You Don't Have To Be A Genius
Mindset Monday
Takeaway: The list of great ideas is endless, and doesn’t have to be the next Facebook or Google. You don’t have to be a genius to solve a problem in a genius way.
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I want to share one of my favorite entrepreneurial stories. Luis von Ahn is responsible for the Duolingo app, one of the most popular language learning softwares available today. I think his true genius is what he accomplished prior to that.
Luis von Ahn is also responsible for CAPTCHA. If you’re at least as old as me, you’ll remember this was the software that asked you to enter the distorted word shown on the screen in order to prove you weren’t a robot.
As the popularity of the internet grew, von Ahn noticed that so too did the presence of scammers. CAPTCHA was a way to combat programs that would try to steal email addresses and flood them with spam. It worked.
Here’s where von Ahn’s real genius shows, in my opinion. Do you know how they chose which words to show on the screen? One might assume they created a random word generator. The truth is much more creative.
Around the same time, as the internet really began to pick up steam, libraries and universities were digitizing written works from their archives. The challenge was that many words were too distorted for the primitive word scanners to read correctly. This required the time consuming task of inputting each difficult word one by one.
200 million people today, on average, fill out some type of CAPTCHA form (or today’s updated version—reCAPTCHA) daily.
The words you had to type on these forms were the same difficult words that needed to be individually translated. That was the genius of von Ahn.
He created this software to help companies combat scammers, in which they would all be interested, but also simultaneously got internet users to solve the problem of digitizing these manuscripts for libraries and universities—for which he got paid for each word translated to digital text.
He made a fortune.
I love this story because it was a simple, yet genius, way to solve two common problems that plagued a large number of people. But they were also not “sexy” problems.
He wasn’t building the coolest electric car or going to space. He wasn’t curing disease or even building Facebook. He solved the boring task of translating words for the internet, at scale.
This story has two lessons:
Success boils down to solving a problem, and problems exist everywhere. If you learn to keep an eye out for these problems, you can find great ideas that lead you to success—even in the mundane details of our world.
Massive success comes from solving a problem for a large number of people. The more people you can help, the bigger your success. Part of von Ahn’s success came from realizing that every internet user needed a way to combat scammers, and every library and university needed help translating words.
Don’t think you have to be a genius to solve problems in a genius way.
Here’s to finding opportunity in the mundane,
~ Coach Alex