Five years ago who knew what tweeting, liking, posting or pinning was? Today those words turned into verbs and common language your parents might use.
We live in a constant state of flux — everything new is old again and vice versa. And the pace is increasing at an often exponential rate.
While this is all true, we also must remind ourselves that things still take time to become mainstream. You’re working on this amazing virtual reality project? That’s great — but understand that it will take a little while for VR to become mainstream. It requires endurance and stamina to put yourself at the edge and wait for it to cross the chasm.
Take my dear friends at Matternet. When they started working on their vision for a point-to-point drone delivery network, people called them nuts as drones were mostly a thing from a SciFi movie. Today, as the market has caught up with them, they are leaders in their space.
The other side of the coin is that you need to be careful to not jump from trend to trend, from technology to technology and from market to market — just because it’s the flavor of the moment.
I see this a lot with programming languages — too many startups are constantly changing their technology stack as they fall for the latest coding paradigm. Ditch your PHP app to rebuild it in Ruby, ditch that and recode in Python to then just redo the whole shebang in Node as it’s so much better.
Understand that everything is in flux. The art is in sniffing out the trends which will prevail (and you’re passionate about) and then ride that wave to it’s logical conclusion.