Introduction: My Business Journey
Selling the Future
In 1999, I was sitting in a Media Studies class and my tutor asked me to do some research on a topic – I forget exactly what – in the library. I started complaining about it to one of my classmates and he suggested I use the Internet. I'd vaguely heard of this thing called “the Internet”, but I hadn't paid much attention to what it was before this point.
My next stop was the library – not to take out books, but to enquire about using the Internet. I assumed it would be a short cut to doing this laborious research. The topic was something I had absolutely no interest in. In my mind, from what my classmate had told me, I imagined a computer programme that would spew out my research for me, which I could then present to my tutor; it seemed like the best cheating machine ever invented!
The reality, however, was far from that simple.
A librarian showed me how to get online, and pointed out how I could type my key search words into a search engine – probably Yahoo! or MSN. The results looked like an absolute mess to my eyes. This was going to take more time than copying it out of books. I was dyslexic, which made it even harder to scroll through the various results and look for the best information. The unfamiliarity of it all made it excruciatingly frustrating; I couldn't make head nor tail of what I was looking at. I soon gave up and resorted to the books. So much for a short cut; in reality it had cost me precious time!
I hated ...