The Weekend Edition

Gaser wonders at the myths, misconceptions, and romanticism around the word “innovation”: The idea of genius is heavily romanticized in modern culture, says former Yahoo ValueLab Chief Solutions Officer Tim Sanders on Big Think (watch: 7:47), leading to misconceptions that set you up for failure. There are no eureka moments, says Sanders, only “little ideas that combine with other little ideas that improve themselves into game-changing ideas.” Sanders tells the story of when he met Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, and spoke about John Lasseter, his Creative VP and the man behind the Toy Story script. The movie was so challenging at the time it was almost shut down nine months in after a meeting with Disney that came to be known as Black Friday. But the smashing success we ended up watching is what Catmull called “a thousand problems solved.”

The lone inventor is nonsense. Bunkum. A myth. Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything. He said so himself. Without Steve Wozniak, there never have been the original Apple I. without Jony Ive and Tony Fadell, there would be no iPhone or iPod. Thomas Edison didn’t invent a single thing, says Sanders. The name itself was a brand consisting of 14 people. Both merely knew how to “recognize patterns and convergence.”

The final misconception is the myth of the expert, or people who are so steeped in their domain that they don’t have expansive perspective. If you walked up to a fish in a fishbowl and you ask the fish, "How’s the water?" The fish would look at you puzzled and ask you, "What’s water?"

We’re not sure what’s being pumped through Hana’s headphones, but she’s diving deep into the music industry this weekend with “The music industry and the digital revolution” by Economist Films (run time 18:21). Yes, it covers the standard ground: How changing business models disrupted labels; artists looking for recording deals that allow them to retain the rights to their music. Forget about how labels are trying to “find the next superstar … trying to find your wedding song … the songs that will make the soundtrack to your lives.” No, it’s about — God help us — the power of social media. Witness, the Economist says, 18-year-old American singer-songwriterJacob Whitesides, who has 1.5 mn followers on Facebook and 1.2 mn on Instagram. Having a fan base independent of a label have him more freedom — not creatively, but in business. He managed to sign a contract with BMG where he owns all the creative rights to his music.

(Oh, and while we’re on music: Odds are good your tween-age daughter is watching videos on (and posting to) Musica.ly, an app that allows you to create 15-second videos of yourself lipsyncing a popular song. Predictably, some of the kids here have mns of followers — and are doing real-world business deals. Read “90 mn tweens, a free app, one goal: Fame,” in Elle magazine, which helpfully sends shivers down parental spines by noting: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes…by ninth grade. And the platform for that tween infamy is Musical.ly.”)

Hisham is considering punching a wall every five minutes on his second attempt at quitting smoking. “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times,” goes the adage often attributed to Mark Twain. That may be truer than we know, as a University of Toronto study suggests it’s more likely it’ll take a smoker 30 attempts or more to go a full year without any cigarettes. The study flies in the face of conventional wisdom, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting 8 to 11 attempts, while the American Cancer Society believes 8 to 10. And so, the daunting futility is making a trip to the koshk very tempting at the moment.

Using data from the Ontario Tobacco Survey, the study published this week tracked the smoking status of 4,501 recent smokers (most of whom smoked daily) over a three year period. At the end of its, 3,960 were still smoking. 1,277 people made an attempt to quit and on average, it took about 2.7 attempts per person. Factoring in the longevity of the habit and the occasional “slip ups”, researchers calculate the average attempts at quitting to reach success at 30. This is not surprising considering the addictive power of nicotine which research suggest is as powerful as heroine, so it is reasonable to expect relapse rates as high a heavy narcotic. According to Brian Kans from Healthline, this means we “learn” how to quite simply through trial and error, as figuring out what works may take some time.

What do you do with data like this? This is my second truly real attempt at it and it is already falling apart three weeks in. My will power appears to faltering the longer I am at it. For me personally, it comes down to a change in the environment. Ramadan was spent with non-smokers, then Ramadan ended. But these are excuses to soften the effects of the shame of the inevitable relapse. Reading the study is already making question my attempt. On the other hand, I don’t feel as much distress about failure, because science has vindicated my relapse, which too has softened the shame. And in some ways, has filled me with a measure of hope that will sustain me through my next ten relapses. Wishing all those quitting much success.

