The first time that I was exposed to the concept that there was more than one right answer was when a met a photographer by the name of Dewitt Jones. Although Dewitt was somewhat a “hippie” in the vernacular of the sixties he overwhelmed you with his sense of creativity. He possessed a level of confidence that was contagious.
This is a man who was never satisfied that he had reached the optimal right answer, and he used his world-class talent as a photographer to demonstrate it. There was always a different angle, or a different lens or different lighting that could enhance the vision of his subject matter.
I vividly remember him talking about a picture of a tree in Yosemite that was hanging off a cliff. He showed me three different presentations of the same subject. The first was quite remarkable and most people would have stopped there. His second depiction gave you the impression that there was no possible way you could improve upon it and yet the final photograph was by far the most powerful representation of the image. He repeated this over with a variety of subjects looking for better answers using a variety of lenses and filters and multiple perspectives.
It was then that I started thinking about the proposition that there is more than one right answer could be applied to many aspects of life. I wondered why few people ever spoke of the concept of finding more than one right answer. It seems that we live in a world where people may look for answers but never look for a second or even a third right answer.
Yet one does not have to look far to see the vast breakthroughs that exist entirely because of rejecting the way something was always done and replacing it with a better right answer.
As late as 14th century, books were handwritten and illustrated. Thousands of monks would sit in monasteries copying what few texts were available. But then another right answer presented itself in the form of the Gutenberg printing press. The impact of mass-produced books and pamphlets left the world in a place where it would never be the same again. This idea barely predates Columbus by 50 years.
In the last few decades, it is almost impossible to measure the changes in life that resulted from better right answers. The Internet opened the world to better understanding, access to information and communication. We had been talking about electric cars for decades and then finally, Tesla was a new right answer for the automobile. Lift and Uber were new right answers to taxis or car services. Pay Pal was a new right answer to paying for online purchases safely. Zell and Venmo were better ways to transfer funds and eliminate the fraud that was prevalent with checks. Amazon and EBAY were new right answers for shopping and the list goes on and on. Notably, Apple was a new right answer to computers, to listening to music, to buying music and a host of other things. Kindle was a new answer to buying books, but it required another right answer, stable electronic ink before it could become practical. We are currently waiting with baited breadth to see where artificial intelligence brings us. Most of these second or third right answers became billion-dollar ideas.
Total mastery of old right answers seems to be the starting point to find new ones.
Picasso mastered “The Masters” before he went on to Cubism. Most of the greatest artist who took painting to another level were very skilled in all the basics before leading us to Impressionism, Pointillism, Expressionism, Fauvism Abstraction, Photo Realism etc., etc. Jimi Hendrix mastered the guitar keyboard before he started looking for new right answers in his music
A great starting point for finding the next right answer is very simple. The next time you find what you think is a right answer, look for anther one before you implement it. You might just find a billion-dollar idea.
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