It takes a lot courage make a great leap into the unknown. But often the hardest thing to do is abandon what you already know.
In 1975, an engineer at Kodak called Steven Sasson created an internal prototype of something that could change the world. It was, verifiably, the world's first digital camera (DSLR). But I can't tell you what it was called, because the device never got a name. It was never commercially produced.
The gizmo was a hefty 8 pounds, captured black and white images on cassette tape, and took 23 seconds just to take a picture. But that's not why Kodak declined to make it. It's because they were already very successful with a different kind of camera. They needed to protect their film camera sales.
Kodak had the technology, the talent, and the capital that would define photography going forward. But they lacked what mattered most – the ability to imagine a future that didn't include film.
It turns out, film wasn't just Kodak's business model it was their entire framework for understanding what photography meant.
Chess players have a term for this: "positional blindness." It's when your pieces are arranged in a way that makes certain moves almost invisible to your conscious mind, even when they're objectively the best moves on the board.
A position blind chess player doesn't avoid the best move because he's scared. But he's so focused on seeing the game from one angle that he can't see any other way forward.
Your past successes can often create cognitive constraints on the future successes you can conceive.
The better your current position, the harder it becomes to imagine abandoning it for something that might eventually be superior.
