Someone Somewhere Something Similar Syndrome

 

“After placing our sacrifices on our respective altars, pray to your gods and I’ll pray to GOD. The god who answers with fire will prove to be, in fact, God”

-Elijah the Tishbite.

Have you ever come upon an idea that you thought was the first of its kind, but after some research you discovered it was already in existence? 

I bet you have. What did you do? If you’re like the greater part of humanity, you most probably discarded it. 

Or how about that time you came across a really terrible product or service and thought to yourself “Darn! This is terrible. My grandmother could do a better job at making or offering this”. 

Well, what did you do? Did you take a swing at it? Did you? Hmm? No? I thought so

We’ve all come across inspiring stories of people who created successful businesses or organizations despite going against all odds. One common thread is that they encountered similar situations as described above.

 In fact, that’s what got them started on their journey to greatness; they identified a vacuum waiting to be filled or a product/service so old/tiring/difficult/frustrating/terrible/broken that they just had to fix it for sanity’s sake. They dared to do it and kept at it and that made all the difference.

Why do the rest of us act so different? Two major reasons; 

1) we’ve settled into a pattern of learned helplessness – this mindset that most or all of the things we encounter are just the way they are and there’s nothing we can do, to change them, but endure, and

 2) we’ve given ourselves over to an ancient, imperial and malicious form of imposter syndrome – a kind so effective that it all it ever does is subtly play us against each other, then sits back and watches in glee as we self-destruct. 

UX Design Specialist & Management Expert, Chinonso Ohakwe (Yep! That’s me… don’t hate) coined a phrase for it; Someone Somewhere Something Similar Syndrome – that thinking pattern that whispers to us, advocating that we discard our ideas because they're not "new" and tells us we'll never be able to overthrow the incumbents if we tried. “Oh someone’s already working on that…why bother?” Right? WRONG!     

First off, “newness” is overrated and fickle. The large majority of human beings eventually settle for something because it works better than other existing options, not because it’s new. 

The truth is, we’re scared. We’re afraid of putting in the work to see our idea come to life and so we succumb to this syndrome as an avenue to avoid confronting our fear. 

Yes, your idea is not as new as you think, deal with it. “Come off it” (Thanks Taooma). As the saying goes, “there’s nothing new under the sun”

Once you can bring up something affordable, 10x (ten times) better than what you’re up against and with a viable plan to distribute it effectively, you’re good to go. 

{I said 10x because humans don’t like change, sometimes even when it’s beneficial for them. To make it easier for them to move away from existing options, your product has to be so superior that the advantages of switching greatly outweigh the disadvantages.}

Google is the undisputable king of web search- but did you know that the imperial brainchild of Larry Page & Sergey Brin was not even in the game until 1998? 

The first search engine arrived in 1993 and during that five-year gap, twenty (yes, you read it right….20!) other search engines had a shot at web search glory. 

Yet Larry & Sergey still entered the fray. The result, as we can all see, speaks for itself.

Thinking of discarding that idea just because Google said someone in Antarctica is already working on it?

“Come off it”

No go lose concentration.

Yeyu!

Author:

Chinonso Ohakwe

UX Designer & Management Professional.

+2349097174236. +2349091134000

hello.ohakwechinonso@gmail.com