The laws of success and my kitchen

S01-E01 (4 January 2021)

Ciao!

I’m happy that you decided to give your time and attention to my sketchbook. If you read something that you want to discuss, just reply to this email :)

A book worth reading

I just finished The Formula. The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási, director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR).

This is not a boring book about “hustling” or “crushing it” by another motivation guru. Barabási is a physicist and - together with his team of university researchers - has analyzed terabytes of data and spent years studying the dynamics of success to formulate a comprehensive scientific theory.

The first interesting concept of the book is the definition of success and the difference between success and performance. In Barabási words:

Your success isn’t about you and your performance.
It’s about us and how we perceive your performance.

Performance - or what you do […] - is certainly a variable where you have some control. You can perfect your performance by honing your skills, practicing, preparing, and strategizing. You can even compare your performances against that of others and determine where you stand.

Success, however, is a whole different category. It’s a collective measure, capturing how people respond to our performance. In other words, if we want to measure our success or figure out how we’ll ultimately be rewarded, we can’t look at our performances or accomplishments in isolation. Instead, we need to study our community ad examines its response to our contributions.

From here, Barabási rattles off his 5 laws of success:

1. Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, our networks drive success. In other words, if your performance can be accurately measured (like in sports) that superior performances determine success. But if performances cannot be objectively measured (like in art) then the social capital plays a fundamental role in determining who will succeed.

2. Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. In most cases performances are bounded. In sports there are obvious physical limits that cannot be surpassed. In other fields, where judges determine who is the winner, distinguishing among top performers is inevitably difficult and often the result is random (it is the case of wine competitions: a study demonstrated that - in a blind test involving tens of labels - most judges that tasted the same wine 3 times assigned radical different votes, even rejecting a wine that they previously judged as excellent). Regardless of how performance is determined, the resulting success has no upper limit, like many celebrities demonstrate: any field has its superstars, with performances that are only fractionally better than their peers. Nevertheless, their ability to leverage social networks plays a substantial role in determining the magnitude of their success.

3. Future success is dictated by previous success multiplied by the fitness of your idea or product. In network analysis there is a subtle phenomenon called preferential attachment: nodes with many connections will receive more connections over time. But this is not immutable, because people change continuously and develop new preferences that influence how products fit in their life. So, if it true that success breeds success, long-term success of an idea or a product is determined by fitness alone. This is a very important insight for entrepreneurs and innovators: we cal always find a way to build a product with a better fit and replace the incumbents.

4. While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements. Digging into data, Barabási found that the more a team has a clear leader, the more successful they are likely to be. Unfortunately, the leader is also the one taking the credit because (as we have learned thanks to law 1) the credit isn’t based on actual performance, but on perception and social capital. 

5. With persistence success can come at any time. As Barabási repeat several time, this is very reassuring for a middle age man like him (and me): statistically success can happen at any age and the only reason why many scientists produce their most relevant works early in their career is only because they are more productive, work more and publish more papers.

The Formula is worth reading and it is full of references to many scientific papers: check the notes if you have time to dig into the details.

My new kitchen

At the beginning of 2020, I and my wife Patrizia decided that we wanted to renew our 20 years old kitchen and started a quest: 10 months later (due to Covid) the project is still in progress and has generated a lot of frustration. Many aspects of buying a kitchen in Italy are really broken and the experience is far from being enjoyable: this means that there are many opportunities to develop new businesses.

We started our quest for a new kitchen taking pictures and accurate measures of the current one. We spent several hours discussing our needs, because Patrizia has a passion for baking and is the owner of Mamma Fornaia, a cottage food activity, that produces strudels and other delicious bakery products: she needs space to knead, rise and bake. I also like to cook and to experiment new gadgets and our kitchen is always busy and packed of objects and ingredients.

After the initial brainstorming, I opened the browser looking for inspiration and to do a short list of brands to analyze: in Italy we have luxury manufacturers like ValCucine and Boffi and more approachable brands like Scic, Dada, Arclinea, Scavolini or Berloni. We decided to concentrate on this second group.

And we found the first roadblocks in the experience:

• most websites are hard to navigate: they are just a collection of fancy pictures and lack tools to support your purchasing process. I understand that you are not supposed to buy a whole kitchen online, but it would be nice to have some sort of configuration tool. At the end, the only thing you can do is download some PDF catalogue: the rest of the website is almost useless.

• pictures are not realistic. The smallest kitchen you can find on a brochure is probably 50 sqm and is always embedded in the living room of a pharaonic villa. Seriously? What about normal houses? I have a 14 sqm kitchen, which is not huge, but is very comfortable and is probably the average dimension of a kitchen in a 140 sqm house.

Frustrated by this first approach, we came to the conclusion that we needed to visit some store to clear our minds. We selected three and... we were catapulted into the 90s, when we bought our first kitchen. Nothing had changed!

Several visits are needed to choose a kitchen and have a quote: the first one is to take a look at the models and provide the necessary information to the seller; the second one is to check one or more projects that in some cases were sketched by hand with pencil and paper; the third one is to discuss the budget and dig into materials and appliances to get to a quote. Repeat this process for any brand that you want to take into consideration. None of the resellers will give you any material to bring home: they still use a very traditional closing process that is designed to force you to sign a contract during one of the multiple visits to the store.

We were in the middle of this excruciating process, when the lockdown started and everything was left in a limbo.

The experience we had with kitchen brands and resellers showed me that there is a clear opportunity to innovate the sale channel. Any idea that could help the consumer with the purchasing process is a potential new business.

Here is a simple idea that does not require sophisticated software development, augmented reality and/or artificial intelligence. A consulting and pre-sale service at home would be an interesting minimum viable product (MVP): instead of asking me to visit stores, send a young architect to my home with a suitcase full of brochures and an iPad to discuss my needs and make some sketches. I would pay for this service: it would save me hundreds of hours in boring visits. I can come to the store when I’m close to the purchasing decision and I’m ready to discuss materials and finishes.

More on our quest for a new kitchen in the coming weeks, because in these months of lockdown I also decided to explore the idea to design my own furnitures and I learned many interesting things. I’m far from a satisfying result, but I’m still working on it and I discovered that there are many aspects that can be improved.

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I hope you will be inspired by this newsletter and that you can find some interesting ideas for a new entrepreneurial adventure. Having ideas is the easiest part of the journey, even though good ideas are not that common in my experience. If you want to take action and need some guidance on how to transform an idea into something tangible, I suggest you to take a look at Productology (only in Italian for now).