The ICBM Economy- global competition and the missile shield of travel

The world is a battleground of ideas- anyone, anywhere can launch a first draft of most ideas within a couple of weeks, leveraging years of work on a pay per usage basis. Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum, and when the idea to launch time window is measured in weeks instead of years, you damn well better have a better environment for idea generation than your competition.

We’ve gone from a world of cavalry charges to one of ICBM strikes- when the next guy’s missiles are arcing over the Arctic you better have yours firing back, and fast.

Travel as a missile shield.

Spreadsong’s a new company and there’s a million things that have to be done to keep revenue growing in the right direction. It means product launches, major updates, major initiatives, and just generally killing it across the board- it means having awesome ideas and executing better than anyone else. Because of this, I work a ton- Spreadsong’s growing fast, we have a lot of customers, there are support needs, emails to answer, strategies to execute on, ideas to test, new things to try. And that’s awesome! I’ve been working my ass off to make that sentence a reality for years, and it’s incredible satisfying to see it come true.

I’m not a Four Hour Work Week man, if but for the simple reason that I like what I do. However, in spending huge swathes of time building, it’s also easy to get lost in the swirling tide of crisis. It’s easy to have each day a Donnie Darko like line from bed to shower to breakfast to office to bed once more. That sucks. It’s no way to live, and definitely no way to come up with great ideas.

So, the question is, how do you come up with better ideas than the next guy? And, not just the next guy, but an entire planet? How do you come up with profitable ideas and then execute relentlessly on them?

Travel.

By being more aware, more interested, more engaged and excited about the day to day, it gets easier to create. And that’s what making money is about now- creation. Creating something new, whether derivative or original- creation. It’s being surrounded by other language, the moment to moment crush of the new- the combination makes it easier to be focused on the moment.

That brings us to serendipity- in being more aware, more opportunity comes. I’ve found it to be universally true while traveling, and friends who live abroad have found the same to totally true. It’s really all over the place- talking to people in cafes who don’t speak a lot of English I get enormously helpful feedback on how we phrase stuff, making for a more usable app. And just that act, getting to know people from other countries, in another country, opens up a huge swathe of opportunity.

An anecdote.

Just as I came in to the cafe I’m writing this from- one of the girls who works here waved and brought over a friend of hers. They had just been talking about what we’re doing, since I come in pretty regularly- as we all talked, her friend actually brought up something about the way book lists are distributed that I’d never even considered.

It had huge implications for the future. A random conversation with a Hungarian art student, but one with far-reaching implications. Will it turn into something big? I think so, because it’s the kind of small occurance that points to a broader, large-scale occurence. And it’s easy to test! So, as we move forward, as we launch our next few products, we have more information to act on, and better ideas to execute upon- we’ll be there before anyone else, because of a random serendipitous experience.

Travel is our missile shield- what’s yours?