The Power Of A Point Of View: Everything Is The Way It Is Because Someone Changed The Way It Was

Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking.

This is one of our mantras, and if you’ve been reading Category Pirates for the past 6 months (has it been that long already?!), you’ve heard us say this before. That’s because it’s foundational. And not only do we believe it’s worth repeating, but it often takes people a while to truly understand what we mean when we say thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. 

You might think you get it—but do you? (Grab a drink and come up on deck!)

Another one of our mantras is this:

90% of what we’ve been taught about entrepreneurship, business strategy, and marketing is wrong.

When we say things like this, we are not trying to be provocative for provocative’s sake.

The core issue is that 100% of what we’ve been taught is based on the past and doesn’t reflect a future where many things might change. Every generation looks and laughs at prior generations and wonders, “How did those prior generations believe that? Look at what we didn’t know!” 

Well, why would we assume future generations wouldn’t look at us the same way? 

Our job as pirates is to help smart people like you understand the context of what it is you’re looking at and thinking about. And in the world of business, entrepreneurship, and marketing, the vast majority of the conversation (and the advice that gets given as a result) makes one very simple, unconscious, unquestioned, under-discussed mistake:

It assumes the market.

Entrepreneurship advice like, “You want to find product-market fit,” and other business strategies rooted in conventional wisdom start with the way “it is.” For example, “disruption” is tied to “the way it is.” Digital transformation is rooted in “the way it is.” When a company announces on their quarterly earnings call, “We are going to disrupt the manufacturing industry,” what they are really saying (which we would name as their Point Of View) is, “We see and accept the way the world is, and we are going to change the way it currently is to a better way of the way it currently is.”

Now, because what we’re talking about here is particularly nuanced, let us illustrate what we mean by drawing an analogy (pun intended, Arrrrrrr!).

Van Gogh vs Picasso

The beginning of Picasso’s career was spent, to put it bluntly, in Vincent Van Gogh’s shadow.

Van Gogh and other Renaissance Impressionist artists had cultivated a style the world loved. This 19th-century art movement was composed of “relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.” Impressionism was all about capturing the essence of the moment—particularly in terms of time and movement. Some of the most famous Impressionist paintings are Claude Monet’s “Haystacks,” followed by Van Gogh’s “The Wheat Field Behind St. Paul’s Hospital, St. Rémy,” both of which aimed to capture the movement of nature (in the form of textures, colors, and shading).

And while Van Gogh’s style certainly seemed “different,” side by side, it still abided by many of the rules established in impressionism.

(Left: Monet / Right: Van Gogh)

In an analogy, this is how most people in business think about product innovation, digital transformation, and marketing. They start with “what exists,” and then aim to “disrupt” or “change” or “transform” the way it is. They assume the market. They say, “Impressionism is what people clearly want. Let’s do Impressionism, but better.” (7 Minute Abs)

And for 20 years, this is what Picasso did too.

He studied the greats. He learned from the Impressionist artists who came before him. And, using the same set of rules, he composed beautiful works of art that were “better,” but still very much rooted in the past. Put Picasso’s early work beside Van Gogh’s, and you would lump them into the same “category.”

“Thin, visible brush strokes, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, unusual visual angles,” Picasso was still playing by the rules someone else wrote. He might have been executing the rules a bit differently, or with his own “style,” but at the end of the day when the painting was hung to dry, it was still, by every definition, an “Impressionist” (category) painting.

Then, in 1907, a little more than a decade into his career, Picasso began experimenting with a new style of painting.

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