Stop whining, better kill
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010Seth Godin made a good point in his recent blog post “Two problems with whining“. First it doesn’t work since nothing will happen just because you whine against technocrats and stupids (in my wording, the Shadoks). Far worse, whining is a reverse placebo because when you get good at whining, you start noticing evidence that makes your whining more true. And since, from point one, you don’t put yourself in the driver’s seat, you quickly become an old moron (“un vieux con” in plain French).
A much better behavior would be to very accurately identify what you are whining about and to kill it. I don’t mean killing in the Wild Wild West way, but rather in the World Wide Web way: building a killer application.
Because if you have really good reasons to whine, it probably means that something is done in a really stupid way… and it is probably not that hard to compete, even against the most mainstream idea. Web apps are for cheap and can provide you with amazing leverage if you are right.
Of course there is some risk that you can fail. But what you will learn during the process makes it worth a try… even if you just discover that the reasons you would have been whining about in the first place were simply pragmatic decisions made by people with more hindsight.