Tag: Living

The Late Mover Advantage

 

Oftentimes in marketing we use terms like Last Mover Advantage or Late Mover Advantage ‘. Brands coming to life at a later stage in a category that is established or maturing can reap the learnings and unlearnings of brands who have come before them. There is a vast reservoir of knowledge and actionable intelligence readily available without one having to go through the grind, time and expense of trial and error.

 

Over time that civilization set foot on this planet, 107 billion people have lived throughout history. The current world population is just over 8 billion( 8,059,147,655 as of Friday, September 8, 2023) according to the most recent United Nations estimates elaborated by Worldometer.

These billions of people who came before us have tried things, failed, learned, tried things differently. And in doing so, they discovered new solutions. Which people like us now get to inherit, learn from and use, without the steep learning curve of trial and error.
Accumulated experience can be a competitive advantage for a company. As a company or a brand operates and accumulates experience in a given market or sector, it can develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, as well as of the challenges and opportunities in the market. This accumulated experience can enable the company to make more informed and effective decisions and to identify opportunities that may not be obvious to other companies.
Similarly, the cumulative lessons of those 107 billion people have been passed down to us. It is the greatest gift we will ever receive. We are smart not because of our individual genius, but because of our collective knowledge. Some of us are better than one of us.
The dead ( or the living before us to put it more respectfully), have left lessons, lineage and legacy for us. After all, there is what we call ‘ the wisdom of the crowds‘. Ratio and Proportion 101 tells us that it is almost a 14:1 ratio i.e. the dead: now living. We can ignore the vast accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.
Being a late mover is a distinct and valuable competitive advantage. Shouldn’t we choose to leverage it?
ENDS

 

Power of Darkness: Switch Off to Switch On!

Please forgive the almost oxymoronic nature of the blog’s caption. We all think that no power leads to darkness, isn’t it?

 

The world owes a lot to Benjamin Franklin, the scientist who invented electricity. It’s human to want light and warmth. God’s first recorded words, according to the Hebrew Bible, were: “Let there be light.”

 

The night has a dark side; literally and metaphorically: ghosts, scary monsters, robbers, the unknown. Electricity’s triumph over the night keeps us safer as well as busier.

 

But whatever extends the day loses us the dark. Our always on, 24-7 culture has phased out the night, so much so that we treat the night like failed daylight.

 

Night and dark are good for us. As the nights lengthen, it’s time to reopen the dreaming space. Have you ever spent an evening without electric light? You would have noticed that when the lights are on, we are all in conformity mode. Saluting the default template, playing it safe, keeping up with the Joneses, effectively talking about our outer lives. Living the expected.

 

It’s different when we are sitting around a fire or candlelight which is when we begin to articulate our feelings. Our inner lives. We speak subjectively, argue less, there are longer pauses. Noticed? Or you could not see it in the dark?

 

To sit in isolation in darkness is curiously creative. We have our brainwaves , best ideas and Eureka moments in the dead of the night and the moment the light comes on we are thinking projects, deadlines, groceries, bills…

 

The famous “sleep on it” when we have a dilemma we can’t solve is an indication of how important dream time | darkness is to human wellbeing.

 

Food, fire, walks, talks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time. Creativity, like human life itself — begins in darkness.

 

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
— Mary Oliver

 

Switch off to Switch on!

 

ENDS