Happy Monday
One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
In 1937, a truck driver named Malcom McLean was sitting at a dock in New Jersey waiting to unload cotton bales from his truck onto a ship. The process took hours. Workers carried every piece of cargo off the truck and loaded it onto the ship by hand, one item at a time. A typical ship in those days carried around 200,000 individual pieces, and the loading and unloading often took as long as the actual voyage across the ocean. McLean sat there watching and wondered why they didn’t just lift the whole truck onto the ship.
Nobody in the shipping industry had asked this question. They’d spent decades trying to make the loading process faster, hiring more workers, building better cranes, redesigning the holds. But they were all optimizing a system that was fundamentally broken, and they couldn’t see it because they’d grown up inside of it. McLean had never been on a ship in his life. He was a truck driver from a farming town in North Carolina whose education ended after high school. And because he had no idea how shipping was supposed to work, he was the only person in a position to see how it actually should. He sold his trucking company, bought two old tanker ships, and in 1956 loaded 58 steel containers onto the deck of a ship called the Ideal-X. By the end of the century, container ships were carrying 90% of the world’s trade cargo. When he died in 2001, container ships around the globe blew their whistles.
I kept thinking about McLean while I was talking to Ronnen Harary on the podcast a couple weeks ago. Ronnen co-founded Spin Master, the company behind PAW Patrol, Bakugan, Hatchimals, and the Rubik’s Cube. He and two friends started it with $10,000 and their first product was the Earth Buddy, which was literally a nylon stocking filled with sawdust and grass seed that grew hair. They had zero experience in the toy industry. No connections, no understanding of how the business worked, no mentors telling them the right way to do things. And Ronnen thinks that’s exactly why it worked. His argument is that the more you know about an industry, the more reasons you have to talk yourself out of trying something new in it. The toy industry veterans knew all the reasons you couldn’t do what Spin Master did. Ronnen and his friends didn’t know any of them, so they just did it. He turned that into a $4 billion public company that airs in 160 countries.
Neither of them knew enough about their industry to be afraid of it, and that turned out to matter more than anything the experts had.
Quote
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki
He was a Zen teacher who came to San Francisco in the 1960s and wrote one of the most influential books on meditation ever published. His whole point was that the more you know about something, the harder it becomes to see it fresh. Expertise closes doors that ignorance doesn’t even know are there, and I think most people learn that too late.
Question
What would you try if you didn’t know enough to know it was supposed to be hard?
Listen
Ronnen Harary: Co-Founder of Spin Master & Co-Creator of PAW Patrol. Ronnen started with a nylon stocking full of sawdust and turned it into one of the biggest children’s entertainment companies in the world. He talks about why he never used focus groups or market research, why he thinks your twenties are the best time to bet on yourself, and why the toy industry keeps getting disrupted by people who don’t come from the toy industry. His new book is called No Experience Necessary.
Read
The Box by Marc Levinson. This is the full story of Malcom McLean and how a metal box changed the world economy. Levinson makes the case that the shipping container did more to drive globalization than any trade agreement or economic policy ever has, and the whole thing started because a truck driver with no maritime experience asked a question that the experts thought was too simple to be worth asking.
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— Scott