Invisible Headphone Jacks

Letter Zero 19

Dear friend,

Creativity is your superpower. That sounds nice, but what does that look like in the day-to-day of product design? One of the best examples I can think of comes from the early days of Square…

When Square was creating the prototype for their first credit card reader, the only approved way to connect to the iPhone was through the dock connector. Square’s co-founder, Jim McKelvey explained that, “Apple had a lengthy and expensive approval process to use the dock connector, special chipsets you had to use, royalties on each unit, and a bunch of other rules on top of the seventeen from the banking world that we were already breaking.” 

Common sense would tell you that Square needed to staff up with specialists who could satisfy the technical, financial, and legal challenges required to support Apple’s dock connector requirements. The traditional way to handle the situation would have been to seek additional funding and extend their roadmap with plans for overcoming each obstacle through brute force. That’s not what they did.

Somebody at Square realized that sitting right next to the dock connector is the headphone jack. If they could figure out how to transfer credit card data through an audio signal they could have a prototype built in a week. 

But who do you hire to figure out how to convert financial data into an audio signal? That’s not a skill that exists. There isn’t a course about it in college and there isn’t a human with that bullet point listed on their resume. If Square didn’t have a culture that rewarded creativity the headphone jack idea would have died on arrival. Instead, they invented new skills as they went, relying on their creative wits to guide them through uncharted territory.

That is why I said that creativity is your superpower. There’s one way to do something correctly and an infinity of ways to do it wrong. Creativity is the only way you can mine the infinite to find the perfect wrong solution. Like x-ray vision, creativity lets you see the latent potential hiding within everything something isn’t. There’s an invisible headphone jack in front of you right now. Do you see it? 

I’ll write again next Sunday. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Adrian

P.S. Postcards will be going out this week! A couple of you have mentioned having trouble updating your mailing address. If that’s you, try this link or just reply to this email and I can correct the issue for you. I might even be able to squeeze you in on the first mailing.