In music
This week the world said goodbye to the legend who was Eddie Van Halen. I grew up with VH’s music, and Eddie’s guitar riffs feature prominently on the background canvas that was my youth. I clearly remember the first time I bought “Van Halen 1” and put it on my dad’s Yamaha turntable and listened to it. I was initially blown away by “Runnin’ with the Devil”, but then when “Eruption” came on, I reeled back. Initially with confusion and disgust. What was this weird way of playing guitar? What on earth was he doing? No one has ever used the whammy bar like THAT before!
Yep, I didn’t like it at first. But then, as I played that album over and over again, I began to love that particular 2 minutes of the album. Every time I heard it, I discovered something new. It was a multi layered, complex beast of a guitar arrangement. EVH soon became one of my top 5 guitar influences, though I never played a fraction as well as him.
Years later, my son (who was born 20 years after VH1 was released) and I were having a conversation about Eddie. I told my son that Eddie moved the goal posts. That he was an innovator that moved guitar playing to a whole new level in a similar way that Jimi Hendrix had done back in the 60’s. But initially, my son was confused, and said “But everybody plays like that now… How was Eddie different??”.
And that was the crux of the discussion. Everybody DOES play like that now, BECAUSE of Eddie. If he hadn’t had come along, the guitar playing landscape would be very different. Eddie revolutionised the whole game and pushed everyone to a new level.
In business
I see similar arguments in my working life too. I came across this tweet a few weeks ago (focus on the reply to this tweet here):
The fact is - Bezos DID do something ground breaking. Other people DID have the same idea, but couldn’t make it run.
I was trying to start an ecommerce business here in Australia at about the same time Bezos was getting Amazon off the ground. And it was hard. NOT just because of (lack of) money, but because there was absolutely no infrastructure around to do it. There was no Shopify to start a turnkey store. There was no Stripe to process credit card payments.
In fact, processing customer credit cards was a massively expensive consideration, and required merchant accounts with certain banks and exorbitant fees. There were no APIs or hosting providers that you could spool up a server quickly and get a store online in just a few hours.
I am not a Bezos fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, but he changed all that. We see the offshoots of his efforts today. In fact, my latest startup is hosted on Amazon’s AWS platform, which is a byproduct of all his learnings and efforts in setting up the Amazon online store in the first place.
The point is - everyone CAN set up a store really easily today because Bezos ‘broke the ground’ in the early days. Everyone can do two handed tapping on the electric guitar and dive bomb whole octaves because Eddie showed us it could be done (and it could be acceptable in modern music) in the early days.
Salute to these early revolutionaries. Thank you for breaking the ground for the rest of us.