I started meditating in 2013 using the app Headspace. At the time Calm existedbelieveI belive Headspace was more popular. What I liked about Headspace was the simplicity and serialization of meditations. Most packs of meditations went for 10 or 30 days, progressively giving more silent space and longer lengths of meditation time.
Using Headspace felt like reading a book or taking a course because you were always focused on the next chapter, not having to think about what meditation you were going to do.
A few years later I started exploring other meditation apps and used Calm for the first time. Calm was more like a grab bag of options, a YouTube style where you entered and were presented with dozens of different options for your guided meditations.
There were some cool features in Calm, but in the sea of options, I felt it was hard to make the habit of using it stick.
Today, if you explore both Headspace and Calm, you’ll notice that one has a lot of orange coloring and one is blue, but apart from that, they are very similar. Headspace presents you with the “mediation of the day” and has tabs for sleep and other content besides guided meditations.
It’s clear that they looked at what Calm was doing with celebrities, sleep, and the YouTube style of optionality, and decided that was the best course for their product. I’m sure they beta-tested these features and found that they increased time on app and conversions from free trials to paid subscriptions. But today, when I log into Headspace I think to myself that I would rather use the version from 2014. In fact, I’d pay more for a version that had the mediation series and none of the other distracting options.
I find this to be true of many digital products. I wish Twitter would show me what the people I follow are tweeting and none of the other recommended garbage (not talking about ads here, but the “x person liked” posts).
I wish YouTube would show me videos I’ve added to “watch later” or the new videos from channels I’m already subscribed to.
I wish that Spotify would highlight new music from artists I follow and new episodes of podcasts I listen to, instead of the new podcast from x or y celebrity or a support the Ukraine playlist.
I’m not appealing for more artisanal hipster companies, or for companies to ignore what will increase their profits. I understand the business logic behind some of these decisions, but they are all deeply rooted in creating a short-term result and the expense of building something unique over the medium to long term.
All the a/b tested, time on app maximizing product decisions create what feels like a narrowing of options. Businesses copying each other and drifting together, losing what made them distinct and interesting.
Headspace becomes Calm, Instagram becomes Snapchat and now Tik Tok, and Evernote becomes Notion. All of this creates a business opportunity (can someone please start a company that just makes old versions of apps like 2015 Evernote or 2014 Headspace?), but I can’t help but feel sad observing it. Sad that this short-term, follow-the-data attitude has so overwhelmed the creative insight and vision used to start and build these companies.
People love Steve Jobs and Elon Musk because they are doing the exact opposite of this. They have a vision and they are building it. Steve Jobs didn’t a/b test his way from the flip phone to the iPhone and Elon Musk didn’t focus group Space X out of NASA. They both had a vision for something and then got to work building it. They stayed true to their vision and what would be best for the company in the long-term–not picking a short-term metric to make all decisions around.
Apple today still runs on the momentum of Steve Jobs’ (and many others’) vision and is likely to remain one of the most valuable companies in the world for a long time because they are focused on building toward a vision instead of copying others and trying to please everyone in the present moment.
It is incredibly hard for large bureaucratic organizations to not give into the temptation of creating a short-term result that will reflect well on the stock price, but as individuals, we do have the option to choose to work towards our vision and a long term future instead of whatever is flashy at the moment. To stay true to what we think is best instead of following what someone else is doing. To be artists and pursue mastery of craft instead of jumping from thing to thing, keeping our name in the lights while hollowing out everything we stand for.
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