ADAPT #25 - Your Heroes and The Real Definition of Innovation

Yew!

I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game!


WAIT!!! What?! Today is THURSDAY…. don’t you send out your newsletter on Fridays?!

Well yeah… but we are testing something new here.. we’re thinking about moving it to Thursdays…

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Let’s get into our first (and maybe last?) THURSDAY ADAPT NEWSLETTER EDITION!!

Today:

• Awe: the ultimate innovation definition

• Deal Flow: prototyping done easily with the power of AI

• Action (Heros): Who are your heroes?

• Parenting and Pets: the first ever hormone-induced bond?

• Trees: this will change the way you see trees forever

Read time: 4 min 15 sec

AWE

You know me already for making unlikely connections and finding correlations between lots of things in life that I think all follow some basic universal principles or laws.

Here is another one for you. Please allow me to indulge.

I think innovation can be simply explained as: “the actions we take to fight the second law of thermodynamics” 

(Proceeds to drop mic 😝)

Let me explain:

The second law of thermodynamics, in real basic terms, says that entropy increases and doesn’t decrease.

Things break but they don’t un-break.

A system left alone will decay - the universe’s entropy is increasing all the time. Makes sense, right?

We observe this every day!

(Super crazy side note you can ignore but if you have read this far you may as well read it: one of the weirdest theories I’ve ever read is that life emerged -as far as we know 3.7b years ago- to help the universe increase its entropy… think about it, you are an organised system, low entropy, but for your system to exist lots of entropy is created around you -you accelerate the decay around you- helping the universe achieve its algorithmic objective of maximum entropy! Whaaaat??? 🤯🤯🤯🤯)

Anyway - you get my point… a business tends to decay (like everything in the universe) and you have to fight hard so it doesn’t (you have to innovate)

A product or service, if you leave it alone, will decay.

How do you make sure it doesn’t?

With innovation!

So there - innovation is simply fighting one of the most basic universal laws!

DEAL FLOW

If you have an idea for a product (remember most of your ideas are shit so don’t go falling in love with them! Ha) it’s easier than ever to create little prototypes and test them with customers….

Check  www.uizard.io , a Danish company, with around 50 people, valued at $65m or so.

The key here is that AI underpins their solution and what’s epic about this is that it only gets better!

ACTION… HERO

I grew up watching cartoons and movies like most of you with global heroes we kinda all know (like supermán and Wonder Woman and He-man).

In Latin America, we had a very special hero called El Chapulín Colorado, and growing up I didn’t really understand how profound his lessons were and how influential he was in some of my thinking. 

Unlike other heroes, who are all powerful and have no fear, El Chapulín was scared when trying to help someone.

Yet he still did it, overcoming his fear.

El Chapulín Colorado also made mistakes.

Often in trying to help he would make it worse before making it better.

He was human, normal, imperfect.

Years ago in an interview, the actor who played El Chapulín (who was also the writer of the show) said:
“Being a hero is not being fearless, but having the courage to overcome fear.
A real hero loses, fails, but eventually, his intentions succeed”

Often when I get asked who are my idols or my heroes I tend to give a really normal answer: my wife, my kids, my family, friends - people that are close and average but will never shy away from helping me, even if they make a mistake while trying to or are scared. 

As Dave Ghrol wrote in his song Hero: “There goes my hero, he is ordinary”

Who are your heroes? 

PARENTING AND PETS

You may have heard of Oxytocin as the love hormone.

Don’t know if you knew this, but the hormone makes you love your loved ones more but actually hate your enemies more too!

So it’s more like the Love/Hate hormone.

Anyway, Oxytocin facilitates the bonding between parent and child and between couples.

The weird thing recently discovered is that it also facilitates the bonding between humans and dogs!

Yes! Sometime in the last 50,000 years we have developed together with dogs a new response to oxytocin.

If we spend more time with our pets and gaze at each other, they increase their oxytocin making us increase ours.

Is this the first ever hormone-induced bond between species?!

TREES

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben is a beautiful book that made me for the first time consider trees in a way I had never before.

I always thought of them as alive but not kinda alive like a dog or a dolphin - more like a jellyfish.

But this was always at odds with my observations.

I’ve seen trees cleverly search for light, I’ve seen trees “learning” to avoid powerlines, I’ve hugged trees and felt something… I felt they could feel me.

Anyway, after reading this book I now see them as beings that operate in a different time scale to us but are exactly like us.

They have a clear display of intelligence but over such long periods of time that we struggle to perceive it.

They also speak a language, take care of each other, collaborate, love and do lots of other things we would attribute to higher-order animals only.

If you are curious pick up a copy and change the way you see trees forever :-)

See you next week (Thursday or Friday?!?! Let me know!!)

Love

Gus

My recommendations:

Company Culture… we live, breathe it and do it differently.

If you want to work on yours, Neu is your best option.

Check us out here!

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