Concepts

When you create your own business, you start with a concept. What is a concept? It is the idea that will govern what you do. It is the North Star, the guiding map that will show you by what ideas and thoughts you will conduct business. The more defined your concept, the narrower the lanes you will operate in. I say lanes because the more you define your concept, the straighter the line to your goal—whatever your goal may be. The more ideas included in your concept, the more lanes you have to navigate, or worse, allow others to navigate. When things become too complicated, it’s amazingly easy for people to get into accidents until a more natural order prevails, or the entire concept falls apart from lack of planning or external influences. But strong concepts, or cultures, tend to take on a life of their own.

 

When I was in college, I met a professor named Dr. David Bella, who was invited to another professor’s class, Dr. King, as a guest speaker. As a civil engineer, Dr. Bella knew more about culture and concept than anyone else I had ever met, which the university didn’t appreciate. They wanted him to stay in his own lane, and since his doctorate wasn’t in the field he desired to teach, he was scorned and excommunicated from the university. But with his background, he developed a unique way of seeing things, very similar to my way of viewing the world in gravitational loops. When written down, his ideas helped you step outside of the “blame game” and forced you to realize that concepts and cultures tend to create their own entities, and those entities often have minds of their own. By looking at the conceptual “creature,” you understand those working within its rules and structure much better. Instead of blaming one or more people, you realize that everyone is just playing along with the prescribed roles they exist in within the culture.

 

I use “culture” and “concept” interchangeably because, in my mind, they are more or less the same. A concept is something that exists only in the mind, whereas a culture is something that came from the minds of many and naturally evolved to be what it is. Though in reality, both exist at opposite ends of a time spectrum, as each starts with one or the other and then further breeds concepts or thoughts within a culture. These concepts then engage in a battle of the fittest to survive within that culture, and the surviving concepts breed new culture and new ideas, and so forth.

 

Back to Dr. Bella, since his framework of cause and effect began to shape my understanding of concepts and culture. I continue to appreciate his explanation of things because, as I mentioned earlier, it gets us away from the blame game. Why is the blame game such a silly thing? Because to blame someone is to absolve all fault of your own, but as we mentioned before, “it takes two to tango.” We are bound to cause and effect more than anything else in this world. Nothing just spontaneously happens without the cause of something else. You don’t just randomly get in a car wreck; countless tiny reasons end up taking the focus of one or more people off the road, leading to an accident. Hence, we use a word that is linked to the concept of a child having a potty “accident.” It was outside of the child’s ability to respond, being an untrained mental, muscular, and cultural norm that takes time for a child’s brain to learn and adjust to. By using the word “accident,” we don’t assign blame but accept that things happen outside of our controllable world.

 

Yet, there is a cost to wrecking or even denting a car. Because that cost is significant, companies have emerged in our culture to help with that cost by spreading it around. Insurance companies, by concept, are probably some of the first subscription-based services I can think of. Pay this monthly fee, and if you ever have an accident, we will pay for it. It’s a business way of creating a rainy-day fund. Except that because it’s a business and lots of people pay into it, the service surpasses a personal rainy-day fund because if you sign up and then get into an accident the next day, they still pay out the same amount. Conceptually, insurance as a subscription has become a part of our culture because of the value of spreading risk. The concept, in actuality, is the provision of a feeling of safety from doubt, danger, or fear—a fear of random occurrences causing you financial ruin or damage. So instead of you saving on your own, you pay a company to take over that fear for you and deal with it.

 

Why talk about this? Because in our culture, to be at “fault” or to be “blamed” is perceived as one of the most negative things there is. When I was living in Japan, I realized that to be blamed for a problem was so offensive that most people would ignore issues entirely in fear of being blamed for them. Insurance companies introduced an “at fault” concept to determine who is penalized by the randomness of our world that leads to accidents. Yet in German, there aren’t equivalent words that assign fault. In English, we would say that you accidentally broke the lamp; in German, you say the lamp broke itself. This change in language alters the perception of reality to the point that Germans are thought of as rude because they don’t apologize as much as Americans. I would argue it’s simply because their language doesn’t assign blame for something that is obviously accidental. What, you’re saying you meant to break the lamp?

