Reading Notes
3-5 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended
Topics and Themes
Netflix's pivot to streaming; Most options are trashy; Find the best option and throw the rest out.
Reed Hastings, former head of Netflix, is living proof that only a few things really matter. The story of how Hastings built Netflix into a behemoth is partly a story of how he had numerous options presented to him, but ended up selecting the best possible path for the company. Everyone who loves to create art or music can gain valuable insights from understanding how Netflix became a household name.
How Netflix Crushed It
In the early 2000s, Netflix pretty much obliterated the movie rental market with its strategy to send DVD rentals to customers while waiving late fees. It probably put Blockbuster out of business.
Netflix was prospering. There was no reason to rock the boat. Reed Hastings, however, recognized the potential of the internet to wipe out the business model of renting physical DVDs when people wanted to watch movies at home.
He had a choice. He could maintain the existing business model based on DVD rentals, despite the drawbacks of sending physical items to customers who might not return them. Or, he could gradually leverage the expanding technology of the internet to deliver movies directly to people’s homes, instantly, with no extra effort required to return the DVD.
In other words, he could have chosen the many options that would bolster, defend, and protect Netflix's already successful DVD rental business, or he could slowly invest in a single option that had the potential to rewrite the script on how customers watched movies at home.
We all know the end to this story. Netflix is, well, Netflix. And there’s much we can learn from it as artists by analyzing it. To me, Netflix's pivot serves as an ideal example of how to filter through the thousands of bad options to get to the one option that truly crushes it.
Most Options Are Trashy
Options appear and disappear, freely, easily, and constantly. There’s no shortage of options! And to be super clear: Most of the options we have to choose from are not worth it. Very few of them have any significance at all.
Think of all the social media posts you scrolled through recently (ahem!). Which ones stand out in your mind? How many of them do you remember? I'd be surprised if you remember more than one or two posts (ahem, again!).
You had options. There's no shortage of social media posts. But if you can’t remember much about most of them, were they good options to invest your time in? Maybe doom-scrolling doesn't actually do a whole lot for us after all...
And that’s the thing: Most options are not worthy of your time.
Finding the Best Option Takes Time, Effort, and Courage
Reed Hastings invested time to uncover the internet’s potential for streaming. He invested resources into analytics and monitored the changing landscape of consumer behavior. He observed how technology improved enough to handle streaming. He moved forward because he saw the best possible route to grow Netflix. That kind of decision-making requires time, effort, and a boatload of courage.
But, just because making choices requires so much effort does not excuse us from taking every single option presented to us at face value. Let's not make a friend out of laziness.
As we create, be it music or art or film or whatever, we will encounter thousands of options. They will get delivered to us, constantly, whether we like it or not. Should we use this color? Should we use that chord progression? Should we shape the character’s arc in more ways?
Choosing gets easier when we remember that most of the options don't have any value. Only a few options truly matter. John Maxwell rightfully said: You can not overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
Perhaps we, as artists, ought to save ourselves for the one extraordinary option that outshines all the others and lean into it. Perhaps we could do better to accept the tradeoffs of cutting away the insignificant in favor of the one brilliant and shining idea.
Reed Hastings certainly had plenty of insignificant options in front of him. He could have bolstered and propped up Netflix’s DVD rental business with all his resources. And yet? He chose the best option after quite a lot of deliberation and gradually invested in it. He made that decision thoughtfully, and now we all know Netflix.
In our work as creatives, let’s do the same. Let’s carefully discard as many trivial (or trashy or insignificant or stupid) options as possible. Let’s instead invest in the best options only, from here on out.
Let's do the art that we really want to do.
This post was inspired and influenced by Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I totally recommend it.
