"Thinking of innovation? Invest in an experience factory!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
I wasted quite a bit of time yesterday. It was great.
What was I doing? I'm trying to figure out how to move my various Websites and servers from a Runcloud setup over to CloudPanel since the latter is a pretty good tool for managing self-hosting. I was running into significant problems with my Cloudflare setup involving SSL and page rendering, and couldn't quite figure out what was going wrong. Overall, it was pretty unsuccessful - and so I woke up this morning that it might be a PHP version issue that I need to explore. I'll tackle that issue later today with a series of experiments to see what might go wrong and to determine if that is the root cause.
All of this is entirely meaningless to you, and for me, involved quite a bit of a bit of wasted time yesterday as I went down a rabbit hole of Websites, YouTube videos, and more as I explored my challenges.
But in doing so, I continue down my path of regularly exploring the complex world of technology to better understand what it's all about - part of what is now a 40-year voyage. By doing so, I am always enhancing the knowledge by which I can talk intelligently about all kinds of complex technology topics, understand deep security issues, and assess new emerging technology trends and opportunities.
It's my 'experience factory!'
A place and time where I can chase new ideas, understand new concepts, develop new knowledge, and learn more about new things. Developing time in your life for an 'experience factory' is time wasted well spent. After all, you can't talk about something if you aren't deeply involved.
Take the backdrop for today's quote. That came from the AI image generation capability of ChatGPT - I gave it the command "Generate an image. The idea is of an "experience factory" - a home for new experiences that generate knowledge that become the engine for innovative thinking. I will be using this as a backdrop in a motivational quote."I'm learning that I can often get better artwork that better fits my work than a stock photo site.
Wasted time? Frivolous projects? You should do more of that too!
What do you have in place for an experience factory? What are you doing to establish more play time, frivolous time, and wasted time in your day-to-day routine? Often, it's the only way to get ahead.
In just a few weeks, I'll be in Indianapolis, with a talk on the role of artificial intelligence in manufacturing for a group of executives. One of my closing observations will be the need to simply dive in and get involved without a plan - invest in a few robotics tools simply to understand what is possible. Dive into the world of the industrial Internet of Things to understand the profound impact it can have on factory flow. Hire a young person with deep digital twin technology experience, simply to understand the role it might play in designing future assembly line and warehouse logistic setups. Buy a sophisticated 3d printer to understand how it is forever changing the world of manufacturing as we go into a new iterative design world.
All of these things might involve wasted time, little to no short-term return, and unclear or fuzzy results.
All of these make them great things to do because if you are going to chase innovation, you've got to get involved with the trends that will help to take you there!
And often, the only way to do this is to build yourself your own 'experience factory.'
Futurist Jim Carroll's wife often thinks that he is too easily distracted by odd projects.