Running To Stay In Place
For decades, the conventional wisdom around evolution was that the longer a species had been around, the more likely it was going to be around. For example, a young species of 10 years might be assumed to have a 10 percent chance of extinction, compared with a 0.01 percent chance for a species that had existed for 10,000 years. But when evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen tried to prove this theory, he could not. Instead, the data suggested that both the 10- and 10,000-year-old species had the same probability of extinction. Evolution, Van Valen realised, is not like a football match that ends with one winner who can stop working and take a break. It is a never-ending competition. Like an arms race, a species that gains an advantage over a competitor merely incentivises that competitor to improve, which in turn forces the original species to improve as well. Eventually, all species evolve, but they do not necessarily become better adapted because, as Morgan Housel writes in Same As Ever, “There are no permanent advantages. Everyone is madly scrambling all the time, but no one gets so far ahead that they become extinction-proof.”
So in 1973, Van Valen proposed the “Red Queen Hypothesis of Evolution,” a reference to the Red Queen’s race in Alice in Wonderland. Despite running for so long on a giant chessboard, Alice finds herself exactly where she started. “Now, here, you see,” the Red Queen says, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Survival of the fittest, as the saying goes, is not the survival of the strongest or the fastest, but of the most well-adapted. And your businesses? Careers? Relationships? Skills? Identities? “Yes to all of them,” Housel writes. “Keeping running just to stay in place is how evolution works… how most things in modern life work.”
Running twice as fast just to stay in place? Yes… that’s how you survive (and thrive) in modern life—that’s the idea for today.
This Is The Future
By 2005, the iPod had revolutionised the music industry. Sales were soaring—the twenty million units sold that year accounted for 45% of the company’s revenue. The company’s public image was beginning to evolve into one that was trendy, stylish and forward-looking. Instead of feeling proud about how far the company had come, however, Jobs was worried. He understood that the curse of innovative technology was that it always surpasses itself, and the success of the iPod would incentivise competitors to improve or replicate. At the time, the digital camera market was being decimated by mobile phones with in-built cameras. The same fate, Jobs realised, would befall the iPod if phone manufacturers started building music players into their devices.
One of Jobs’ remarkable skills was his ability to spot markets filled with second-rate products. The immediate thing he noticed about the mobile phones (BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola etc.) was that “they all stank… They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was just Byzantine.” So he decided to make his own phone. To simplify what others made complicated, Jobs decreed: No On/Off switches, no cheap materials that make the phone inelegant, no third parties should be able to open the phone to fiddle with the insides, the product should feel and fit comfortably in your palm, thinner is always better, et cetera. And even though keyboards and styluses were a crowd favourite, Jobs said, that if you included those features in your product, “you’re dead.” Instead, everything should be deferred to the screen where users could “type by touching the screen with their fingers”, “swipe to open”, or “pinch-to-zoom”. However, multi-touch—as it was then called—was new and untested. Apple engineers were unsure whether they could execute the engineering, thus risking the entire project. “Let’s bet on it,” Jobs said. “Think of all the innovations we’d be able to adapt if we did the keyboard on-screen with software… This is the future.”
Indeed, it was the future. At the January 2007 Macworld event to unveil his newest product, Jobs opened his presentation: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” He referred to the original Macintosh and the iPod, which had disrupted the personal computer and music industries. But today, Jobs announced, “We’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class… These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
Critics were quick to emphasise that at $500, “it cost too much to be successful”, and “it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” But Jobs understood desire. He understood that things cannot stay the same as they have always been. He understood that products—no matter how fascinating and groundbreaking—need to constantly evolve because the psychology and attitudes of humans are always evolving. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold more than ninety million iPhones and obliterated the entire mobile-phone market, and the evolution of the iPhone fundamentally changed the paradigm of mobile technology, enabling a wide range of innovations—apps, social media, GPS, photography, videography, AI, biometric authentication, etc.—transforming the world into what we know today.
I Responded To The Condition
There are many instances in the past where long-standing industries were displaced by newer, more innovative technologies. In the early 1970s, the rise of FM radio disrupted the records industry by changing the way consumers consumed music, resulting in a significant decline in sales, widespread budget cuts and massive layoffs. As she no longer had access to illustrators to help design album covers, designer Paula Scher had to do it on her own. Because her background was in typography—the art of arranging text to make it visually pleasing—she made the type on album covers larger and larger, bolder and bolder, eventually sealing in place what became her “signature” style that extended beyond the music industry. By making typography loud and expressive, Scher redefined postmodern graphic design, creating iconic designs for Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, The Public Theater, Citibank and MoMA. “I began to find my graphic language in the early 1970s,” Scher said when she was asked about the origins of her career, “as a result of the economy and what was happening in the record industry, not because I had some grand plan. There was a condition, and I responded to the condition… In the end, a person has to be able to adapt to the conditions of their present circumstances.”
Running In The Direction Of Human Connections
At the age of six, Maya Shankar was introduced to the violin. It was all up from there. By nine, she had been accepted into The Juilliard School and taken under the tutelage of legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman. For six years, she performed around the world, winning concerto competitions and soloing with world-class orchestras. It was her world, her success, until one day, at the age of fifteen, while practising a piece by Italian composer Niccolò Paganini, she overstretched her finger and snapped a tendon. Despite surgery, doctors told her she could not play the violin again. Her musical career was over.
In the time after the accident, Shankar felt stuck and unable to evolve into anything other than a violinist. “My identity,” Shankar said, “was completely tethered to being a violinist. When I met people, it was first, ‘I’m a violinist,’ and second, ‘I’m Maya.’ So when I got injured, suddenly there was this profound loss of identity.” Shankar was experiencing what is known today in cognitive science as “identity paralysis”—the idea that when we define ourselves by something we do, and suddenly we can no longer do that thing, it paralyses us, destabilises us, and envelopes us in a cycle of anger, frustration and hopelessness.
In between these moments, however, Shankar would reminisce about her favourite memories as a violinist. She realised that these memories were rarely about playing the violin itself, but about learning from her teachers, building relationships with other musicians, connecting with audiences, and the community around which her life had been anchored. “It turned out,” Shankar said, “that at the root of my passion for music was human connection.” This was a hopeful shift, because “although I had lost the ability to play the violin, I could still find this underlying love of human connection in other pursuits.”
She began to run towards that through line of human connection and eventually found it embedded in cognitive science, focusing on the study of human emotion and social connection. In 2015, she joined the “Social and Behavioural Sciences Team” of the Obama administration, translating behavioural science into federal policies and nationwide programmes. She later started A Slight Change of Plans, a podcast featuring stories and scientific insights about who we are and who we become in the face of change, which was named Apple Podcasts’ Best Show of the Year.
For “those in the throes of change and feeling that threat to identity,” Shankar said, “what I would recommend is to try to figure out what your through line is. What are the underlying features of the things you used to do, that you used to absolutely love? And can you find expressions of those features in other things?”
Don’t Fight The Future
“An artist has to accept that this is a constantly changing environment,” John Mayer explained, “The people who have the hardest time are the people who are fighting the future.” The music landscape was shifting; people’s behaviours and attitudes towards music were changing. You would hear artists complain about “the way things were going,” Mayer said. “You’re not gonna hear me complain about the record industry or downloading [of music] because my complaining isn’t gonna change it. All you can do is ride it.” The forces of the world are beyond our control, but it is within our control to decide how we respond to those conditions. So run in the direction of the conditions. Run twice as fast! Yes — that’s what we can do, that’s what we can control, if we ever want to survive and thrive in the modern world.
