68. Self-Disruption 🔗

To disrupt, you have to serve a marginal customer
To be product-driven, you have to serve your own vision

So to self-disrupt, you have to serve a currently marginal part of your own vision

Which means a toy/game/hobby feature

For an individual it literally means hobbies

Hmm. A “tell” is apparently wasteful use of dev time while more “important” product features (lifestyle features for individuals) demand attention. Logic of ideas like “waste transistors” rests as much on “marginal” features (GUI etc) as cheap raw materials.

Diagnostic questions:

1. What can you waste?
2. What’s a seemingly useless thing you could waste it on?
3. Who will be mad about it?

If nobody is mad, there is no disruption. For product-driven, the “responsible” side of you has to get mad. Id make superego mad. Ego must choose

It’s always bothered me that disruption theory assumes a customer-driven mindset, but the most disruptive companies tend to be product-driven. They find marginal markets by orienting towards peripheral visions, rather than directly asking “what marginal market can I serve?”

In the geometric metaphor, a market is a circle and has one center (incumbent) but infinite margin points. Not all will do. For disruption it has to coincide with a bit of your own peripheral vision. The future you see out the corner of your eye rather than straight ahead.

Though the undetermination problem exists there too. There are probably many silly features in your peripheral vision. Which one to make the new center? Probably the one it’s easiest to waste time and attention on. For individuals, which of your many evening/weekend hobbies?

I have at least half a dozen right now personally.

Some are clearly NOT my next thing despite being current hobbies (eg hiking, cooking with new air fryer, new tv shows I’m getting into)

Time spent is a decent but not perfect proxy. A better proxy might be “troubleshooting time” — how much time you spend fixing things when stuck

If it looks too rainy or hot, I’ll cancel a hike or run, so I’m obviously not super committed there. Problems with my 3D printer I’m more likely to try and troubleshoot rather than give up.

Even troubleshoot is too broad. It’s narrower: intersection of troubleshoot/workaround.

What can stop you from the next step? I probably give up on some 3D printing problems (PETG might be too temperamental for me) but where it stops my next step on rover project I’ll either fix it or find a non-3D printing workaround.

In some cases, the activity is the hobby for its own sake. In other cases, it’s a means to an end that’s the real hobby. My current tinkering is a mix of both. The 3D printing is mostly means to an end. The electronics dabbling is more of an end in itself.

Hmm... something interesting about troubleshooting as the essence. When you’re going a new thing, the scope creep from that is unpredictable. It could remain sustainable at a couple of hours a week, or take over your life if you decide you’re not going to let setbacks stop you.

Like take the rover I’m trying to build. For a more skilled maker, who has already done a lot of 3D printing, electronics, RPi coding etc, this is a well-defined, well-scoped, contained project. It can stay hobby grade. They’ll avoid most dumb bugs, troubleshoot things quickly.

It can’t be life changing for them because it’s not a true growth experience.

For me otoh, new to all of it, it could easily consume my life because I am making way more dumb mistakes, taking far too long to troubleshoot trivial setbacks, etc. Open scope.

Disruption means you’re leaning a new activity and allowing yourself to be transformed by it. The “fixing one bug creates two more” effect dominates. You have to let the scope creep proceed as much as it needs to. If you try to budget time/resources too much, it will fail.

The real risk is, you’ll run out of growth headroom before you get anywhere sustainable. For every successful disruptor there are a hundred carcasses of overreach.

Possibly the only thing you can do to derisk is ask if you can handle the transformation overall. Which means accurately understanding the strengths that allowed past transformations to succeed, not “peacetime” skills between self-disruptions.

This is the what’s toughest in my current attempted self-disruption. For eg. writing is a “peacetime skill” for me that I find a way to use in every new adventure. But it’s not a relevant strength for self-disruption. I’m trying to remember what sustained my last big leap.

Often it’s a window of opportunity to grow with a young medium. Looking back, my last half dozen self-disruptions over 20 years all piggybacked on a newish medium for the context. Early adoption is possibly the secret weapon for self-disruption. It ties in to what you can waste.

Damn. I’ve figured it all out. Don’t feel like fleshing it out in a post though.

Self-disruption is next door to play but IMO isn’t truly playful.

In the short-term, early on, it’s like play, but beyond a point it gets too big and dangerous. Capped vs uncapped stakes. Safe fail vs unsafe bets.