Talk
by Johan Jaaffar to participants of Te Dx Merdeka
Square at the Methodist College Kuala Lumpur, Brickfields on 17 August 2013
I love this story about the red paperclip.
What can you do with a paperclip?
Just one red paperclip.
Use it to clip some papers, of course. Or straighten it to open a
lock. Or just throw it away. Not Kyle MacDonald. Through a series of online
trades over a period of one year, he bartered his way to owning a house.
He first traded his red paperclip for a fish-shaped sheet of paper
on 14 July 2005. Fourteen transactions later, on 5 July 2006, he got a
two-storey farm-house in Kipling, Saskatchewan, Canada.
MacDonald, the Canadian blogger, has earned his place in history
as someone whose ingenuity, tenacity and clever idea have changed the way we
solve problems. The story of one red paperclip is now taught in business
schools and discussed as a case study in motivational talks.
The moral of the story is: there is no
limit to imagination and creativity. And more importantly, ingenuity. MacDonald
did something with an everyday item that we all take for granted, Showing us
that even little things have value. Just read his wonderful story in One Red Paperclip: The Story of How One Man
Changed His Life One Swap At A Time.
He has inspired us too.
We are too used to the idea that you
need a proper job, work hard, save, and borrow from a bank to buy a house.
MacDonald was 25 at the time, with no permanent job, when he started his
adventure. The idea was to trade something for “bigger” and “better”. He
changed the rules of how things get done.
We are familiar with incredible
stories of people becoming rich for doing something extraordinary. The founders
of Microsoft, Google and Facebook, to name a few, stumbled onto something
incredibly simple but had impact on the lives of millions. They started their
business in garages and dormitories, equipped with ingenuity and lots of hard
work. They made it big. We have heard about rag-to-riches stories many times
before.
We learned how with problems,
challenges and adversities come ideas and solutions. We admire innovators and
creators of things that redefined our way of life –while making themselves
extremely rich by doing so.
But trading a paperclip for a house is
a different ball game altogether.
The next time you see a paperclip
lying on the table, remember this, you might end up owning a Ferrari many
online transactions later.
Tina Seelig of Stanford University
mentioned the paperclip story in her book
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the
World.
The book tells stories of people with
ideas – some of which are outrageously simple but defy expectations and
challenge assumptions. She mixes real-life stories and experiences with
classroom innovations and boardroom decisions. It is part motivational book,
part management mantra, but mostly a lesson in disregarding the impossible, on
how to recover from failures and look at problems as opportunities in disguise.
What would you do with $5 (RM16)?
Like the paperclip, it is nothing
much. That assignment changed the way her students thought, solved problems and
managed their finances. In short: Leveraging on limited resources, Seelig found
through her experiment that her students were capable of coming out with ideas
that were original and inventive. You never know what the human mind can do
when properly challenged.
The whole idea of the “Five-Dollar
Challenge”, according to her, is about inculcating and nurturing an
“entrepreneurial mind-set”. At the same time, she realised that her students
must not measure “value” in terms of financial rewards only. For the next
assignment, she substituted the $5 for 10 paperclips.
Remember, MacDonald started with one.
Students must not be trapped in the
traditional education mould, she argues. What you learn in schools is different
from the real world. You can’t apply textbook solutions to real problems
outside. You have to innovate, be creative and think out of the box. According
to Seelig, “Bridging the gap to tackle real-world challenges can be extremely
difficult, but it’s doable with the right tools and mind-set.”
When I was the editor of a newspaper,
I sent rookie reporters to places with no real assignments in mind. I sent them
to bus stations, the National Mosque, a morgue, a hospital, a massage parlour,
Pasar Chow Kit, you name it.
They were lost initially. But my
message was simple:
“Don’t Come Back Without A Story!”
Incredibly, they came back with
interesting ones. I met one of these reporters recently, an award-winning
journalist herself. She said that the assignment I gave in 1994 had changed her
outlook, perspective on life, and professional viewpoint. She had written about
a masseur at Jalan Alor, who had two of her children studying abroad.
Let me talk about sportsmen and women
and film stars and, of course, Psy. Yes, that Psy!
In the introduction to his book, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money
From Ideas, John Howkins quoted from Fortune
magazine that basketball superstar Michael Jordan’s personal economic value
during his prime years, gained through copyrights and merchandising, exceeded
the Gross National Product (GDP) of the Kingdom of Jordan.
Copyrights and merchandising are new catchwords in the global
economy today. There are many such stories in which sportspersons, film stars,
dot-com starters and digital entrepreneurs are rewriting the economic logic.
Companies started in garages and by college drop-outs are leading the world in
wealth creation, value for investors and market capitalisation.
Wayne Rooney is currently not the best footballer in the English
Premier League.
He’s paid £120,000 a week. That is a staggering RM600,000 a week
or RM2.4 million a month. A clerk earning RM2,000 a month in Malaysia would
have to slog 1,200 months to earn that much money. He will never see that kind
of money unless he works till he’s 100 years old.
