The Desirable Difficulty

I have a love/hate relationship with Malcolm Gladwell and I have never even met the man. For those of you not in the know, Mr Gladwell is an author and is probably one of the best around. He tends to take things you and I take for granted and completely blow them out the water.
I love his work, I love the controversy. The hate part of the relationship is that I don’t always agree with him.
Take for example his premise that it takes 10 000 hours to become an expert in a field.
I would argue that 10 000 hours is an average and that more likely some people get in 8 000 and some poor suckers are at it for an extra two years.
With his work you always have great material that you can use in debates. I bought myself a New Year’s present, his latest offering “David and Goliath” deals with the idea of the underdog.
He ploughs through examples of underdog success and failure in business and in life to hound out a few principles that work in the favour of the “less fortunate”.
One of those that resonate well is the concept of the “Desirable Difficulty”.
What if there were certain traits that the world would generally regard as undesirable that have an ultimate positive effect if worked through.
In the book, he highlights the idea of dyslexics who invent coping mechanisms that enable them to succeed as businessmen.
Richard Branson, Jetblue founder David Neeleman are a couple of names on the list of dyslexics who have made it big.
Now some would look at doing business in Zimbabwe as the biggest difficulty in the world.
We have been through hell and back economically. What if doing business was really easy here?
What if anyone could push through the bureaucracy required to start-up?
What if sourcing goods was as simple as a phone call and didn’t require dealing with crazy transport logistics, sanctions and the odd corrupt official?
What if we could obtain all we needed to run our business locally at a price cheaper than the rest of the world?
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it. I’m just not so sure that it would be.

You see the challenges we face require us to be innovative. It requires a tenacity and creativity to bootstrap a business when loans are not readily available.
It requires a certain amount of disagreement with the status quo and as George Bernard Shaw put it — a degree of unreasonableness.
He said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
“Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Unreasonable here does not mean impolite, it just means an ability to not take no for an answer and to find a solution that works, even if that solution if out of the ordinary or breaks a few social norms along the way.
Ecocash is unreasonable for example. The norm for years has been that you go to a bank, stand in a queue to do a transaction.
Even in a world of internet banking there are still some things you need to go to the bank for.
Bank charges mean that transactions need to be meaningful to make them work. Wait, now your phone is your bank.
Transaction size is less of a limit. Of course the normal banking world is going to be upset.
A difficult world teaches us the meaning of failure. I had a friend at high school. He was an A grade student, he was beyond A grade.
He passed everything with over 90 percent. He complained if he fell out of the top five percent of the school.
Then one day he failed a test. His world ended. This was Armageddon, how would he ever recover from this.
Compare his reaction to someone who was more “average”, who failed maybe one in 10 tests.
They fail and their reaction is “oh look there is failure, yeah I met it before and I know you can recover from it so I’m going to recover.”
They move on to the next task and do better at it. Failure is never pleasant, but it is the tenacity that recovery from failure brings is what you want.
Imagine a country filled with people who have a mentality that says we recovered from the worst inflation figures in history.
We started, fought for and built businesses in the most desperate economic environment. We turned that economy around. People like that, a country like that will change the world.

2014 The Start

In case you overslept on December 31st and missed the whole affair, it it now 2014 (cue drumroll as last year leaves graciously stage right).
More time is spent looking back at the past and predicting the future in this season that any other couple of week period. The web is full of bumph and blurb...some of it is actually really good.
Check out BBC Magazine's list of 20 words to remove from the English language for overuse.
Sadly many of them have crept into my own writing over the last year or so, time to cut them out for a bit.

Stuck for something to do while waiting for the holidays to end? Go buy some trendy, slick blank cards and write thank-you notes to the people that have impacted you the most this last year, add a bit at the end about the positives you expect this coming year.
Have fun with it, it is only the start!