How to Have a Good Idea
A unified theory of fantasy football; Eat, Pray, Love; and Burning Man.
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Kearon recommends another approach. If you want to innovate as Google, Apple, and Red Bull have, he says, you should follow a couple of rules:
1. Don’t look for big ideas. Seek small ideas that can grow.
2. Fail fast. Fail often. Keep learning and never give up.
Three Steps to Culturematics
So what’s the way to create a Culturematic? Try these three easy steps:
Test the World. Think of a way to provoke the world. Ask questions like: What if I invented a professional sports league? What if I put seven people in a house in Brooklyn and turned on the cameras?
Good what-ifs are easy to spot. They make us tilt our heads and go “hmm.” They speak to us because they go against the grain of expectation. They flirt with paradox. They provoke our curiosity. That moment when we tilt our heads—that’s the moment we can climb out of culture and into innovation. We are on the verge of making something new.
And no, we can’t quite say what. That’s what it is to be on the verge of the new. We are not really sure. This may be a false positive, a bum lead. We have to launch lots of Culturematics to find the few that work. It is impossible to say ahead of time. (If we could tell ahead of time, then we would not be on the verge of the new.) The only thing we can do is keep at it. Play out the what-if and see where it goes.
Discover Culture. The successful Culturematics will phone home. They will play out. They will discover meaning. They will produce culture. When Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, went searching for herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia, she found something that appealed to millions of women, a way of seeing themselves. When Morgan Spurlock ate all his meals at McDonald’s for a month, he helped millions of people rethink fast food. None of these people were working alone. They were taking advantage of deeper cultural changes. But each Culturematic these people invented was so apt, so endearing, so engaging, they pushed these cultural changes, giving perhaps as much as they got.
Elizabeth Gilbert turned her Culturematic into a memoir that sold four million copies. The subsequent movie, starring Julia Roberts, took in more than $200 million worldwide. Morgan Spurlock’s Culturematic became a documentary called Super Size Me. The film generated nearly $30 million on an investment of $65,000.
Unleash Value. Many Culturematics return nothing. This is not to say they fail. They tell us that this is a tree up which we no longer wish to bark. They satisfy our curiosity. And they tell us that the thing that captivated our curiosity doesn’t actually captivate anyone else’s. We have private enthusiasms. But if we want to hit a gusher, we have to look elsewhere. To find the innovation that returns significant value, we will have to try many things that return next to nothing. It’s the nature of the hunt.
Culturematics let us test the world, discover meaning, and unleash value. And this makes them an excellent way to innovate in a turbulent, inscrutable, confusing world. Think of them as the little ingenuity machines that make the planet a more interesting and fulfilling place.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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RELEASE THE MCCRACKEN!!!
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Unfortunately, Grant is still living in the shadow of his brother Phil.
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When I heard that joke for the first time in 6th grade about 30 years ago it was a laff riot.
One time when I heard it from some knucklehead in a bar, I told him a long story about the Irish martyr Henry Joy McCracken and how my family's name was a proud reminder of the long struggle for Irish freedom and how none of us are willing to just sit still and let someone treat it as some kind of joke.
I'd try and act like I was getting more and more upset as I'd go through this until at the end when I'd suddenly smile and shrug my shoulders.
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If I just get high, then I will have some good ideas.
What was the question?
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People with this much knowledge wanted more involvement. Fantasy football let them into the game.
My experience with fantasy sports is exactly the opposite. The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games. They want something to make the games more interesting. Juggling the stats and the lineups becomes its own game for the nerdy, most of whom certainly did not play the game.
They do, of course, pick up some knowledge of the actual sport while playing the fantasy version, but only so far as it improves their fantasy team -- they know the backup running backs and quarterbacks on every team in the league, but don't really know many of the plays those players run.
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I haven't seen this. I play fantasy football and my buddies are all incredibly knowledgeable. I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game, but that's probably a minority.
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Oh, there's plenty of people playing fantasy sports who know the sport very well, but the fantasy sports universe, especially fantasy football, brings in people beyond the core fans.
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"The people who play fantasy sports are the least knowledgeable and the least interested in the outcomes of the games."
Least knowledgeable about certain aspects of the game--probably.
Fantasy players know a lot about offensive players. They know a lot about who his backup is, too. Fantasy football players in Seattle know who the Michael Turner's backup is. Old school fans didn't know that.
So, I wouldn't say they're the least knowledgeable; I'd say they're typically not as knowledgeable as fans used to be about things like formations, defense, and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team.
They don't know as much about the game, and their hometown team as the old school guys, but they know more about offensive players all around the league.
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If you want to see how Morgan Spurlock lied in his "Supersize Me" movie, watch the movie "Fat Head" by Tom Naughton. I think it's available on Netflix.
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I had the same negative reaction to Spurlock in this article. I've not seen the movie you mentioned Delroy. But I assume it covers the assertion from nutritionists that Spurlock had to have eaten twice the amount of food he claimed.
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Within a couple of years, Web 2.0 was coin of the realm, the term you could use in a meeting to a chorus of nodding heads.
Holy vapid corporate anthropologic bullshit Batman. This is approaching Thomas Friedman metaphor abuse.
Speaking of another self-proclaimed deep-thinker, the fail in this is just spectacular.
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"This is an abysmal failure of free market forces to converge the end price with the cost of production."
I don't think this person has even the slightest familiarity with the terms s/he is using.
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Aside from the abysmal ignorance of economics, consider that the dweeb can't even distinguish between a simple point to point communications link versus a cellular mesh.
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They want something to make the games more interesting.
L7805CV -
Culturematic
I know made up bullshit terms when I see them, sir.
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The other thing fantasy football freed us from was the tyranny of Monday Night Football.
It used to be that if your hometown team wasn't playing on Monday night, then Monday night football didn't really matter to you.
When you're in a fantasy league, the chances of someone playing on Monday night either being on your fantasy team or on your opponent's fantasy team are very high. As a fantasy player, you end up watching and being interested in games you wouldn't care about otherwise.
As a Redskins fan, I wouldn't give a damn, normally, about Kansas City playing Tennessee. But since I have Jamaal Charles on my fantasy team, and my opponent is playing Chris Johnson, I care very much about watching the Chiefs play Tennessee.
So, playing fantasy football frees me from the tyranny of the programmers, who decide which games are on regular TV. It's hard for a fantasy football player to find a game with no fantasy relevance whatsoever. But before I started playing fantasy, I didn't give a damn about three-fourths of the games on TV.
In fact, fantasy has created a market for satellite television where there was none before. Before fantasy, there wasn't a market for people who wanted to be able to watch every single game being played every week--because people only cared about their own home teams.
Subscription satellite TV is now a huge business. Sports bars where you watch the games you want are likewise a huge industry.
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Culturematics are the forge on which a distributed.Sohbet Siteleri - Chat Siteleri
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But not much of a hearing. Friends can be relied upon to offer discouragement.Güzel Sözler - Şarkı Sözleri
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Most of these ideas keep moving. Mynet Sohbet - Sohbet
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Last week’s exertions and heroics on the field were creating the foundation of an alternate world in the ether. Film izle - Dizi izle
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Winkenbach, you are such a loser. Sohbet - Sohbet Odaları
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and who's playing gunner on special teams of their hometown team. Oyun - Mirc indir
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I do agree that so many people play fantasy sports that some of them have to know nothing about the game. Rüya Tabirleri - Yemek Tarifleri
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