Name's Special ... Super Special

A little girl calmly responded to the question about her ambition in life, 'I want to run a pet hostel.'

The response really puzzled the baby boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964), as they had no clue on such a career option. It took them by surprise as they were expecting a rocket scientist, teacher, doctor, engineer, civil service, pilot, journalist or a lawyer.

This tweet by Vir Das actually made sense in this context. When you really love pets, why not hang around them and actually get paid for it.

Can kids these days think that deep? 

When they are around 3-4 years old, most kids are familiar surfing their favorite games, pictures, cartoons on smartphones. Soon they grow up exploring Wikipedia and Googling information they are curious about. They know much more than what their older generation did at that age.

Ruskin Bond recently shared his thoughts about him aspiring to become a writer in his teens, to be an odd ambition (that was around 65 years ago). He feels writing has suddenly become fashionable. Nowadays young people in their teens come up to him and gift a copy of their published book!

From speciality to super specializing

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev shared an interesting story while explaining the concept of yoga in one of his blog posts :

“ Thirty years ago, if you wanted a medical checkup, you had to go to one family doctor. Today, you have to go to six or seven doctors, because you have separate doctors for different parts of the body. A few years ago, when I was in Atlanta, I badly injured my knee while playing soccer. So, at a talk I was giving, my knee was bandaged. At the end, someone came up to me and said, Sadhguru, I think I can look at your knee. I’m a knee doctor.’ I said, ‘What? You must be an orthopedic.’ He said, ‘No, I’m a knee doctor.’ It seems every day, he conducts a number of knee surgeries - he does nothing but knees. Then I asked, ‘Which knee are you - right or left?’ “

My experience in the startup journey had its share of the special zone - once while explaining to someone that I was into mobile, the person casually enquired 'Ecommerce enablers, hyperlocal, logistics, listing, aggregator, payments, social, analytics, IoT, enterprise. Which one?'

You see, earlier e-commerce meant you were in the business of transacting using the online medium. While the medium split into web and mobile, the specializations too narrowed down as need based competition got better.

When Howard Schultz brought the concept of Italian coffee bars to America in the eighties and gave it a touch of the American dream by launching 'Starbucks', can you guess what made it special?

He made the coffee experience super special.