Wandering Wandering Star

Core insights have three key attributes:

1. Logical, yet unexpected.
A core insight is the quintessential “Aha!” — a realization about how your customers think or where a business opening lies that emerges out of connecting the dots between various other findings (customer research, technology trends, demographics, economics, brand, etc.) in a new way. Toyota’s counterintuitive realization about what would motivate buyers came from understanding cultural, behavioral, economic, and technologic trends, and this insight drove development choices as well as marketing.

2. Forward-looking.
A core insight provides forward-looking understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and market trends. Core insights should address the current state of the world and also point to how the world will be in the future. In recognizing the phenomenon of eco-friendly products becoming status symbols, Toyota was picking up on a pioneering mind-set with emerging eco-conscious buyers that seemed likely to expand into the mainstream. The fact that they are now turning Prius into a brand and product line is testament to the durable nature of their insight.

3. Hard to follow.
The core insights you’ve discovered should be hard for competitors to perceive based on the offerings you put into the market. “Make it faster” or “add another blade to the razor” are obvious; reliance on such easily deduced “insights” makes you predictable and easy to compete against. The real trick is that even if competitors can eventually understand your core insight, their ability to respond is often constrained by their own competencies, customers, and business model.

We kind of romanticize creativity as inventing ideas out of thin air. When you actually deconstruct even the most radical new ideas, they’re often just a new connection between old ideas. They’re transplanting a solution from one problem space to another. So whether it’s the Gutenberg printing press, which is really just wine-press technology applied to letters and words, or even the Google Search algorithm – the basic logic of that algorithm was the logic that academics had been using for decades to rank their peer-reviewed articles, so more citations meant a bigger influence, meant a higher rank. That’s the logic of Google Page Rank.

You see this again and again. Whether you call it stealing or recombination – that’s just the polite word – the basic premise is the same, which is that the human mind is a connection machine. We are always making connections between old ideas. That’s why you see the most creative people are the ones who seem to have the most ideas in their head, the ones who bump into a wider spectrum of ideas.

–

Does education as it is in the US today do an effective enough job at exploiting our latent creativity?

No, education’s great at killing creativity. Every kid is born an artist, as Picasso said. The problems begin when we grow up. Right now, K – 12 education is doing a really effective job at killing that out of kids.

Partly it’s just the start of brain development. Educators refer to the fourth-grade slump, which is when a lot of kids lose interest in writing and drawing and painting, and it’s not a coincidence that this is also the time of life when the frontal lobes come online and kids can for the first time delay gratification, they can control their impulses, and inhibit their first answer.

That’s good for all sorts of reasons – it allows us to exert self-control and work with our hands and stuff, but it does get in the way of creativity. For the first time they’ve got a voice in their head telling them what not to do, telling them to not make that mark there, reminding them that their drawings don’t live up to their expectations.

So the first thing we have to do, the low-hanging fruit here, is to focus on this window of third, fourth, fifth grade, really focus there and try to find ways to make sure kids know that, “Yeah, your drawing may not look great now. But if you invest in your talent, if you keep on practicing, it will get better.”

Sure, Path 2.0 design is amazing. However, amazing design is not enough.

It is like fashion. Everybody is excited about it at the beginning, but then people are getting used to it and eventually it wears out. After it does, the user is left with the essence of the user experience and what Path misses most is a compelling and unique user experience that will make using it worthwhile.

“Amazing” design won’t get you anywhere
What is considered web design today is not really design. It is styling, pixel coloring or whatever you’d like to call it. Real design is about solving problems. It is way more holistic and deep than the actual work we do in Photoshop. Real design is about creating a thoughtful, engaging user experience. Aesthetic styling can be then applied to enhance the experience as long as it doesn’t get in its way.

There’s a reason why the most successful internet companies have fairly utilitarian design — take Facebook, Google or Amazon as an example. The focus is on creating a fantastic experience that delights users and adds value.

Instagram’s design is utilitarian and is way less “sexier” that Path’s. However, Instagram made taking and sharing photos so easy and delightful and that was enough.

Disclosure are like, what, 12 or some gobstoppingly young age. And already perfected the vibe of their sound. Love it.

Asians, unlike their Caucasian peers, tended to collect fat internally, around internal organs. This internal fat – properly termed visceral fat – wraps itself around the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas, and streaks through muscles. Because this fat is internal, one often cannot tell that he or she might be seriously unhealthy and may even be a high risk case for certain diseases. Caucasians, on the other hand, tend to collect fat subcutaneously first, which shows rather obviously.

A friend of mine once told me that her personal trainer, an expatriate who had moved here only a few years ago, said that he had never seen so many “skinny-fat people” prior to moving to Singapore. While an amusing phrase to mull over, the sad reality is that we are indeed a population of skinny-fat people. Instead of gaining weight visibly, we collect fat in the inside, which, doctors have said, is much more dangerous. End result? We look great. But we’re really not.

Recent surveys here have pointed out that more than 54 percent of our population never exercises and that 11 percent of the population is clinically obese. Similarly, more and more young people seem to be plagued with high cholesterol. One of my own business partners–an ex-Miss Singapore Universe finalist – was diagnosed with dangerously high cholesterol in her late twenties. You would never have guessed from looking at this svelte stunner that she had such health issues, but the sad reality is she isn’t alone here.

Another statistic that Professor Chia shared with his audience that day was that one-third of Singapore’s population has a very high risk of contracting diabetes. This was also startling to me. While 11.3 percent of our population has diabetes today, all the indicators suggest that from one out of every nine persons, with the way we’re living and eating, one out of three will have diabetes within a generation.

So what can we do about this? The simple answer is eat better.