 

While insurance companies are not the only ones to benefit from blame, and not the only ones to assign it, for me personally, it’s all too simplistic a view on things. While simple is fun and easy, it keeps us blind to a much more complex truth—the truth that culture and concept breed laws and rules that we, as the people living and working within them, must abide by in order to succeed. When people are driven to success via adherence to a specific set of rules and laws, you start to see an orderly set of cause and effect.

 

That is, until I took Dr. Bella’s class. I’ll share a couple of his diagrams here in this book. In the bubbles, you’ll see thoughts, and from the thoughts, you have arrows pointing to new thoughts that came about because of the previous bubble—cause and effect in a nutshell. To go with the arrow is to say aloud “therefore,” and to go against or backwards from the arrow is to say “because.” When you take this idea and use it to look at Enron, as Dr. Bella did, you begin to see patterns as to why the outcome came to be—an outcome not caused by one person, but a systematic approach to understanding why, instead of assigning blame.

 

As many a great person has said, “Losers complain, winners listen.” If we simply go through life complaining about why certain things came to be, instead of listening and learning, then we are forever going to be doomed to the cause and effects of our world. Instead of building better, stronger, and bigger cultures, we are going to continuously build up companies, countries, and empires just for them to fall under their own weight.

 

In fact, that’s a fitting analogy, isn’t it? Collapsing under its own weight implies something physical. But is something physical like wood and stone held to the same or different laws as culture or business? Does a culture or business not have a foundation—an ideology that it is built on? As it grows, that ideology is either held to be true or glossed over in favor of quick profits. Does that glossing over and not paying attention to details then weaken the foundational structure of the business? But at the same time, taking time on the details makes the culture or business a behemoth that becomes harder and harder to steer through the river that is time. When times are tough, and this hulking behemoth can’t be steered through the rapids with all the jagged rocks of this faster-flowing part of the stream, it is then smashed on the rocks and breaks apart, while smaller, more nimble vessels can get through or are caught up in the titanic collapse.

 

Now, this is probably the key part of understanding concepts. Concepts don’t change, but technology can change how the concept functions. For example, we used to build ships out of wood. While wood floats, and that’s why we began building ships with it, we began to understand other physical principles of surface tension and buoyancy that allowed us to make ships out of materials that were much tougher and longer-lasting. Without a better understanding of physics, we wouldn’t have been able to build such ships, but these ships now could weather even tougher storms that previously proved fatal to earlier vessels. We then figured out how to put a ship below the surface of the ocean and avoid the wind entirely. These technological jumps allowed the use of concepts to change what was possible before.

 

Radios changed warfare, flight changed travel, and computers changed the way we interact with the world forever. With every new jump, we combine old concepts and stories together utilizing new technology that redefines how we interact with a concept and allows us to combine concepts. Take a cellphone: it combines concepts of communication, play, note-taking, scheduling, news, weather reporting, and so much more into one handy device. Whoever can offer more concepts contained in this tiny device will always be on top of the world in that market simply because of the foundation they’ve built of perceived and real value.

 

What is the difference between perceived and real value? A tool has real value; it has its uses that make any given task easier. A hammer is great for hitting things, usually into other things, by utilizing weight, levers, and hardness. A phone is great for staying connected with others at great distances away from yourself; now it has evolved into so much more. The tool has its use, and it will forever make the job easier—can you even imagine waiting for a letter reply in today’s world?

 

Perceived value is how companies or people tell you that the world is a nail to your hammer, and that by seeing the world in this way, it is easier, more efficient, and makes you better as a human. You think that’s extreme? We, as a species, get into arguments over whether Apple is better than Android! They are both tools that do the exact same tasks but in slightly different ways. Yet we draw lines in the sand between us (as every entity needs) to help define who we are. So if a brand works hard to connect you to a specific ideology of a simpler and more perfect self, and if you see yourself in that way, you will feel a connection to the brand—a connection similar to hairstyle, color schemes, and even friends or family you have. Some brands even enjoy connecting you to your own sense of success and fulfillment by using some of their tools.

