I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, not too long ago, and started thinking a bit more on how ideas and products really invade the general consciousness and translate into universal desires. It’s easy to think that if a product is marketed well it will automatically be successful. I don’t think this is really true. ( I’m obviously not alone here, I’m just trying to get my thoughts together).
I think a new product or change of lifestyle happens on a large scale when one person extends the use of her imagination during the absolute dullest task that she thinks she will ever have to complete. If she comes up with a “wouldn’t it be great if….” during that task, she has just related to every other person who ever completed the same dull task that she was just engaged in. She then, in effect, created a shared want…where there never was one before. This is, of course, the beginning of a great product.
When I was in college, I had a work-study job in the English department of the University. I was asked to shred a bunch of old documents. This basically involved going into the department lounge, sitting by the shredder and hand-feeding document after document into it. One of the professors came in and said something to the effect of “are you having terribly horrible thoughts with such a monotonous task?’ and I remember responding, that “No, I was just wishing that there was a machine that could take these documents from their files and put them in the shredder for me”.
Now it was a one-time task, and after that day, I really never cared if there was a machine or not, but somewhere, someone else must have had those thoughts because there are several products available that do just what I wanted that day. They’re called industrial shredders and are available at the Officezone.
When I sat down to start filling in the blank spaces in my babybook, I had another one of those “wouldn’t it be great if…” moments. What surprised me was that the whole process felt like an assignment instead of a joyful rite of motherhood. I hated that I was being redundant, and filling in data in multiple places, and then sending emails on top of it all. I just started thinking “wouldn’t it be great if…I could maintain a journal, upload my pictures, get everyone to come look at them, and then have a computer somehow magically turn all this stuff into a really elegant looking babybook”.
Unlike the paper shredder, I knew that the babybook, and sharing news with my friends and family wasn’t going to be a one-time task. I needed to do it every day, or at least every month. With that as an incentive, Alex and I got to work.
LittleChapters took what had been a tedious, joyless task for me and helped make it simpler and quicker. What surprised me though, was that I actually enjoyed using the tool. Writing Thomas and Christopher’s books in LittleChapters was actually fun and therapeutic for me. Suddenly I realized that the general consciousness theory holds true for this. But we’re a bit more like cake mix than the paper shredder. Sure, we’ve taken some steps out of a process, but you still get to lick the spoon.