Firstly welcome to all the 10 new subscribers this week. I have no idea who most of you are. That is cool.
In case the title or image confused you let me make this clear. This is not a post about gifts or puppies.
Bundles of joy
I've been thinking about the 'bundling' or 'unbundling' of things lately as a concept. It relates to my own business and often those I am helping or considering investing in.
As often happens when I am thinking about one concept it starts appearing all over the place in other things.
What is it?
Bundling - the combining of items/services into one package
Unbundling - the segregation of items/services into separate packages
Many businesses are either the bundling or unbundling of existing services. This new format delivers a benefit to the user that is not possible with existing forms.
My example
With my company Reason we have concluded that the many hours of admin it takes to release a podcast episode of high quality are silly. It is not a requirement but a result of the numerous separate tools that don't work together.
By bundling existing tools to create an end to end platform, two things happen:
Save time - eliminate a LOT of manual admin
New capabilities - do things you couldn't do before
I could go on a long and excited rant about all the cool features that are going to be easy because of the bundled services. If you want that just ask me.
Business accelerators
A simple example is a business accelerator.
The bundling of venture capital investing with business coaching and networking and a place for founders to work amongst their peers. It provides a powerful way to unlock the value of very early stage startups in a way that one service alone cannot provide.
Creative bundling
Bundling is spoken about in business often, but it applies across all creativity. Science, engineering, cooking, music, writing and most things in existence.
Food
Bundling - A recipe is combination of basic elements, obviously... However, innovation also lies in the combination of needs.
Deliver a meaty savoury taste but make it climate friendly —> mock meats.
Create an Indian cuisine but for a British up market audience —> Dishoom
Unbundling - Restaurants with a simple menu that have a very specific niche are much better brands than too much combination. Jamies 5 ingredient meals cookbook is still my favourite due to the simplicity of removing elements to create a powerful taste experience.
Writing
Unbundling - A good blog post is often the unbundling of ideas to isolate a particular point of interest. A single focused post that get's to the point is worth reading.
Bundling - Conversely, a good post can be the bundling of existing ideas to form a grander conclusion. Putting different elements together can form a new way of thinking in the reader that don't happen from any of the single elements.
Mark Mansons writing style is the bundling of stoic philosophy with swearing. His social media posts are mostly the unbundling of different ideas from any one of his books.
Music
Bundling - New genres are often fusions of old ones. Sampling of old music and incorporated into new tracks is always a thing.
Unbundling - Some great covers are the stripped back unbundled form of a song with just a singer and a single instrument.
A song is the bundling of several elements together. Each line doing different things which together form a better overall sound and ‘feel’.
Psychology
A personality is the bundled traits of someone and their personal history. They may have a number of disorders or quirks that dictates how they react to different circumstances.
A trait is an unbundled element of someones personality that explains how they react to a certain situation. The methodology behind most research is psychologists trying to find new ways of isolating a humans reactive framework to identify a novel insight.
Nuerological and personality disorders are an unbundled aspect of a person. Understanding a single one can help explain how a person exists in the world but doesn't form the full picture.
Mastery and bundling
Music
A musician learns several elements and concepts to be able to create or play music. To learn a song you need to unbundle its parts, the rhythm, the notes, the different tasks for each of your hands. You can practice them in isolation before putting them together.
So with unbundling we can learn to master a song in its bundled form.
Life
In Robert Greenes book on mastery he highlights the paths to mastery.
Core focus on a single skill with complete life dedication is how to excel and be a 10/10 in a given field. It is risky and we may give up or not be as innately talented as others.
For most of us it is better to have diverse experiences and become a 7/10 across three or more different fields. We then have a unique skill set that is rare. We are a 10/10 in the bundled meta-skill that is those skills together. We see links between them that most are blind.
Therefore, it appears wise to learn to unbundle and bundle things.
What can I do with this?
So far I have pointed out the bundling and unbundling is all around us. What does that mean to you?
Firstly, it is another framework to consider the unlocked potential value of something that has applied bundling or unbundling to a concept. It might help work out the potential of an idea you are considering.
Secondly, explaining the value of ideas. Being able to step out of an idea and analyse it’s bundled / unbundled form, you can better highlight the value unlocked.
Thirdly, for idea generation. I think applying unbundling or bundling really helps with the blank canvas issue for creators.
