Mastery (46 page)

Matsuoka started from the other end. Her goal was to discover what
makes the hand dexterous, and it was clear that one critical requisite was to have a flexible, curved palm. Thinking on this higher level, it then became clear that the motors and cables had to be placed somewhere else. Instead of jamming the hand with motors everywhere so that everything could move, she determined that the most important maneuverable part of the hand was the thumb, the key to our grasping skills. That is where she would put more power.

She continued on this path, uncovering more and more of the details that went into the marvelous mechanics of the human hand. As she worked in this peculiar way, other engineers would scoff at her and her strange biological approach. What a waste of time, they would tell her. In the end, however, what she called her anatomically correct test-bed hand soon became the model for the industry, revealing whole new possibilities for prosthetic hands, vindicating her approach, and gaining her fame and recognition for her engineering skills.

This, however, was only the beginning of her quest to get at the organic nature of the hand and to literally recreate it. After graduating with a master’s degree in robotics, she returned to MIT to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. Currently, armed with deep knowledge about the neuro-signals that make the hand-brain connection so unique, she is pursuing the goal of creating a prosthetic hand that can actually connect to the brain, operating and feeling as if it were real. To reach such a goal, she continues to work on high-end concepts, such as the influence of the hand-brain connection on our thinking in general.

In her lab she has done tests to see how people manipulate ambiguous objects with their eyes closed. She studies how they explore them with their hands, and records the elaborate neuro-signals that are generated in the process. She wonders if there could be a connection between such exploration and abstract thought processes (perhaps involving similar neuro-signals), such as when we are confronted with a problem that seems difficult to solve. She is interested in building such exploratory sensations into the prosthetic hand. In other experiments, in which subjects move a virtual-reality hand, she has discovered that the more people are made to feel that the hand is literally a part of their bodies, the greater the degree of control they have. Creating such sensations will be a part of the ultimate prosthetic hand she is working on. Although its realization is years away, the design of such a neurologically connected hand will have technological consequences far beyond robotics.

In many fields we can see and diagnose the same mental disease, which we shall call
technical lock
. What this means is the following: in order to learn a subject or skill, particularly one that is complex, we must immerse ourselves in many details, techniques, and procedures that are standard for
solving problems. If we are not careful, however, we become locked into seeing every problem in the same way, using the same techniques and strategies that became so imprinted in us. It is always simpler to follow such a route. In the process we lose sight of the bigger picture, the purpose of what we are doing, how each problem we face is different and requires a different approach. We adopt a kind of tunnel vision.

This
technical lock
afflicts people in all fields as they lose a sense of the overall purpose of their work, of the larger question at hand, of what impels them to do their work in the first place. Yoky Matsuoka hit upon a solution to this that propelled her to the forefront of her field. It came as a reaction against the engineering approach that prevailed in robotics. Her mind naturally works better on a larger scale, continually pondering the connections between things on high levels—what makes the human hand so weirdly perfect, how the hand has influenced who we are and how we think. With these large questions governing her research, she avoids becoming narrowly focused on technical issues without understanding the bigger picture. Thinking on such a high level frees the mind up to investigate from all different angles: Why are the bones of the hand this way? What makes the palm so malleable? How does the sense of touch influence our thinking in general? It allows her to go deeply into the details without losing a sense of the why.

You must make this a model for your own work as well. Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger—a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place. This bigger idea governs your smaller paths of investigation, and opens up many more such paths for you to look into. By constantly reminding yourself of your purpose, you will prevent yourself from fetishizing certain techniques or from becoming overly obsessed with trivial details. In this way you will play into the natural strengths of the human brain, which wants to look for connections on higher and higher levels.

7. The Evolutionary Hijack

In the summer of 1995, Paul Graham (see
chapter 2
,
here
) heard a story on the radio promoting the endless possibilities of online commerce, which at the time hardly existed. The promotion came from Netscape, which was trying to drum up interest in its business on the eve of its IPO. The story sounded so promising, yet so vague. At the time, Graham was at a bit of a crossroads. After graduating from Harvard with a PhD in computer engineering, he had fallen into a pattern: he would find some part-time consulting job in the software business; then, with enough money saved, he
would quit the job and devote his time to his real love—art and painting—until the money ran out, and then he would scramble for another job. Now thirty-one-years old, he was getting tired of the pattern, and he hated consulting. The prospect of making a lot of money quickly by developing something for the Internet suddenly seemed very appealing.

He called up his old programming partner from Harvard, Robert Morris, and interested him in the idea of collaborating on their own startup, even though Graham had no clue where they would start or what they would develop. After a few days of discussing this, they decided they would try to write software that would enable a business to generate an online store. Once they were clear about the concept, they had to confront a very large obstacle in their way. In those days, for a program to be popular enough it would have to be written for Windows. As consummate hackers, they loathed everything about Windows and had never bothered to learn how to develop applications for it. They preferred to write in Lisp and have the program run on Unix, the open-source operating system.