 

But I digress. Are we starting to have a better grasp on the concept of concepts? They are storylines; they are the natural progression of cause and effect. And as it so happens, we have been using them in spoken, written, sung, and portrayed art since our species first crawled down from the trees.

 

Now, how do we apply new concepts to old ones? How do we mix and match them? When I was first coming up with the brand for Botanist, I was looking at the concepts that different bars around Portland had been using to define themselves. Some defined themselves as “craft cocktail bars,” which was a concept of putting importance on the cocktails themselves, such as using house-made syrups, juices, purées, and other fresh ingredients. These cocktail bars were following in the footsteps of chefs in top restaurants by questioning the ingredients they used and the techniques employed in order to give respect to those ingredients. I fell in love with this concept, but I noticed that many of these bars that put so much importance on the ingredients were forgetting to also put the guests who came in to drink the cocktails first. Bartending, in general, is a concept of artistic talent that you use to make something that is to be consumed and enjoyed by someone else. Culinary arts are unique in this way. You amass a great deal of technique, knowledge, and wisdom about what you do and how you do it, only to then try and make something enjoyable for someone who hasn’t even thought twice about where their potatoes come from.

 

We can see here, if we are viewing the world in a conceptual way, that a missing concept in this equation is education of the art so that the consumer can appreciate it as much as the artist. But back to bartending in a craft cocktail bar—they seemed a little stiff and up their own asses at the time. So conceptually, I wanted my bar to be more friendly, like the way I perceived dive bars here in Portland. They were friendly and non-judgmental about what you were drinking or eating and were both your ally as well as your caretaker. I wanted to have a bar that put importance on the craft of bartending but also was your caretaker when you were there.

 

I then looked at how some bars were differentiating themselves by the spirits they served. What was popular? Whiskey bars were all the rage when I was thinking of opening a bar, so I didn’t want to be part of a movement that was already underway and therefore I was late to the party for. What else? Tequila and rum bars were definitely a thing as well but didn’t share the same popularity as whiskey. But randomly, gin wasn’t being celebrated in bars, yet here in the Pacific Northwest, we produced a lot of it. I found that weird, and so decided to settle on a bar that cared about craft products, was fun and friendly, and put importance on gin as one of the spirits it carried and educated about. From there, we designed music around that, colors, a space, and menus. The three main concepts became a foundation for us to build a bar on.

 

After the first month, my business partner decided that gin didn’t have enough of a reach, so we were going to rebrand ourselves as a craft cocktail bar that had a gin focus—not a gin bar, but also a gin bar. At the time, I did not possess the strength nor the vocabulary to argue against this point, but now in hindsight, I can see that in this process we removed a pillar of our bar—one of its core concepts that I had put together. Now, I want to make a very clear point here: I’m not blaming nor arguing that this is bad. I’m simply saying that as the creative driving force of this, when I came up with the idea, I had positioned it around three pillars that I was going to use to build the rest of the structure. I wanted to educate patrons and fans about how creative and cool gin was to me, so before we opened, I chose to educate myself on it more and to focus my mental energy on knowing as much as I could about the spirits we would choose to carry as well as ingredients we could use to show how cool these spirits were in cocktails.

 

When we removed one of those pillars, I had to scramble to redefine the bar for both myself and the team that was working there. We all had to change the language that we used to talk about ourselves and what the identity of the place we worked in was. While in general I would say that thanks to this change we were able to come up with some of our best cocktails and ultimately this allowed us to come onto the Portland bar scene stronger, it also proved to be extremely confusing to our staff and the regulars who stayed with us. Ultimately, it gave birth to a truth that in hindsight I find offensive and embarrassing. The truth was that we were okay with changing who we were in order to suit our marketing and business needs. If it meant making more money, we were happy to change. But at the time, making money was akin or equal to surviving in the rat race that was owning your own business. Ideology and conversations about what we think is right and wrong tend to go out the window when we are discussing bankruptcy or continuing on. And when the right and wrong aspects are about your brand image, there isn’t much of an argument there. So we changed; we made certain to tell all future reporters, writers, and guests that we were a cocktail bar first and foremost—with very creative and fun cocktails, a friendly atmosphere, and all spirits were welcome.