In many cases we get stuck and I think that applying unbundling / bundling thinking can be a useful tool. Instead of running into the same problems with the same method we can think about what to add or take away in our approach that might lead to new success.
Take this newsletter. I could just pick any book I happen to be reading and take a section that resonated with me and unbundle a concept into a piece for the newsletter.
Or social media. When I approach social media I feel like I need to do too much in one go to deliver a post of value which is ludicrous. What you're supposed to do is provide a single simple thing that might interest someone.
I need to just think of the different things I'm up to and apply unbundling to myself.
Bundling this up
So in this post I spoke about bundling in business, a well known concept. I then demonstrated it's appearance in various creative avenues. It even comes up in understanding personalities and thus yourself and everyone around you.
The conclusion is that bundling is a concept worth pondering and a nice lens to view the world with to see where it crops up. I like it.
When you're having blockers with your creative ideas or business it might be that you are all bundled up and need to cut back elements. Or perhaps you need to add an extra element to make things work correctly.
Has this given you an idea?
I hope you find new insights in your understanding of anything you feel like pondering. Maybe it will spark some breakthroughs in your own creativity.
If you have any ideas hit reply. I promise you'll deliver me unbundled joy.
Pondering my pondering
In the first issue I mentioned sometimes we aren't happy with our work that isn't perfect in our eyes. Yet for others it might feel new and useful. I was not happy with the email above for two reasons.
It doesn't feel new. I only learnt about bundling a month ago but by writing this it almost seems too obvious to me. Now I feel like everyone must already know it and I am just telling you that 1 + 1 equals 2.
I tried to write a much harder post that had way too many bundled things in about personality disorder issues, routines, my memory loss lately, what even is a leader, creativity, understanding what is easy for you and not others. That was just the start.
There is some big cool thing in there somewhere but I failed. So this post feels like a bit of a cop-out
My disappointment about this post is silly. A month ago this would have been crazy cool to read for me. Writing it also pushed me into new ideas.
Furthermore no one in the world has a clue about the other post I wanted to write. I am not going to be marked down on this one against some grand answer to life the universe and everything.
The bad news is I haven't yet overcome my imposter-syndrome of feeling bad about my writing for the wrong reasons.
The good news is I'm noting when I'm being silly and telling that part of me to go away and I'm showing up anyway.
After all the most important thing is showing up. Whether you're all bundled up or not.
Yours creatively,
Sam
Enjoyed this latest post Sam.
To the first point you raise in the “pondering my pondering” section, I try to view the value of a public post this way:
1) Utility to the writer: Even if nobody reads what you wrote, solidifying your ideas is, hopefully, valuable to you, the writer.
2) Utility to people unfamiliar with the idea: As you suggest, it’s easy to think something is obvious once you know it or that “everyone knows it.” Then again, if you didn’t know what unbundling/bundling was a month ago (and you a quite well-read and tuned in to the business world), there’s a good chance others don’t know it either. I’m guessing most people intuitively grasp the concept of bundling, it’s everywhere once you look for it, but haven’t spent much time thinking about it or have neglected to pin a nifty label on it.
3) Utility to people already familiar with the idea: I know about bundling but I still enjoyed your post immensely. For one, I don’t always think about bundling, so when I see a post like yours it’s a great signpost/reminder to say, “Hey this is a cool idea you should revisit and think about!” Reminders and repetition are underrated , imho. Second, I love it when people re-contextualize an idea and make me think about it in another way. Carrying the bundling metaphor into other domains helps me spin my own wheels on the topic. I extend the idea of a “growth mindset” to ideas: I’m never finished with exploring or evolving my thinking on the ideas that are really interesting to me. So thanks for posting about your topic of the week.
I know you know all the above, but it’s worth making explicit (just like how you made your thoughts explicit and shared them with us in the piece above). It’s hard to have a conversation about things if you keep your ideas bottled up in your head. And good conversations are worth coming back to time and time again. That includes the conversation with have with ourselves, that we have with interesting ideas or books, and certainly those we have with other people.
To your second point, you can still continue exploring the ideas you didn’t get to in a future post. It’s a tough trade-off wanting to focus a message vs. including everything and the kitchen sink (oh there’s an entrepreneurial lesson in that last point too!).