The Click Moment by Frans Johansson

The Click Moment is a great business book. The world is random and there are forces out there that make success impossible to predict, so we need to be doing everything we can to harness randomness and use it to our advantage. The famed ‘10,000 hours rule’ works in many cases, but it’s essentially irrelevant in the business world. Instead, we need to focus on three things: click moments, placing purposeful bets, and allowing complex forces to work for us.

‘Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World’

The Click Moment Summary

“Innovations must not only be valuable, they must also be put to use by others in society“

Hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina (a symptom of ischemic heart disease) are serious medical conditions that affect a seriously enormous portion of adults. The drug company Pfizer was trying to create medicine that could effectively treat these issues. The clinical trials of ‘Sildenafil’ showed little impact on angina, but the pills had an unintended side-effect that kept patients coming back for more. In 1998 it was approved for sale, and Pfizer now sells almost $2,000,000,000 (two BILLION dollars) every year of these little blue ‘blood pressure’ pills…  

Sildenafil is more commonly known as Viagara. The pill designed for blood pressure that unexpectedly did quite a good job of giving blokes stiffies is now sold to treat ‘erectile dysfunction’ (an ailment created by marketing consultants, not identified doctors). 

  IDEA #1: Success is random. 

This story just goes to show that success is random. The book has countless of other examples like this. 

• Lloyd Braun was the chairman of the ABC television station in America from 2002 to 2004. He approved two brand new shows to be created. One become the most expensive show the network had ever created, with the pilot alone costing more the $14m to produce. But after numerous arguments and disagreements with Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney (who owns ABC), Braun was fired. Everyone at ABC and Disney assumed that these shows would flop. No one at ABC had any faith because these shows went completely against the tried-and-true formats of what had worked in the past. The two shows were Desperate Housewives and Lost, and they went on to be the two biggest shows of 2004 and saved the network from its decline to ruin.
• Bill Bowerman was a track-and-field coach and a cofounder of Nike. He was always looking for ways to improve athletes’ performance and was looking for ways to engineer a spike-less sports shoe. None of his creations worked, until he saw his wife pulling a waffle out of the waffle iron and he saw how the shapes were flexible. Experimenting with putting rubber in the waffle iron, he eventually developed the world’s first sports shoe (and Nike has done pretty well!). 

These stories, and many more, highlight that success is random and unpredictable. We can’t possibly know what is going to work and which ideas are going to take off.

IDEA #2: Take action to capture randomness

There are a number of specific actions individuals or organisations can take to capture randomness and focus it to our favour. Just because success is random and unpredictable doesn’t mean that we can’t try to harness that power. If success is random, our aim should then be to capture as much randomness as possible and bring more randomness into our lives.

There are some domains where the fames ‘10,000 hours rule’ holds up. In domain with strict rules that are very predictable, putting in more and more hours of deliberate practice will make you better. Playing chess, practicing the violin, learning a language – the more time you put in, the better you’ll get. But when it comes to business, there are really no rules and no rigid path to success. Richard Branson had no experience in aviation before founding Virgin Airlines, and Reed Hastings had absolutely no domain experience when he started Netflix to battle Blockbuster by delivering DVDs by mail. Because the rules are always changing then you don’t need the 10,000 hours – you just need to be able to use unpredictability and randomness in your favour.

The Click Moment

The Click Moment is that spark of an idea, or the point where all of your thinking ‘clicks’ into place and things appear clear. Looking back at all of these random success stories, we can find a click moment that started it all. For Nike, the click cam when he saw the waffles. He realised that he could take those geometric shapes and apply them to the soles of a shoe to give the right might of speed and flexibility. For Branson, the click moment came when he was trying to flying to the Virgin Airlines to meet a girl but got stuck in Puerto Rico when his plane was cancelled. He realised that he could charter a plane and divide up the costs by selling seats to everyone else who was desperate to get to their destination even though their flight was cancelled. 

Pay attention to these moments. When you feel the lightbulb going on inside your brain, don’t ignore it! We might be writing a book about your success one day. Following your curiosity, combining different idea from intersecting fields, rejecting the predictable path and following something bizarre – these are way that you can invite more click moments into your life. ‘Take your eye off the ball’ and start looking for different opportunities that everybody else around you is missing.

Purposeful Bets

Just getting an idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Similarly, just getting an idea doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the real world. You need to place ‘purposeful bets’ to turn your idea into a reality. You don’t know what is going to work, so you need to place a lot of these little ‘bets’ in the hope that one of them will pay off. The bet is a small version of the idea in your head. At the poker table you wouldn’t go all-in on your first hand and risk going bust, so when you’re trying out a new idea you shouldn’t go all in and risk everything before you’re sure that it will work. We need to test the waters by taking the smallest executable step in the right direction, calculating an affordable loss that will allow you to try many more bets if this one doesn’t work. When you start to get a feeling that you’re heading in the right direction, you can double down on your bet and try the next thing, then if that works take the next step again.

Books like The Lean Startup (see book #XX) and many other business books recommend a second approach. Putting everything on the line and going all in might seem glamorous, but it’s not a wise decision. We glorify the entrepreneur who quit their job, maxed out their credit cards, was one day away from bankruptcy but managed to turn it all around at the last second and achieve massive success. But we never hear about the hundreds of others that followed a similar path and ended up living on their mum’s couch. You can’t possibly know which idea will work so don’t risk everything. Instead, recognise that success is random and unpredictable, so place small purposeful bets that will allow you to experiment and court this randomness to work in your favour.