The Importance of Cultivating Your Mind Garden and the Limits of Strategy

The Importance of Cultivating Your Mind Garden and the Limits of Strategy

Cultivating your mind garden is essential to ensure all the information you consume can lead to increased productivity and creativity, instead of just getting forgotten in your mind backyard. The garden metaphor is particularly apt, involving cultivating your curiosity, growing your knowledge, and producing new thoughts. To seed your mind garden, you need to consume quality content, and when you find something interesting, share it with fellow gardeners. Your note-taking app can be used for collating snippets, ideas, and raw thinking. Once you have managed to articulate a new idea, write it down, and add it to your digital garden as an evergreen note.

Google and Apple have completely different business models. Apple is a vertical company that invests in designing and building devices that include material costs, while Google is a horizontal company with fixed costs in R&D and data centers. Google's profitability goes hand-in-hand with market share, and advertising is its perfect business model. Google's short-sighted favoring of Android ensured that for hundreds of millions of potential Google users, the default mapping experience and the treasure trove of data that came with it would belong to someone else. Google's go-to-market gap is that assistants are only useful if they are available, which means downloading and using a separate app. The Google Assistant is, at least for now, exclusive to the first true Google phone, delivering a differentiated experience that justifies the margin.

Google's business model is being constrained by the reality of a world where artificial intelligence comes first. In that world, you must own the interaction point, and there is no room for ads, rendering both Google's distribution and business model moot. The iPhone maker has the distribution channel and business model to make Siri the dominant assistant in its users' lives, but there are open questions about its technology prowess when it comes to artificial intelligence specifically and services generally. Google's culture and organizational structure are attuned to its old business model, the one that equated market share with profitability, and which achieved that market share with a product development approach predicated on iteration and experimentation.

In conclusion, cultivating your mind garden involves consuming quality content, taking notes, sharing interesting ideas, and adding them to your digital garden as an evergreen note. Google and Apple have completely different business models, and Google's profitability goes hand-in-hand with market share, making advertising its perfect business model. Google's go-to-market gap is that assistants are only useful if they are available, and the Google Assistant is exclusive to the first true Google phone, delivering a differentiated experience that justifies the margin. However, Google's culture and organizational structure are attuned to its old business model, and the only thing more difficult than changing business models is changing cultures.