The best (and essentially only non-Egyptian) thing Patrick had the time to read this week was Brian X. Chen’s “What’s the Right Age for a Child to Get a Smartphone?” for the NY Times. Our resident eight-year-old, having subsequently read the story with her mom, still isn’t convinced that the under-14 set shouldn’t have phones. She does, however, think the family contract is a great idea. (And no, tomorrow being your ninth birthday doesn’t mean you’re old enough to have a phone…)

Meanwhile, Patrick thinks Inc Magazine’s annual “How I Did It” issue should be required reading for wannabe entrepreneurs. He would have read this year’s package this week had he had time. Instead, it’s this morning’s reading. Grab the print magazine if you can, or tap through the list below so you don’t have to search for this year’s stories manually on Inc’s really horrible website.

• Meet the Entrepreneur Behind Fashion’s Biggest Insurgent Brand (Milk)
• What I Did the Day After Selling My Company for USD 400 mn (NYX Cosmetics)
• Why Dyslexia Became the Key to This Founder’s Success (LiveIntent)
• How Lyft’s Founders Listened to Their Gut (and Not Their Mentor)
• (Lyft)
• This Entrepreneur Made 25,000 Cold Calls to Build a USD 250 mn Weather Business. (AccuWeather)
• How to Succeed in a New Market (Even When You Don’t Speak the Language)
• How This Company Moved Its Operations 600 Miles in the Middle of the Night (Gekks)
• How This Founder Rediscovered a Century-Old Razor Bump Solution (Walker and Company’s)
• ‘Shark Tank’ Star Robert Herjavec on Mark Cuban: ‘If He Did It, Why Not Me?’
• How I Coped With My Co-Founder’s Death and Built an USD 85 mn Company (Late July Snacks)
• This Fashion Startup Raised USD 100 mn Serving the Plus-Size Woman (Gwynnie Bee)
• How This Entrepreneur Turned His Drone Disaster Into USD 8 mn in Funding (Drone Racing League)

Rehaam thinks we’re all getting shorter: Africans, Egyptians included, aren’t as tall as they used to be, according to a study on height published last week. The research is being held out as underscoring humanity’s progress over the last century due to the steady gains in height seen in most countries, the Financial Times’ Steve Johnson writes, but Africa hasn’t quite kept up the pace. In Egypt, adult height has decreased since 1960, by around 5 cm for men, according to the study. The reason? Likely poor childhood nutrition, which has fallen “since the end of Africa’s colonial era, even as they have risen virtually everywhere else in the world,” writes the FT. “The timing of it is consistent with the colonial or early independence period,” says leader of the research Professor Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London.

Renaissance Capital chief economist Charles Robertson feels the drop is due to poor economic growth in the 1980s, when GDP typically climbed around 2% while population growth was at 3%. “The lack of education in the 1960s and 1970s meant that when commodity prices fell in the 1980s there was nothing else to propel these economies at that point,” he said. “Incomes were going down but people were still having big families because that’s what you do to protect yourself against poverty when you are in poverty. People were getting worse off and as a result less able to give their children sufficient nutrition.”

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• 3-year-old stands trial for ‘terrorising citizens’ (Daily News Egypt)
• Market-based informality: Egypt’s real housing sector (Enterprise)
• Cabinet statement on IMF talks (statement from Cabinet press office, pdf)
• Cairo Real Estate Market Overview Q2 2016 (JLL, pdf)
• Table summarizing bank restrictions on credit card use outside Egypt (Al Mal)

Moustafa, who is on annual leave in a more northerly clime, wonders: Can you say “benevolent”? Some words are harder to pronounce than others, even if you’re supposed to be playing a shrewd strategist. If you’re a GoT fan, you’ll get a kick out of this. If you’re not, it’s still cute: Bloopers from Season 6 of Game of Thrones. (Runtime 02:15)

And some other random pieces that caught our eye this week:

Attention, readers of a certain age: The last VCR will be manufactured this month. Queue your kid’s next, “Dad, did they have TV / the internet / Minecraft / cars when you were young” to add insult to injury.

On vacations and “quality time” with family: “I used to think that shorter would be better, and in the past, I arrived for these beach vacations a day late or fled two days early, telling myself that I had to when in truth I also wanted to … But in recent years, I’ve showed up at the start and stayed for the duration, and I’ve noticed a difference. With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful. Or when one of my siblings will flash back on an incident from our childhood that makes us laugh uncontrollably, and suddenly the cozy, happy chain of our love is cinched that much tighter.”

Saturday Friday Morning Cartoon: Watch Ren’s near-instant descent into madness in this 1990s classic. (Watch, running time: 12:11)