There are many ways to read oneself.
Among them, the easiest and fastest is to read a book. That said, the old saying that what comes easy is lost just as easily does not exactly miss the mark here either. Of course, I do not think anyone would take the bewildering step of giving up reading because of that.
Another way is to use the other person as a mirror to see myself. This one is very hard. If you receive the other emotionally or misread their intent, identification can happen, where you start to resemble the other. So I think some psychological background is very much needed. (* Identification = the phenomenon where the state of mind or behavior of the other person becomes the same as your own.)
Also, instead of looking at and judging the other person's behavior itself, you need to first understand the cause, motivation, and environment behind that behavior, which takes time. (Here, 'needing time' is not just a nicely polished phrase about not making hasty judgments and holding a middle position; it means…) You have to accept and endure the internal and external misunderstandings and rumors that arise in the gap of that time. You need the problem-solving capacity to work through that situation, whether it is an interpersonal one or an inner psychological conflict.
For that reason, I want to practice 'using the other person as a mirror to see myself.' Or, loosely put, it is more like a bit of grumbling I hope to exchange over a drink with the me who might become me in the future.
Mirroring Myself Through the Other 01 — An (for now,) outsider's view of the e-book market
1. The outsider's view
If I have a personal rule for drawing insights, it is: 'Don't predict from the result (the phenomenon).'
At the foundation of the generalization of email was the internet. Within the big basket of information sharing, it was, I think, just about the only easy, fast, everyday tool for exchanging information. Not long after, a mountain of mail services appeared. Over time a very few succeeded and the majority shut down. The ones that succeeded were, as expected, the ones that leveraged not email itself but the user behavior and patterns around email. Of course, identifying a single pattern meant bearing many risks, agonizing over decisions, and putting in severalfold the effort to turn that clear pattern into revenue.
This pattern is not limited to email. It was there in the moment we moved from PDAs and BlackBerries to the iPhone, and right now it applies to the gasoline-engine car market and the EV market. Famous and capable executives correctly pinpointed the megatrends and succeeded. But none of them (alive or otherwise) ultimately lasted that long.
I am personally active in three book clubs, and what I keep sensing there is: 'the category of e-books (digital content), which people and the media have been buzzing about for a few years now, is no different either.' And the thought that follows is: 'Shouldn't we be asking questions a little closer to the essence?'
I personally think that to build a real email service—or any category—into a sustainable service, we need to focus on the context of 'not the digitization of letters, but communication via the internet (online).'
2. For now, an outsider's insight
If I look back a little, just as the offline newspaper market went, the publishing market—and the e-book (digital content) market too—was, I suspect, already in an unstable state well before.
Just as 'Nintendo's rival is not Sony but Nike,' you can already sense that the fight is not digital versus analog but that the fundamental meaning of the category itself is under threat.
To lead not only the e-book (digital content) market but the broader book/media content market going forward, you have to move beyond the physical and mechanical story—content being easy to buy and sell or being light to carry—and beyond.
I have started to wonder whether the digital market too has been sinking into a productivity- and technical-thinking-based problem-solving mode.
So I think the e-book market going forward should not be about digitizing analog books or an optimized book sales system using member data, but about wrestling with why people must read books and how they should read.
Product and technology cycles are getting shorter by the day. To go beyond mere corporate survival and offer services that help see into the lives of customers, we need to shift from the product-centric approach focused on what to a customer-centric approach (not customer supremacy) focused on why and how.
In the past (or even still), reading was simply a matter of personal taste or attitude. But just like Nintendo and Nike, the competitive relationships around e-books (content) are not an analog-versus-digital problem. In an era of such complex and excessive competition, instead of self-justification, we need to be able to build a genuine consensus about our reason for being.
And of course this is not limited to e-books—
(omitted)
In short, I think the future book revolution must have communication as its premise.
It should become a channel through which we can read and share each other's thoughts and expressions through relationship.