They decided to postpone the inevitable and wrote the program for Unix anyway. To translate this later into Windows would be easy, but as they contemplated doing this, they realized the terrible consequences it would lead to—once the program was launched in Windows, they would have to deal with users and perfect the program based on their feedback. This would mean they would be forced to think and program in Windows for months, perhaps years. This was too awful a prospect, and they seriously considered giving up.

One morning Graham, who had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Morris’s Manhattan apartment, woke up repeating certain words that must have come to him from a dream: “You could control the program by clicking on links.” He suddenly sat bolt upright, as he realized what these words could mean—the possibility of creating a program to set up an online store that would run on the web server itself. People would download and use it through Netscape, clicking various links on the web page to set it up. This would mean he and Morris would bypass the usual route of writing a program that users would download to their desktop. It would cut out the need ever to have to dabble in Windows. There was nothing out there like this, and yet it seemed like such an obvious solution. In a state of excitement he explained his epiphany to Morris, and they agreed to give it a try. Within a few days they finished the first version, and it functioned beautifully. Clearly, the concept of a web application would work.

Over the next few weeks they refined the software, and found their own angel investor who put up an initial $10,000 for a 10 percent share in the business. In the beginning, it was quite hard to interest merchants in the concept.
Their application server provider was the very first Internet-run program for starting a business, at the very frontier of online commerce. Slowly, however, it began to take off.

As it panned out, the novelty of their idea, which Graham and Morris had come upon largely because of their distaste for Windows, proved to have all kinds of unforeseen advantages. Working directly on the Internet, they could generate a continuous stream of new releases of the software and test them right away. They could interact directly with consumers, getting instant feedback on their program and improving it in days rather than the months it could take with desktop software. With no experience running a business, they did not think to hire salespeople to do the pitching; instead, they made the phone calls to potential clients themselves. But as they were the de facto salespeople, they were also the first to hear complaints or suggestions from consumers, and this gave them a real feel for the program’s weaknesses and how to improve it. Because it was so unique and came out of left field, they had no competitors to worry about; nobody could steal the idea because they were the only ones who were insane enough to attempt it.

Naturally, they made several mistakes along the way, but the idea was too strong to fail; and in 1998 they sold their company, named Viaweb, to Yahoo! for $50 million.

As the years went by and Graham looked back at the experience, he was struck by the process he and Morris had gone through. It reminded him of so many other inventions in history, such as microcomputers. The microprocessors that made the microcomputer possible had originally been developed to run traffic lights and vending machines. They had never been intended to power computers. The first entrepreneurs to attempt this were laughed at; the computers they had created looked hardly worthy of the name—they were so small and could do so little. But they caught on with just enough people for whom they saved time, and slowly, the idea took off. The same story had occurred with transistors, which in the 1930s and ’40s were developed and used in electronics for the military. It was not until the early 1950s that several individuals had the idea of applying this technology to transistor radios for the public, soon hitting upon what would become the most popular electronic device in history.

What was interesting in all of these cases was the peculiar process that led to these inventions: generally, the inventors had a chance encounter with the available technology; then the idea would come to them that this technology could be used for other purposes; and finally they would try out different prototypes until the right one fell into place. What allows for this process is the willingness of the inventor to look at everyday things in a different light and to imagine new uses for them. For people who are stuck
in rigid ways of seeing, the familiarity of an old application hypnotizes them into not seeing its other possibilities. What it all really comes down to is the possession of a flexible, adaptable mind—something that is often enough to separate a successful inventor or entrepreneur from the rest of the crowd.

After cashing in on Viaweb, Graham hit upon the idea of writing essays for the Internet—his rather peculiar form of blogging. These essays made him a celebrity among young hackers and programmers everywhere. In 2005 he was invited by undergraduates in the computer science department at Harvard to give a talk. Instead of boring them and himself by analyzing various programming languages, he decided to discuss the idea of technology startups themselves—why some work, why some fail. The talk was so successful, and Graham’s ideas so illuminating, that the students began to besiege him with questions about their own startup ideas. As he listened, he could sense that some of their concepts were not far off the mark, but that they badly needed shaping and guidance.

Graham had always intended to try his hand at investing in other people’s ideas. He had been the beneficiary of an angel investor in his project, and it was only right to return the favor by helping others. The problem was where to begin. Most angel investors had some related experience before they began investing, and they tended to start out on a small scale to get their feet wet. Graham had no such business experience. Based on this weakness, he hit upon an idea that at first glance seemed ridiculous—he would synchronously invest $15,000 in ten startups all at once. He would find these ten prospects by advertising his offer and choosing the best among the applicants. Over the course of a few months he would shepherd these novices and help guide them to the point of launching their idea. For this he would take 10 percent from any successful startup. It would be like an apprenticeship system for tech founders, but it really had another purpose—it would serve as a crash course for him in the investing business. He would be a lousy first investor and his pupils would be lousy entrepreneurs, making them a perfect match.