 

In reality, all bars have to play a little of both. You can come into it with your own concept, your artistic purpose if you will. But ultimately, your customers and community will decide how and if they will patronize your establishment because it meets their needs. This then gets into the conversation of just how niche you are. The more niche—that is, the fewer people in the world who are able to gain value out of your idea—the more of a price you need to charge for your unique and individualistic service. The more common and greater the need for your service, the less you can charge because it is a common need, and price will come into play more importantly because others are competing in the same market. But in today’s world, most businesses are able to customize their experience uniquely to their user, and bars and restaurants are just starting to get into this game—the ultimate niche, to be what each individual user needs in your local community.

 

But I digress. Instead, I chose to pivot the business to having a greater understanding of the spirits we sourced. The idea had come from when I was working at Urban Farmer in the Nines Hotel. There, we made decisions on authenticity and transparency of certain products that would define whether they were allowed on our menu or back bar. So when designing the menu, we made choices around what kinds or types of sugars we used. We avoided sugar cane since we didn’t care for the production method and its history, instead focusing on local honeys and the myriad of flavors they came in. We only allowed tequilas, whiskeys, cognacs, gins, and rums that were additive-free to the best of our knowledge and practiced higher ethical and environmental business and trade. From there, we talked, preached, and taught about the brands and the ideas that we ourselves were wrestling with—trying to decide what brands and ingredients to support and what to avoid. How do you measure that? What determines if one is better than the other? While at the time I didn’t have the language to explain it, we used concepts to better understand the systems that different brands and ingredients were involved in, and from there we were able to make very educated decisions on what to support and what not to. From a conceptual point of view, this was the first time that I realized that the bar I designed at the tender age of 28 was possibly a little short-sighted and small.

 

I would argue that concepts are the basis of philosophy, as they seem to be ideas that are drawn in a mental way that govern the way more solid things play out in the world. War is a concept, peace is a concept, business is a concept. They are all thought-out ideas that have reason, logic, science, and a timeless history to them. The history is the important thing because it means that countless lives lived all over the world have explored this concept via their work, their lives, their time, and their effort, or their experiences that are then collectively lived. This has given shape to a framework where these concepts play out via the real world as well as our own mental understanding of them. Time allows for there to be an exploration of the poles, the give and take, the transactions, the flow of energy from one form to another, and flipping points—or as physics likes to call it, phase changes. Phase changes happen when the amount of energy flowing through any given concept causes it to change to a new phase of matter—think water to ice or water to gas. It is still the chemical H₂O, but the speed of its molecules moving has changed the way that we perceive it. The speed of the molecules is related to the amount of energy running through it as well as the pressure of other molecules pushing down on it. Think of a pressure cooker—you can achieve much higher boiling points because there is nowhere for the moving molecules to escape to; they are, in fact, trapped. So the faster they move, the more pressure is put into the enclosed environment, which changes key phase change points to higher levels of energy. When this happens, different phase changes can occur, such as plasma.

 

In business, Safi Bahcall came up with the same concept for phase changes that happen in companies when they move from highly creative to highly functional. His argument in his book Loonshots is that we need to learn how to either keep the phase change in the middle—in a state where it is both and neither—or we can segment the business into different parts so that one part can stay at a certain phase while another moves on to a more consistent phase. Again, this is all very similar to physics, and understanding the amount of energy that each of these phases requires for each unique and individual company, as well as the individuals that are a part of them, is important. At this stage in our ability to monitor and track things, this isn’t a random occurrence anymore; we have the ability to create and monitor this.