Egon: Don’t cross the streams.
Peter: Why?
Egon: It would be bad.
Peter: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean “bad”?
Egon: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Raymond: Total protonic reversal.
Peter: That’s bad. Okay. Alright, important safety tip, thanks Egon.
Even if you’re fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing, the lesson was clear. And when you are working to trap ol’ Slimer, it’s a reasonable perspective.
But when faced with a larger problem, the Ghostbusters only had one way out. They couldn’t stick with the old way; they needed to come together. They needed to cross the streams.
We’ll Cross the Streams
Egon: I have a radical idea. If the door swings both ways, we could reverse the particle flow through the gate.
Peter: How?
Spengler: We’ll cross the streams.
Peter: Excuse me, Egon, you said crossing the streams was bad.
Ray: Cross the streams…
Peter: You’re gonna endanger us, you’re gonna endanger our client. The nice lady who paid us in advance before she became a dog.
Spengler: Not necessarily. There’s definitely a very slim chance we’ll survive. [team ponders]
Peter: I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it!
Winston: This job is definitely not worth eleven-five a year!
Crossing the streams is what happened when H.B. Reese coated peanut butter with delicious Hershey’s chocolate.
Crossing the streams is what happened when Rick Rubin lined up Run DMC with Aerosmith.
Are you getting the idea?
Books plus the internet = Amazon.
Modeling plus American Idol = Americas Next Top Model.
Got it? Crossing the streams is a power move. It can supercharge your innovation.
See, when you cross the streams, you can accomplish some pretty big-time stuff.
Total protonic reversal.
Piece by Piece
In his (excellent) Lego Documentary, Pharrell Williams asks, “What if life is like a Lego set? And you can put it together, piece by piece?” With The Neptunes and N.E.R.D, he used this thinking to unburden himself. He wasn’t trying to create those Lego pieces, he was just assembling them. After all, people have been playing C Minor for quite some time.
He could arrange the notes in a new way, build the music “piece by piece.” Instead of creating music, he was simply crossing the appropriate streams to make something fresh and new.
He didn’t create Snoop Dogg, and he’s not the first one to play a funky ass base line, but as Snoop said, “I was always a bad gangster, but you brought out a smile.”
Total protonic reversal.
Ryan Holiday takes a similar approach. He writes about The Stoics and pulls in narratives from business to politics. Same old notes, new arrangements. And what comes out on the other side are best sellers that fall somewhere between philosophy and self-help. He is crossing a number of streams to carve out his own niche in the writing world.
To create these books, Holiday has popularized a “notecard system.” An approach he learned while interning for Robert Greene. Each story, fact, and tidbit from his research, is placed on a notecard. Holiday then arranges and rearranges those cards before he starts writing. He works out the story, the flow, the primary subjects, the lessons, and the strongest materials. He stacks them, “piece by piece.”
Then and only then does he do the writing part.
When he crosses streams from Marcus Aurelius, Ulysses S. Grant, and Zen Buddhism, he can help people discover the material or see it in a new light.
The Uber of ______ Method
A brainstorming exercise to help you get started crossing the streams is “The Uber of ______.”
Once Uber upended the transportation industry with on demand, gig economy, taxi service, every industry had to take a closer look at themselves.
Were they ripe for the same innovation.
“The Uber of _____” method is just crossing the streams while holding a fixed variable.
The “X of Y.” And if that doesn’t work, how about the X of A, B, or C?
The Uber of maids, foster care, private jets, carpet cleaning.
Sometimes you get Airbnb and NetJets, sometimes you get WeWork, but you always get something.
Which means you have a chance.
But a lot of people don’t give themselves a chance, because they think they need to invent everything from scratch. Remember, people have been playing C Minor for quite some time.
What Happens When Ideas Have Sex?
In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley makes the case for something called idea sex.
He describes ancient humans, and their glacial pace of innovation. Yes, we made tools, and that’s what separated us from other animals, but those tools would stay nearly the same for generations. A hand axe for example, made by Homo Erectus, was left unchanged for 1,000,000 years. From 1,500,000 years ago to 500,000 years ago, this was the hand axe. That’s 30,000 generations.
Talk about traditionalists.
But something changed on our path to getting a new iPhone every 18 months. 120,000 years ago, these ancient civilizations started venturing out, establishing trade routes. Tools were first, and much later goods like gold, silk, and spices. The initial gains were in productivity through specialization. Tribes that were great with silk made the silk, people who were good with gold, did the gold, and then they traded.
But among all those trades for goods and services a different type of trade was taking place.
The trade of ideas.
Farming, building, hunting, navigation, and the list goes on. The exchange of ideas, and the eventual combination of those ideas.
Idea sex.
When ideas have sex, they combine and recombine and multiply. When ideas have sex, they take the strongest traits from each side and pass them to the next generation.
Humans are the only animals that do this. As much as we disagree and argue, it’s these exchanges that set us apart.
One of my favorite OG bloggers, James Altucher, took Ridley’s thinking and started applying it to business.
The Uber of _____, expanded.
Combine two ideas to come up with a better idea. Take that idea, combine it with another, and then another. Idea evolution works faster than human evolution. And each successive generation is stronger and more resilient than the previous.
We exchange ideas all the time. In a world that praises people for originality and erases them for fitting in, to make progress we need to do a little of both.
New Stuff is Just Old Stuff with Different Ratios
Crossing the streams can unlock some really big ideas. Remember what happened when the books stream crossed the internet stream earlier?
That’s right, Amazon.
But in the early days, Amazon was struggling. If you were following along, they were under quite a bit of pressure to, you know, make money.
Like, a profit.
In 2001, Jeff Bezos agreed to raise prices on their discounted items to get closer to profitability.
Soon after, he had a meeting with Costco founder Jim Sinegal to discuss a distribution partnership. The two founders sat down at a Starbucks Cafe that is tucked away inside of—ironically—Barnes & Noble. The distribution and logistics partnership wouldn’t work, but the two still had a great conversation about retail. And Bezos did a lot of listening.
People say that Bezos learned about Costco’s membership model at that meeting. They say he came back to Amazon HQ, guns-a-blazing, and implemented Amazon Prime. That’s not totally true. What Bezos learned at that meeting was a larger lesson.
Bezos’ first move was to reverse his decision to raise prices. He then took it one step farther, and cut prices even further, 20 to 30 percent on books, music, and movies.
He said, “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second.”
That was A lesson, but not THE lesson.
Sinegal shared several other ideas with Bezos. For one, the goal is customer loyalty. If you have that, and if customers are happy, they will spread the word. Which means you don’t need marketing. Another lesson was that “Value trumps everything. The reason people are prepared to come to our strange [Costco Warehouses] places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value constantly.”
In the ensuing years, after numerous iterations with super saver shipping, Amazon finally did roll out Amazon Prime. And guess what, they didn’t stop there. They added Prime Video, crossing the Netflix stream. They added Prime Reading (Scribd stream), Prime Music (Pandora and Spotify stream), and Prime Photo (Photobucket stream) to that offering.
Bezos has said he wants to reach a level of value in Prime where people will feel “irresponsible” for not being a member.
And that leads us to THE lesson from Sinegal, who said, “I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas.”
Crossing the streams.
And when you cross the streams, you can accomplish some pretty big-time stuff.
Total protonic reversal.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend.
