Friday Punch: Let’s Think Different

Let’s be frank: Most of us aren’t good at thinking different. We have a tendency to rejoice in familiar routines.

It’s understandable. Life is easier to manage when you can count on traffic lights to work, trains to come on time, and maple scones to be fresh at the bakery around the corner. There’s nothing wrong with humming the same song or riding the same bus every day. And nobody should mock you for taking your coffee the same way. (I like my Latte strong and foamy. Thank you very much!)

But there’s a danger in this habit. Enslaved to predictability, we frequently surrender to systemic shortcomings and accept them as a way of life. We rearrange our schedules around buses that are always late; we resign to software packages with bloated menus; and we cease to question input devices that give us carpal tunnel syndrome.

It takes someone like Steve Jobs to shake us out of such a stupor, to wake us up from our long sleep of complacency.

Software developers and gadget makers touted products with low-learning curve. Jobs came up with devices and apps with no learning curve. (For many who took pride in their mastery of complicated software packages, the humble pie was tough to swallow.)

With the iPhone and the iPad, Jobs gave us back the use of fingertips, a much more natural way of interacting with 3D objects. With iTunes, he led the charge in cloud computing, now swiftly becoming the backbone of content delivery, data management, and collaboration.

Mark Twain once quipped, “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

Many of us are busy sampling, collecting, making expensive wine. Then Jobs came along and tossed a cold, fresh glass of Apple juice in our face, as a friendly reminder that technology is meant for everybody, not just for the small pool of genius among us.

At tech conferences, when keynote speakers talk of “disruptive technology,” the phrase is invariably punctuated with anxiety and dread. Let us remember that Jobs was a disruptive genius, and our lives are richer because he once walked among us.

We use—and many of us misuse—the term “innovation” to describe incremental improvements to existing ideas. True innovation comes with the shock of cold shower and the velocity of wildfire. And the stamp or approval comes not from industry insiders and experts but from ordinary folks. Let us use the word more sparingly, because innovators like Jobs are rare, miraculous occurrences.

Most of us come to believe technology should be inconvenient, should require us to put in considerable effort. We think of overcoming complexity as the price we must pay to play with a new high-tech toy. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten the original promise—technology is supposed to make life simpler.

Jobs’ products are popular not because they let us do things in some new and untried fashion. They’re irresistible because they work the way we’ve always wanted things to work from the start, from listening to music to finding new friends.

Tomorrow, when we go back to work as engineers, designers, software developers, marketers, and reporters, let us try something new.

Let’s think different, for a change. After all, it’s the only way to make a difference.