Idea Legos- [ WellPal Seed #4 ]
Context
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have grown up with legos in your childhood or any kind of building blocks alternative, this shorticle will be a no-brainer.
I’ll use LEGOs as my point of reference as it’s what I personally relate this to you can do the same or use any [insert generic name] game alternative.
The concept of legos is to use individual blocks and build a pre-designed set. Good, we got that. The magic of Lego and why still so many adult fans like myself understand that ethos goes beyond the pre-designed kit.
I remember as a kid and even when I first started earning my own money, this is what building was all about, it’s what got me equally obsessed with The Sims. Taking elements of an existing pre-planned structure or system and using its components to build new things. This fueled my entrepreneurial character from a young age and even more so when I decided to make the creative industry my main source of income.
Very similar to this physical building and compounding, we can see the same with ideas and concepts.
“Creativity and building brands, products, and businesses are like remixing. Period.”
If you think you’re the only one doing something chances are you don’t challenge yourself enough to explore and exploit beyond your interests. In some shape or form, the foundation has been or is being built for your breakthrough idea. Find solace in that.
Our minds have only been exposed to this much global data and ideas of others outside of our geographical realm for a little over 30 years… let that sink in.
Access to the internet is what made a lot of ideas that seemed impossible, possible. Now many of these achievements were not necessarily achieved through the idea of building blocks (composable) but they unlocked “impossible” in peoples mindsets which made them attempt to do it themselves and the next person after that decided to do it even bigger and better (*think world records).
“No innovation is a single event”.
Lego mental models as part of “Brand”
Now if we bring this back to what most of my content revolves around, entrepreneurship and brand. Brand is like compound interest. Each building block you have (whether you build it, design it, ideate it, or acquire it), is added to another one (if your building brand in a holistic manner, that is) and another one which overtime builds the equity of the brand and increases its value.
Blocks can be: brand identity, product, IP, roadmaps, communities, etc
So this being done is a process that takes time, consistency, and patience. Once it’s in a recognizable form and respected by people through their trust to buy into it, the average person will probably ignore the work that went into building this structure you’ve made. They see the end result.
So what happens next is they take some of your Lego blocks and start laying their foundation, this is sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. The thing is, it shouldn’t matter too much as the structure is built out of many blocks and functions as an instrument [insert strategy block].
Lego mental models as part of “global ideation”
Now, that covered a somewhat brand-level take. If we look at ideas in general and how they build systems, this too can be dissected the same way.
The space and time between an idea and its execution by that same person are getting smaller and smaller. With takes like “build in public” even more so. Many things are built in parallel and symbioses with each other whether we realize it or not.
Not so hypothetical Example: me having the crazy idea of building an alcohol and lifestyle brand native to web3 with a high degree of CCO might take me some time to get off the ground, due to many factors. But me having this idea is not new or innovative, it’s a product of my interest, and the echo chamber these interests curate on my social feeds and network.
Subconsciously you start to use blocks you see here and there and start building your own structure with them.
Now outside of the example, when people build on other people’s ideas, they can sometimes go to market much faster, accumulate money faster build teams and structures around it and that becomes the new building block for us to take and build a new structure with it.
Depending on your personality and what you set out to achieve, this is a thing to find comfort in. I personally have been building my own brands for the past 10 years, first was a bamboo bike company that came out as a building block of my dissertation. It thought me a lot and is also what opened my mind to actually consider the creative aspect of business as an interest. From there I started a company in China and grew that for over 7 years. The building blocks there were remixed by others and I took some myself to build new structures. Fast forward and Wellpal was born. With Wellpal there are 2 more building blocks that are building their own structures now and building them parallel in totally opposite industries brings a certain kind of creativity that opens truly exciting possibilities for traditional products.
This trajectory is very familiar for most entrepreneurs.
In Part 2 we will dive a little deeper into Lego blocks as mental models in relation to the evolution of web3 developments.
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Are you ready to start looking at building brands or expanding product categories/portfolios with business and not just visual identity in mind?