Golfer Tiger Woods was once the highest paid sportsman – he earned
$78 million a year or RM249.6 million or $148 a second (RM473.6). The hat he
wears on his head – it would take a Thai garment worker 38 years to earn what
he collects from Nike in a day.
The Howkins book challenges us to rethink the way we look at
businesses. Ideas matter. Creativity reigns supreme. And creativity brings in
money, lots and lots of money.
There is a company that employs 13 people, yet its turnover a year
exceeds RM3.2 billion ringgit. In fact, there are many such companies – not at
all labour intensive, yet performing better than companies that employ
thousands of people. What matters is that everyone can make a difference. A
creative economy, Howkins argues, is the exchange of products, services and
experiences whose economic values are based in ideas.
Thanks to advancements in communication technology, things are
changing for the better. The world is never the same again. Both the old and
the young are embracing the latest applications in the world of communications.
In the creative economy, ‘Content is King’ and in the
entertainment industry, the quality of content differentiates the men from the
boys. The creative content industry is the most robust, exciting and
challenging industry today. It demands nothing less from the best and brightest
to keep ahead of the pack. This is the world of great achievements, spectacular
misses, bloated ambitions and unthinkable riches.
The industry allows almost everyone to participate. The entry
level is cheap. What you need is creativity, audacity and the lots of luck. Psy
would not have been created had YouTube not been in place. Facebook (FB) is
everyone’s favourite social media tool. One in seven humans has an FB account.
Twitter is fast growing in strength, a staggering 400 million tweets are sent
out a day. There will be many more surprises.
The world of entertainment is changing beyond belief. Movies are
being made differently today. James Cameron waited until computer-generated-images
(CGI) were perfect before proceeding to make his Avatar.
The Lord of the Rings
would not have been made the way Peter Jackson wanted had the relevant
technology not been ready.
Despite the soaring cost of movie-making (for an American movie,
averaging between RM256 million to RM385 million a movie), Hollywood movies
have not lost their luster. A good director of photography (GOP) in a typical
Hollywood movie will be hired for a fee at least twice more than the cost of an
average Malaysian movie.
People are willing to spend to watch movies in cinemas or on
various other platforms offered today. There is no one vehicle to get
entertained – the principle is you can get your favourite film or TV show
anywhere, any time. The potential for film and TV stars, not to mention sports
personalities or even celebrity chefs are tremendous. There is money
everywhere. If a plump, thirty-something Korean with only two YouTube postings
could demand more than RM1.5 million per appearance on stage, you know the
world of entertainment has drastically changed.
How much is a film star worth today? For a big Hollywood star, $20
million a movie is nothing. That is RM64 million, mind you. I joked about
McCauley Culkin. For the second Home
Alone movie, he was paid more than the amount ever received by a famous
Malay film star in 40 years!
Talk about fairness.
Howkins’ book is about the relationship between creativity and
economics – neither is new but what is new “is the nature and extent of the
relationship between them and how they combine to create extraordinary value
and wealth.”
He has a point: people with their own ideas today “have become
more powerful than people who work machines and, in many cases, more powerful
than the people who own machines.” He argues that creativity is about using
ideas to make more ideas and a creative ecology is one where people can be
creative and turn ideas into products.
Content Is
King
I was in Afghanistan in the spring of
1989 – at the peak of the Afghan Civil War. President Najibullah was hanging by
a thread as the Russians abandoned him. I was in Jalalabad and around the Kunar
Valley. I met Gulbuddin Hekmateyar, Prof Raff Sayoff, and many leaders of the
various Mujahideen groups in the south.
Back then, they were heroes and
freedom fighters hailed by the West as the ragtag army that defeated the second
most powerful nation in the world. Even Sylvester Stallone was there to remind
us of the famous Pashtun proverb: Beware the venom of the cobra and the
vengeance of the Afghans.
They are all terrorists now.
I met Mir Mohammad, who was hardly 14
at the time, a child soldier indeed. I was accompanied by Amir, a UIA student
who left his studies to be the spokesperson for the Hisbi Islami group.
And I met this man – an old fighter
reading the Quran, regardless of what was happening around him.
Look carefully.
Look at his idea of security – boxes
of ammunitions waiting to explode if hit by a bullet.
I didn’t get to know him – or his name
– as bullets were whizzing pass us and we were terribly scared.
But I learned about bravery,
determination and fortitude that day.
For many, sheer hard work and
determination are needed to achieve great things in life. For MacDonald, it was
ingenuity. For the likes of Tiger Woods, Rooney and Jordan, it was practice and
sheer hard work. For the old man, it was about fighting for freedom. For God,
Nation, Family and the future of his generation.
But there is another dimension to that
– how they were motivated and inspired to achieve that. One simple idea can
change the world. Determination too.
Greatness is made of these – little things that turn bigger and better.
And the men and women behind them, whose ideas passed the test of time.
My two-cent worth of advice?
YOU CAN DO
IT!
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