

The important idea to take away from this is that I was able to benefit the most from the board game concept and PowerPoint format because I was the innovator – I was the one who introduced these ideas into the “market”.

Anytime you are the first one to do something, you reap more benefits of success than those who follow later on and eventually saturate the market. When no one else was making board games or using PowerPoint, I stuck out as a success. I was successful because I was different and ahead of the time.

Original and creative ideas lead to innovation, and now more than ever, innovation is almost necessary to stay competitive. Innovators are the ones leading the waves of success because they are able to take advantage of their innovations before these ideas become common place.

Imagine if companies stopped doing research and development. Imagine if they stopped trying to improve their products. What would happen? Whoever generated the next great idea would take over the industry. This concept doesn’t just apply to businesses and companies; it’s a concept that is universal to any type of success.

That is one of the problems with pursuing success through mimicking. Unless you are able to recognize the next big wave of success, you often get involved way too late, when the market is already saturated. I saw this with both board games and PowerPoint – once everyone started doing them, those ideas just weren’t “impressive” anymore.

It’s not like I worked any harder to learn how to use PowerPoint or spent more hours building my board game than any other student would have done. The value in those ideas came from being the first person in my community to introduce them to everyone else.

Becoming the Authority

In terms of achieving success in something, you want to be the first one in. And you can’t ever be the first one in if you’re just mimicking other people’s successes. In general, you can only be the first one in if you’re innovating.

Also important is the fact that it’s usually the first success who becomes the notable authority – the leader of that field or idea. It’s these authorities who eventually become the most trusted individuals in the industry. Imagine a brand new type of computer coming into the market. Who are you going to trust: the company that first made it, or the companies that copied it?

If you’re not the first one in, and you are providing a product or service that is no better than what’s currently out there, where does your value come from? Why should anyone switch from the product their currently using?

There is a plaza near my home which has a super market, small restaurants, and other stores. There is a certain restaurant location in the plaza that almost seems cursed. Any restaurant that tries opening up in that spot over the last several years has closed.

Actually, I don’t really think the restaurant is cursed. In my opinion, the problem is that any of the restaurants that have opened up there have not given potential customers any reason to switch from other restaurants in the plaza that they regularly eat at. The plaza already has a very popular Chinese cafe. Yet for some reason, a bunch of other Chinese cafe’s with similar menus keep trying to open up and this formula keeps failing. They don’t seem to recognize that because they weren’t the “first ones in”, and aren’t offering any new or different food services, they are not giving customers any reason to stop going to their current restaurant.

Adaptation

The reason why innovators are always able to be successful is because they understand the system and forces at work so well that they are able to constantly adapt to the changing environment. They are able to see new problems forming and come up with original solutions before anyone else. In order to both see these problems and figure out solutions to them, you must first understand the system in which these problems occur.

I have done well in school my entire life, and it’s not just because my natural skill set is inclined towards the school environment. A lot of my school success is due to my understanding of the education system. I have developed a very good understanding of professors and teachers, and most of the time, understand the motives behind the way they teach and evaluate. By understanding what drives educators, I am able to adapt in the academic environment, from the way I approach tests to how I prepare my assignments. No two educators approach their work the same way, and through my understanding, I am able to adjust accordingly.

If you don’t understand the system you live in and cannot adapt to changes, you will have to wait for someone else to figure those things out. And sometimes it’s just too late.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Whole Picture

If anything I’ve written so far in this series has not made sense, maybe an analogy would help. If you’ve read my article on ranges, you’ll know that I love using rock, paper, scissors (RPS) analogies to explain ideas.

In Part 1 of this series, we learned about the barriers preventing people from being successful at things – such individuals lack the knowledge of what it takes to be successful at something. Furthermore, they do not have a deep understanding of the system – in this case, they have no idea how the game of RPS works. We can imagine such a majority of people as poor RPS players always throwing rock.

In the minority, we have the successful, innovative RPS players who always throw paper when they compete against the unsuccessful players, and thus they always win – more importantly, these players know how the game of RPS works and understand why they are throwing paper.

Perhaps, as time goes by, some of the losing players recognize that the winning players are always throwing paper against the weaker players. Even though they don’t understand why throwing paper is good, they are smart enough to realize that if it’s working for the successful players, it’s probably the right thing to do. So this group of players starts mimicking the successful players, and throwing paper every time they compete against the weak players.

However, the number of players throwing paper now starts to increase. The field gets saturated with paper. The innovators soon realize that throwing paper is working less and less since so many more players have started mimicking their techniques (i.e. they now find themselves throwing paper against other paper way more often, resulting in a draw).

Because they understand the system and can adapt, the innovators will realize that they need to make changes to their strategy – they need to keep throwing paper against the oblivious majority, but need to start throwing scissors against the mimicking group that is now throwing paper all of the time.

Eventually, the group that can mimic success will catch on and start throwing scissors themselves – the problem is that the group that mimics will never be able to beat the innovators because they cannot adapt. That is, they can only wait for a new technique to become popular and then copy it. So while they are still ahead of the masses, they can’t reach as great a level of consistent success as the innovative, adaptive players.

So What Does this Mean for You?

If you’ve read this far, it probably means you are pretty resourceful and open-minded. I would imagine that most students reading this blog are fairly successful in their own endeavours, but are looking for that extra little push forward. I would think that many of you have become quite good at identifying successful techniques and adding them to your own arsenal, but may not have tapped into your entire creative potential yet.

All I’m saying is this: if you ever want to really get good at something and stay at the top, you have to spend the time really understanding the system you’re in, and subsequently, have the drive to identify new problems and design solutions.

I am definitely not an innovator in everything that I do. I learn a lot by observing other people, analyzing what drives them, and figuring out why their methods work.

That being said, for the things that matter the most to me, I strive hard to look at those issues from as many angles as possible, so that I can understand them to the fullest. If I want my efforts to really matter and impact the most people, I have to stay ahead of the curve.

* * * * * * * * * *

Read the other parts of the The Secret to Consistent Success series here: