So I work in the Internet field running FlucMedia and you might think this immediately invalidates my opinion or predisposes it to the bias that “of course we need the National Broadband Network (NBN) you idiot!”. Well, that’s not true – I like to approach each issue from an impartial basis and determine whether it’s for the benefit of Australian’s as a whole. The reality is – it is my opinion and I do believe we need the NBN. And this is the very argument I had with another person across on the Australian technology blog Delimiter. The post that started it all was a comment by Malcom Turnbull – the Federal Telecommunications Opposition Minister – where Mr. Turnbull stated

To go from 50 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second in a residential context would be imperceptible; the user experience would be no different.

This really set me right off. I’ll post my somewhat long comments below for you to read in response to another user primarily called “Alain” – but pop on over to Delimiter to see the mammoth 300+ comment post for yourself if you’re interested.

—

@Alain
I’ll respond to your comments again but unfortunately I don’t have the time again to reply on this thread – thanks for the discussion nonetheless.

Regarding Anonymous Commenting on Blogs

“That old furphy gets a airing again, of course you are very selective on who that ‘put down’ attempt applies to, if it applies to everyone in blogs like this Whirlpool, ZDnet etc you have eliminated 99% of all posts in one hit as having any legitimate comment.”

Legitimate commenting online IMHO should link to a real online presence – hence the reason Facebook has implemented its online commenting system as one of many. You comment differently when you attach your real profile in comparison to an “anonymous” one because you do not care what you post – knowing that no one will ever attach this back to your name. The anonymity that one hides behind tends to provide a contextual behavior that you would not have if people knew who you were. I am not selective who this “put down” applies to in any sense – I think it is clear that your legitimacy is only increased when you provide critical commentary without hiding behind some “unknown name” because you care about your identity and therefore structure your arguments accordingly. It’s not so much providing your “real” identify as it is providing a consistent one – feel free to read this.

“Oh great build FTTH nationally, spend $43 billion of taxpayer funds and they will ‘invent something’ to justify its existence – brilliant!”

You assume this a stupid thing ? In 2000, when the Internet was not even validated as a widely accepted concept in Australia – we used existing infrastructure to enable and facilitate connection. 10 years later – we are still using the same infrastructure albeit with a better facilitation mechanism. In the next 10 years, 20 years and even 30 years – the usage and consumption of the Internet will be compulsory and an inherent part of culture [if it is not already]. Perhaps you don’t believe that services in the future will continue to rely on Internet at a greater rate ? History has already shown the path that innovation has taken across the last 10 years. Do you assume that in the next 10 or 20 years – the reliance and consumption of services will not be at a faster rate than what they are currently at ?

Let’s assume we do nothing – cost only increases as a function of time. IF we decide that we need faster infrastructure for broadband services in Australia in 2020 or 2030 – then the cost will far exceed $43 billion [even though this is not the total cost]. Let’s assume we build the project in “incremental” stages across the next 5 governments – then again, the total cost will far exceed the current projected budget. So the argument you present is more likely one of – “never build” – because across the next 30 years – building either a) privately or b) through incremental stages – will ultimately yield a slower, more expensive and poorly spread broadband service which has a higher net cost to consumers. Read this paper as one of many. Australia ranks 14th – Switzerland, Japan, Greece, Korea and many other countries are already implementing FTTH nationally – of course, all these countries are “wasting their time” as well I assume ?

“Where does that argument ‘fail’, what is it about BB infrastructure in 2011 that fails to display Youtube properly?”

Because YouTube is an amorphous website that is constantly increasing it’s data demands. Youtube “works properly” now because it is unable to innovate at a faster rate because services are simply not available to justify the increase in innovation. If Australia had faster access to internet, then YouTube would innovate at a faster rate accordingly which would provide an even greater an immersive experience to the entire community.

Again, yes youtube works. But no technological innovators want their service to “just work” – they want to innovate and provide a new and immersive experience to their users. In 10 years time, youtube will challegene Television stations just as Hulu.com and NetFlix are already doing in the US. You connect to the Internet directly and consume services across these services – this will become common place and already is becoming common place in the States.

Certainly, if you want to have 1 TV – with shitty non-HD quality video’s displayed at poor resolution – existing services will work fine. DO you really think Mum and Dad who have just bought a new sony 3D television will want to continue along this line ? No. Now let’s assume there are 4 TV’s in the same house – all wanting to consume services at the same rate of consumption ? Again, existing services render this impossible without painful buffering and generally do not justify a family use case.

“Err what, that doesn’t make any sense, is that intentional?”

I’m unclear where you’re confused here. Read my first paragraph – the incremental increase of broadband infrastructure in Australia will be entirely more costly distributed over the next 20 years as opposed to upgrading the entire network as one project. Governments are responsible for pushing society forward as a whole – not providing incremental services to incremental aspects of society which promotes fracture and class separation. This is exactly what the Government is trying to avoid by upgrading the infrastructure in Australia entirely and I strongly applaud this effort.

“Australia is already ranked what?”

17th on broadband speeds and will quickly loose any status in the top 50 if we choose to avoid upgrading our infrastructure as a whole. Korea, Japan, Finland, Sweden, France are already far above Australia and are all increasing rapidly. Review this if you need evidence.

“What innovation? – or do you consider the NBN rollout is like a lottery, based on a assumption that innovation in the future can ONLY be be met by a fibre to the home taxpayer fed rollout.”

Perhaps you need a definition of innovation – I’m happy to provide one. From the Princenton dictionary – “being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before;”. Clear ? Evidently, existing services will not be able to handle products of innovation in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. In the last 10 years, we have grown into a culture of technological reliance and innovation. Every seemingly must be “realtime’ even now – and this will only change in the future.

Do you believe that future services in the ‘average’ home of 2 parents and 2 child with immerse entertainment, multiple computers, streaming music, multiple streaming video connections, multiple gesture based appliances, multiple home appliances and home automation are all going to run across a 2.4mb shared connection ? It’s a strange belief in my eyes if you do. Given what history has already shown us in the last 10 years – I strongly believe that all the above services will require a vastly superior experience in comparison to what we have today and innovation in all these areas will require faster and wider broadband pipes.

“Many users are happy today with HFC, ADSL and ADSL2+ BB speeds, if you gave someone FTTH today who is totally happy with ADSL2+ or HFC what are you achieving here?””

Yes, the key word again “today”. So because one is happy with services they consume “today” – is your argument that this will contine at perpetuity ? New services arrive that require increased bandwidth and consumers upgrade accordingly. All you need is for Netflix to arrive in Australia [it will in the next 12 months] and already every household which wants this service will be upgrading their internet to handle streaming movies and television. So and so forth the data usage patterns are driven. The issue you seem to miss is that multiple service offerings through multiple services and devices in the home across the next 10-20 years will require an absolute increase in bandwidth and speed. There isn’t a question that this is going to occur – it’s a fact.

“Seeing as you have not defined what the innovation is it sounds like you understand that current speeds are adequate but to help prove your case supporting the need for FTTH you have to rely on ‘stuff’ that has not been thought of yet.”

Again, look above or in any dictionary. Innovation is a fairly clearly defined word. Of course, this is the point – there are many services already invented that aren’t in Australia yet for a whole range of reasons. American’s are already screaming for faster internet and it’s the whole premise for Google’s 1gbps expansion projects and the like – people are consuming more services, through more devices at a faster rate in their homes.

In the next 10 years, the reliance on hard-drives will disappear completely and you’ll have a screen, a keyboard and connect to your OS over the internet. Look at Google Chrome OS – it’s already doing this and it’s evident that the future of online services are going in this direction. Do you honestly believe that 2 or 3 or 4 users in the same household booting and using their computers across the internet are going to be able to do this on existing broadband services ? Absolutely not and this is just their computers. Add in the swather of other services offered – music, education, home appliances, security , television, video, gesture based applications and all the rest which will require the internet – and you quickly discover existing infrastructure will render any and all such scenarios impossible.

“Reminds me of Concord the fastest commercially available aircraft in the world, where is Concord today?”

So you’re comparing an airline jet which services a single industry to the internet which services almost every application we currently use ? Nice use case comparison. The reality is – the internet is now more important and utilized by almost every service and device you use in either an indirect or direct capacity. If you don’t use it – businesses do to process basically anything you purchase or consume. I don’t understand how you can possible draw any similarities in this regard.

The concord failed primarily due to the crash in 2000 and a loss of confidence in it from this point forward [in addition to other reasons]. In comparison, Internet sites crash all the time – do you stop using them if they do ? Of course not.

“You are muddying data usage with speed need, 100 gig under FTTN or HFC is the same data usage as 100 gig under FTTH,”

Really am I ? The shortcomings of HFC are well known – including primarily limited downstream [technologies such as Docsis try to help out] and even more limited upstream [ala channel bonding etc] and fundamentally the medium itself – the signal is a less ‘transparent’ one in comparison to fiber which why the requirement of amplifiers is needed and it’s a shared access network throttling bandwidth [just like wireless]. Evidently, the weakest point of HFC is the move from linear TV to non-linear HD video in both uplink and downlink.

“We tend to overestimate the short term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term impact.” – Dr. Fancis Collins – Direct of the Human Genome Project

Yes, upgrading HFC will be a ‘short-term fix’ – no it will not be enough to compare to FTTH in the future and a migration will be required eventually anyway due to it’s shortcomings. Again, your ‘incremental’ increase plan is just a more costly one across the life of any broadband project.

“Except this one requires the existing working infrastructure to be ripped up to ensure people use the NBN, is that what you mean by ‘innovation’ perhaps?”

Again, refer to the definition of innovation. Shared connections are the failure of almost all the technologies you mention in the future of consuming digital services in our country and every other country implementing a FTTH network understands this. Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Greece and so on are all building FTTH because shared technologies do not facilitate, and will not facilitate, the required demand in the future. Again, the reason google is building FIBER 1gbps trials in many US States and hope to expand this across the country. Again, the reason Australia needs FTTH and again the reason so many other countries are adopting the same strategy.

“Oh you are serious, sorry I thought it was a joke, so why cannot we do that today?”

Simple scenario. A team of surgeons – let’s assume 5 – each require HD video in real-time, each require machinery to operate as “hands” and each is remote. You think a broadband connection of 24mbps will handle this ? Absolutely no way would it. This is the problem – the shared network is not enough to facilitate the need. All you need is one “buffering” link or one “poor image” and you have the potential to kill the patient. This not to suggest that FTTH will not have these problems – but the risk of these problems is mitigated to a higher degree.

“Yes but all of your ‘innovations’ are also missing, but that’s ok apparently.”

I’m unclear that it seems history is an unacceptable use case. Compare the year 2000 to the year 2011 and you can fairly easily create a list of “innovations”. In the next 10 years, we will consume more services, at a higher rate and demand more speed through more bandwidth. In the tens years after that, it will continue at a higher rate.

Finally …

The sooner you accept that the world is moving to one of data services without the “cynicism” of “we won’t innovate” or “why waste money on products not invented yet” – the sooner you will realize that the future of digital services in this country requires a FTTH. Other countries realize it, we shouldn’t be any different. History has already given us a glimpse to what’s achievable in realistically 5 years [2005-2010 being the real growth] – and in the next 10-20 years its only apparent that such innovation will continue.

While I respect that you don’t believe in the NBN and I applaud that you have a evidently strong belief that it is a waste of time – I think many of your views are cynical. I don’t necessarily hold the view that you’re “irrational” – if you didn’t hold such a strongly pertinent view against the NBN – then everyone on this blog would simply “agree” :) And that’s no fun is it ? As I stated I am all for government accountability and cost scrutiny and transparency – but in view Australia needs this broadband plan to adequately take us into the future for the next 10, 20, 30 years and beyond. Innovation is already apparent from the last ten years and Australia needs to arm itself for the benefits that the Internet can bring over the next 10, 20 and 30 years. Otherwise we will be left behind – with a populas demanding increased speeds and bandwidth to consume services other countries take for granted – and digital services which will be upgrade through private organisations, at a slow rate with an incredible increasing cost burden as a function of time on consumers which will lag us far behind the rest of the world [or should I say, further behind than we already are].

I have been asked by a few people if they could grab a copy of speech that I gave to bunch of 17 and 18 year old school students today about careers and what they can do with their lives. I didn’t want to focus on my career as much as I wanted to impart some advice to the students that I have learnt across the last 10 years since I left school. Feel free to read it and let me know your thoughts.

Hi Everyone,

Well today …. my speech is going to be a little different. When I was asked to speak at this event – I think the spec was to focus on career choices and my current and previous employment – so I’ll get that out of the way right now.

My name is Tim Davis, I’m 28 and I run a software company called FlucMedia that has staff members based in 3 countries. I run the business and do all the design and user-interface work. I have patents-pending in the field of computer science for some of our work. I have 2 diploma’s in Financial Services and Technical Analysis, a Bachelor in Commerce, a Graduate Diploma in Applied Finance and Investment and 2 Masters degrees – 1 in Corporate Law and 1 as a Masters of Law (Juris Doctor) specializing in domestic and international Intellectual Property law. I’m a qualified Trademark Attorney and Certified Financial Technician. I’m not a lawyer – instead I taught myself software coding and it’s what I do now.

Now that’s out of the way – I don’t want you to remember any of it. No … for today – I want to impart the 3 best pieces of advice that I can possibly think of when looking back over the last 10 years to the moment when I was in your exact shoes.

So – 3 pieces of advice and that’s it for me.

1. Failure is great

I think we live in world today where no one fails any more – no …. now days you are “progressively improving” or you are “still developing your potential” – and this is because most people fear failure. They shun from it and they resent it. It’s seen as a “dirty” word which – through some abstract misunderstanding of the English language – automatically infers you’ll never be a success.

But this could not be further from the truth.

Personally, I love failure because without it – I wouldn’t be where I am today. For me, it all started when I was a 2nd year University student doing a Chemical Engineering and Microbiology double degree – a course which I was certain I was going to love when I was in year 12. I enjoyed chemistry and maths at school and so assumed that this would be the best career path for my life.

But it wasn’t until one day when I was called in by a University lecturer who had told me I had received a ‘near pass’ for the subject of ‘fluid mechanics’ – again, the Universities code word for ‘failure in a nice way’. It basically meant I had failed the subject and they had passed me – but I needed to sit down and speak with the lecturer ‘about my future’.

So off I went and he told me ‘Tim, you’ll never succeed in life if you don’t try hard”. With the benefit of hindsight, I honestly think it was at this exact moment that I realized to myself – actually you couldn’t be more wrong.

The fact of the matter was simple – I failed – everyone freaked out and couldn’t say it – I was honestly put under the impression that the whole world was going to stop rotating. And if I believed everyone words – I was truly doomed.

But of course I wasn’t, the world wasn’t going to stop rotating and it won’t in your life time’s either. Instead, I realized at this exact moment that failure and succeeding in life has nothing to do with trying hard – it has to do with being absolutely passionate about what you do and I wasn’t passionate about ‘fluid mechanics’ at all and nor I was passionate chemical engineering or microbiology.

So I realized at this very early age that the testament of a person is not what they do when they fail, it’s the action they take after they fail that truly counts. You can mope around or you can make change in life your and do something about it.

So what did I do ?

I took my ‘near pass’. I quit the course the next day – enrolled in a completely new one that I was more excited about and I’ve never looked back. You’ll learn that intelligence is a relative metric – I might be able to write algorithms, interpret law or manage web servers – but picking up any sort of power tool usually involves some sort of injury. So don’t constantly compare yourself to others – someone is, and will always be, better at something. Instead, follow and find your passion – don’t focus on someone else’s.

So my first lesson to you is – embrace failure, accept it, learn from it and take action on it and remember throughout your life that your greatest downfall will be not action – but rather continuing along the road of inaction.

2. Be passionate

I write a blog and I posted about this a while back so I thought I would simply paraphrase the post because it’s quite popular. So here goes:

Why do people do what they do ? I am reading a fascinating book at the moment that I encourage everyone to go out and read to really discover what they want to do with their lives. It’s a book by Carmine Gallo called The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success – and it’s a fantastic read. I suggest you definitely check it out. One of the people the book mentions is a person called Bill Strickland – who is the author of Make the Impossible Possible and who has an inspiring story of getting disadvantages kids back on track. After doing a bit more research about Bill, he has a quote that I think is amazing and something that everyone who reads this blog should paste up on their wall.

It’s amazing that the most successful people in life – and increasingly as a function of their success – are doing what they absolutely love and are passionate about it. Many people live their entire lives in a job they ‘like’ or ‘they enjoy’ but never ‘truly love’. While I completely understand that many people do this for the ‘safety’ of a job and providing for their family – unfortunately they are missing the obvious – nobody ever said that doing what you love would be easy. The truth of the matter is that doing what you love is entirely related to how much effort you are willing to put in, how much you want it to succeed and how much you are willing to do anything to ensure that your passion exceeds the odds. Every successful entrepreneur will tell you the same story – from Bill Gates, to Warren Buffet, to Steve Jobs to Bill Strickland. Money was never the end goal – simply being passionate about changing peoples lives and doing something that each of these entrepreneurs absolutely loved is consistently the message. I have read each of these entrepreneurs official and unofficial biographies and it’s always the same outcome – do what you love and you’ll always be better off in life.

Passions are infectious. If you show this passion – others will want to join you. How you communicate this passion, how you achieve this passion, the story you tell, the goals you want to achieve – this is what will draw the best people to you and around you and with you. If you want to be a musician, a professor, a teacher, a social worker, a lawyer, a doctor or any other type of career and you want this more than anything in the world – nothing will stop you. It’s been documented and shown over and over throughout time through thousands, if not millions, of people.

So the second lesson I tell you all – do what you love, hold on to it, never let it go. Follow it with all your being and if it’s really what you want – nothing will stop you achieving it now or in 20 years time.

3. Enjoy life, Celebrate everything.

Life is not easy and you’ll discover that with time. Nothing is ever handed to you on a silver platter and you have to work, struggle, scrap and fight to achieve anything you want in it. Realize this now, realize it early and accept it.

But through every struggle – you have to learn to celebrate every success. Too often people focus on the big things and miss so much that life has given to them. Learn to put things in perspective, learn to put your life in perspective and learn to celebrate your successes no matter how large or small.

For me, this includes everything from the big things – like celebrating academic and business success to getting engaged – to even the tiniest of tiny things. For example, I love coffee and not always do you get a great cup of coffee. So when I do, I like to stop and say “this is a great cup of coffee, I mean it’s really great and that’s awesome”. Or when I’m driving into nearby shopping centre car parking – and find a car park right at the front. I think to myself “wow, I could have been driving around and around – but I’m right here up the front. That’s awesome”.

And although these are funny simple examples, learn to celebrate and embrace every success – no matter how big or small – you’ll live a happier and more enjoyable life and you’ll learn the valuable lesson of perspective in everything you do.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, remember these 3 lessons –

1. Failure is great. Take action, not inaction.
2. Be passionate. Do what you love, hold on to it, never let go of it if it’s what you want. Embrace it. Let it envelope and engulf you.
3. Enjoy life, celebrate everything large and small.

So while Years 11 and 12 seem hard – don’t let them be so hard that you lose sight of life. If you don’t achieve what you want – don’t think you can’t ever do it – you can, it just depends on how much you truly want it. If you fail, learn to get up and move on because as you get older you’ll realize life waits for nobody. Take action now.

I can tell you this truthfully – because I’ve lived it, because I’ve failed and I know I will fail again, because I found what I am truly passionate about and because I love and embrace all life has to offer – no matter how large or small.

You can and should too.

Best of luck in the years ahead.

So I thought I would post some of the stat’s around the free law forum I created – All Things Law – and what it receives after being around for about 12 months without any promotion at all. I’m pretty happy with the way the forum has gone so far considering that I haven’t had to put much work into it. The central idea behind it is to enable sharing and collaborating around studying the law in Australia much easier by providing an opportunity for students and graduates to share their knowledge where possible.

Anyway, the stats for the period of March 1st -April 30th 2011 are below with Total Members being around 1,523:

1. Period Pageviews – 9,342
2. Unique Visits – 2,464
3. Pages/Visit – 4.04
4. Avg Time on Site – 2:24
5. Avg. Signups per week- 34
6. Most Referring Site – Timdavis.com.au
7. Most Other Referring Site – Google + Facebook
8. Total Answers – 93
9. Most Popular Page – Notes page
10. Longest Time Spent – Law Clerkships – The Naked Truth

Of course, the site is and will always remain a completely free resource for students – both undergraduate and post graduate. While I don’t  have all that much time to manage the site and  the increasing load that it requires – I am happy to engage with people who want to get involved, help promote the site or become moderators and the like.

If you think this is something that you might want to get involved with – preferrably being located in Australia – just contact me at any time.

I’ve always been a big believer in Text-Based email signatures – that is, those that don’t contain HTML – so you don’t have to constantly “load images” and everything else that comes with creating a HTML signature. Something like this always has worked for me:

However, with the increasing reliance on social media the importance of promoting yourself, and your business, through simple measures such as a HTML email signature – I’ve decided to convert for a while to a HTML based signature and see how it goes. Of course, the question becomes one of how to do this so that it still looks professional (at least in my opinion).

I’ve gone about to create a HTML template that you can easily use inside your Gmail or whichever email provider you use – assuming they allow you to enter a HTML-based email signature.  Before we get started – I’ll show you what it looks like for me:

And of course, you can alter it a little (I’ve also done this below) so the icons are along the bottom. I’m using the totally cool icon set from Ristaumedia which is available on DeviantArt here.

Getting Started

To get started creating your kick-ass email signature you’ll need to do a few things – the most complex (which isn’t really complex) is to pull up your Facebook profile photo. This is really simple now that Facebook have allowed you (and notably, everyone else) access to your data. To grab your Facebook image – just do this:

http://graph.facebook.com/username/picture

So for example – my Facebook thumbnail photo is available via

http://graph.facebook.com/timdavis/picture

as my Facebook profile is http://www.facebook.com/timdavis.

Once you’ve completed this step – you’re basically set to go and edit one of the simple HTML templates I’ve created.

Template 1

The first template is simple and includes ONLY Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In details. And looks like this:

Basically, you can download the template and edit it in your text editor on your computer. You just need to update the links within the HTML code to your own links and then open it in your browser – you can then simply use “Ctrl+A” (PC) or “Command+A” (Mac) and copying the selection and then paste the template into your email signature. Download the template here with the included social media icons.

Template 2

As with the above template – you can easily just edit this via a text-editor on your computer and then open it inside a browser on your computer. Then it’s just using ”Ctrl+A” (PC) or “Command+A” (Mac) and copying the selection and pasting it within your email signature on your email client. Download the template here with the included social media icons.

Integrating it with Gmail

To integrate your new found signature with Gmail, just hit the “Settings” option in the top right hand corner of your Account and then go down to signature. You can then just hit Paste after you’ve copied and it’ll look like this:

After that, just hit “Save Changes” and you’re done. You’ve now got a shiny new email signature with all your social media links.

I’ve always enjoyed trying to solve problems but like all people – some problems you just struggle with. Does it have to do with your intelligence ? I absolutely don’t agree with that – yes, of course it’s a factor – I’m not suggesting that if you’re an expert in physics that you’ll automatically be able to solve a problem relating to copyright law – the point is that for a given field – a problem is always as hard as the narrowness that you give it.

What does that mean ? Most of the time, when you approach a difficult problem you attempt to draw upon existing knowledge that you have in a particular field and then you apply this knowledge in a manner which enables you to solve the complexities associated with the problem. This is what everyone does – including myself – but in being the ‘standard’ solving algorithm it is also the ‘standard’ failure algorithm.

Most problems which are foreseen to be ‘difficult’ are viewed in this light simply because you aren’t using the best approach and you have narrowed your view to one particular field of view. ”Tim, it’s called Shortsightedness” – well, in some degree it is synonymous with shortsightedness but of course, how can you be shortsighted when you don’t even know all the possibilities available to solving the problem ? Short sightedness, in my mind, is knowing a set of solutions to a problem but refusing to adopt those solutions because you simply  haven’t – or refuse to – consider them. This is quite different from being “unable” to solve a problem because you perceive that you lack the knowledge.

I’ve been reading a little about an American Physicist called Richard Feynman who was for all intents and purposes a genius – although he actively refused to believe he was.  His way of solving problems was unique and was aptly termed the ‘Feynman Algorithm’ which goes something like this:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

‘You’re joking right?’ Well, no. Although this was never actually created by Feynman – rather by Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague of Feynman, in a New York Times interview – it does really show you that no problem can’t be solved. I’ve often said to people that “Difficultly in problem solving is a function of how narrow you are looking at the problem” and I stand by my quote. To solve the problem – you need to look much further and wider than your particular sphere of knowledge. No problem is too hard – for every single problem the world faces, nothing is unsolvable because for each problem we create there must be a solution in turn. The solution, of course, is limited by how narrow you look at the problem and whether there are solutions which you can’t seem to perceive because they are not “directly in front of” the problem. No problem can be more complex than the human understanding – the problem appears difficult because the approach to the solution is too narrow. As Feynman suggested in his speciality of mathematics – which is true for any field:

“I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it’s no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, ‘What one fool can do, another can.’ What we’ve been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn’t studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There’s a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound.” — Richard Feynman, 1979

Critically, to solve a problem simply don’t look at the obvious solutions unless they are ‘obviously’ apparent. While I’m no expert by any stretch of the imagination, the point is that solving problems easily becomes an exercise in how wide you can extend your field of view. Look for simple solutions to complex problems and look outside your current specialty for motivation in finding solutions. Often, the most successful solutions to problems come from the simplest of beginnings and because people have thought outside their ‘normal thought pattern’. If you’re unsure, ask questions to as many people as you can and then ask again. The craziest and most outlandish solutions or applications from other spheres are most often the ones that solve the world’s most difficult problems in a way that is simplistic and beautiful. Feynman stated:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.”

There are many other quotes throughout time by very famous people along the same lines – for example Daniel Boorstin stated ‘Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know’ and Roger von Oech has stated ‘Be foolish; break the rules; be impractical; get out of your box; look for ‘wrong’ answers; seek ambiguity; make mistakes … And set your creative self free’.

So the point of this post ? “Think Different” – you said it Apple.