Endless Possibilities and What Can Actually be Done

I was reading this round table discussion (I'm linking to it just in case you want to see, but it's in Japanese...) by Satoru Iwata (CEO of Nintendo) and Mochio Umeda (President of Muse Associates), and it was so insightful and interesting that I wanted to write about it here. There were two a-ha's that I got from reading their discussion, so I'll write about the first one today and the second one tomorrow.

The first a-ha has to do with how the Internet is making possibilities endless by eliminating a lot of physical barriers, except for our time.

Distance and space are the physical barriers that the Internet has eliminated (or perhaps I should say made them irrelevant): We can connect with someone on another continent, or we can store and share massive amount of information real time without being in the same place.

This made our possibilities endless: Internet allowed us to become aware of all the choices that we didn't know existed. It made aware us how the Internet could possibly be leveraged to accomplish something large or complicated that we didn't think we could do before. It made us aware of issues and challenges that we didn't know we could help resolving.

But what it hasn't changed is our personal limitations. While we may be able to do things quicker with the Internet, the fact we only have 24 hours a day or we need to sleep and eat hasn't changed. Consequently, how much one can physically do hasn't changed.

This, in fact, has been the issue ever since I started to rethink my life to determine what I wanted to do. As I research what I could possibly do to fulfill my interest, I'm finding so many options which all look worth investigating.

So my a-ha here was how I needed to be conscious about this gap between possibilities and what I can actually do. And the discussion also went into how focusing something specific and going deeper could often in turn generate additional values that you didn't foresee.