Survival of the Fittest Ideas
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter):
“Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).”
It’s a good following to the last post, about success not being exclusively a matter of personal (or group) characteristics, nor exclusively a matter of the environment, but a result of how those different factors interact.
It’s the same with ideas, behaviours, beliefs, business models, etc…
We all say we understand that “there’s a time and a place for everything,” but we also have a tendency to get into habits of assuming that a) such-and-such an idea failed in the past, we learned our lesson — “it’s wrong” – or b) such-and-such an idea worked in the past so it is right, it’s been proven — “it’s right.”
It isn’t enough to know that something is right or wrong, we need to try to understand how and why as well; so when circumstances change we can adapt our ideas accordingly.
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Tags: cultural evolution, evolution, ideas, intellectual evolution
Good thoughts. It seems to suggest to me that success is not merely the product of some grand/brilliant idea that occurs in some vacuum, but it is also about being grounded, informed and present in the real world.
A brilliant “square” product, no matter how amazing it is, will not fit in a world/culture/time built for “circle” ideas.
I love the grounded metaphor.
Like grounding electrical instruments and appliances: you don’t really need to ground them… until a shock hits the system.
[...] Call it survival of the fittest ideas. [...]