Hey y’all! We’re almost through Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, this time on Chapter 8, Landing on New Planets. This one is about what happens when you try to build on a platform that doesn’t have any rules yet, whether that’s AI, robotics, or whatever comes next, and it landed right in the middle of me actually wrestling with some of this at work.
What you’ll learn:
* The core problem this chapter tackles: Pincus’s whole “Proven Better New” framework depends on having something proven to build from, so what do you do on a new platform where nothing is proven yet? His answer is what he calls fuzzy proven, borrowing mechanics that worked somewhere else and hoping they translate
* Why getting native to a new platform means becoming a hobbyist and a hacker, playing with the technology long before it’s practical, and why he says you should give yourself permission to be too early since being early beats being late almost every time
* What he calls your curious edges, the places where your personal interests intersect with emerging technology, and how that landed for me since nearly two years of reading and sharing frameworks like The Coaching Habit and The One Thing on this podcast is now directly shaping how I’m designing the AI product I work on
* Why increasing your surface area matters so much, whether that’s Reed Hoffman building his network years before the payoff, or something smaller like the West Michigan product community I built myself, or running a lightning demos exercise with your team to see how companies outside your industry solve similar problems
* His idea that every platform shift produces two waves of products, the obvious first wave everyone predicts, and a second wave of things nobody can imagine until they’re actually living on the new planet
We’re one chapter away from finishing this book, so next week is the conclusion. I’ll also have some real talk in that episode about a shift I’m making with the podcast and Substack cadence, including moving the back catalog of episodes behind a paywall in the next couple of weeks, so if you’ve been meaning to catch up on earlier chapters, now’s the time.
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