My curiosity keeps me searching for new avenues since mere motions of life can never truly make you feel alive. There are times when my interest in a particular area is waning, and I find myself taking up new pursuits to sate my short attention span, which is a curse of the curious. In my opinion, it is a way of adding new perspectives to life so that it becomes more magical and nuanced. My greatest value comes from the fact that we learn from the sum of all our decisions, both good and bad, over time. And that leads to experience.
The small steps in different directions add up. Below are the stories of companies that have embraced that Renaissance soul.
Around World War II, Masaru Ibuka in Japan came up with a simple product to cater to the millions of homes that had electricity but lacked the appliances to use it, especially in a country where rice forms the basis of every meal. This led to the development of an electric rice cooker. This rice cooker was marketed under the name Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute and consisted mainly of aluminium electrodes attached to a wooden bucket. Rice often ended up being served as overcooked mush or undercooked grain based on the unregulated electric current at the time as well as the quality of rice or its water content. This prevented the product from reaching the market. But now this relic commemorates the beginning of the giant we now know as Sony, one of the world's biggest gadget manufacturers.
Not far, a Korean grocery trading store was opened on March 1, 1938, by Lee Byung-Chull. Initially, his business was to trade noodles and other goods produced in and around the city and to export them to China. During the country's industrialization drive following the Korean War, the company successfully expanded into textile manufacturing. The company created other subsidiaries in Heavy Industries, Shipbuilding, and Precision soon after-under the name Samsung - to position it as a major competitor in the electronics industry. They became the first company to enter the black-and-white TV market in 1969 with several electronics-focused divisions.
As a company that developed security software for handheld devices, Confinity was established in December 1998. Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Yu Pan, and Russell Simmons founded Confinity in 1999 as a money transfer company. Confinity merged with X.com in March 2000, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk. The money transfer business Confinity was developing was viewed as a future success by Musk. Musk decided to cease X.com's other Internet banking operations in November 2000 to focus on PayPal, a global money service that everyone is familiar with.
A podcasting company called Odeo realized they needed to reinvent themselves in 2006, so they brainstormed new ideas. As outlined by Dorsey, an SMS was created to permit a user to communicate with a small group of people. "Status" was introduced until the group looked up names in the dictionary and picked Twitter, which was perfect. In the first tweet published by Dorsey on March 21, 2006, the product was called twttr. A prototype of Twitter was tested internally by Odeo employees prior to its public launch in July 2006.
After the war, Kiichiro Toyoda was given the instructions to start a car company but realized that the company needed a solid foundation in order to succeed. For this reason, Toyota has the edge over its competitors in the world of haberdasheries. Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation, designed and constructed Toyota's first sewing machine back in 1946. Toyoda believed that a machine should be both functional and beautiful.
A pulp mill in southwest Finland, founded by Fredrik Idestam in 1865, began producing paper. Three years later, he opened a second mill near Nokia and the company began generating electricity in 1902. Following the First World War, Nokia faced bankruptcy and the nearby Finnish Rubber Works, a manufacturer of goloshes, hoses and tires, bought the firm for the sake of securing a power supply. The group subsequently acquired Finnish Cable Works, a cable manufacturing company that exported telephone and electricity cables to the Soviet Union, thus forming the centre of Nokia's electronics business.
It would be impossible to ever walk off the queue, society engineered so meticulously if it had its way. The minute we are born, we are conditioned to only be intelligent enough to pass through the dam of social conditioning, fueling the oppressive fantasy of a world without a Renaissance. The path's construction must never be questioned, and those who abandon it are better left labelled and demonized.
Yes, it is true. Change is hard and almost never welcome. However, every so often, in the unlikeliest of scenarios, multipotentialites challenge every assumption. The power of someplace else maps the rest.
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