The Owaves team had the honor of interviewing Marty Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone on the Owaves podcast. Marty is a TIME Magazine Top 100 Inventor in History, a Wireless Hall of Fame inductee, a Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering, a Marconi Prize winner and chair of the business advisory team at Owaves. Marty is not only known as an entrepreneurial legend, but also as a health and wellness enthusiast. Here are three key lessons from Marty in navigating the technology industry and life.
1. Create technologies that solve problems
As technological innovations grow, Marty Cooper highlights the importance of creating technologies that improve health, wellness, and quality of life for people all around the world. He reflects on the ways in which the cell phone has transformed humanity, referencing how cell-phones have helped bring “over a billion people” out of severe poverty. For example, the adoption of mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa has enabled access to education, research, and financial services (Reducing Poverty with Mobile Phones in Sub-Saharan Africa, The Borgen Project, 8.6.17). Additionally, cell-phones have improved health outcomes in less developed countries by increasing access to medical advice and diagnoses. Doctors can now make remote diagnoses and examinations, such as eye-tests and ultrasonic analysis using cell-phone mediated health devices. Marty also talks about the potential of data analytics in supporting wellbeing and understanding the human body.
“I’m enchanted by the opportunities for data analytics. Just think about how much we could learn about a person, if we measured virtually everything that is happening to you in life, in a way that doesn’t intrude in your privacy. Wow, is that an important, and difficult problem… But if you could take all that data, and just analyze the data, think about what you’ll learn about what it is appropriate to have a full and complete life that is consistent with evolution! I think we have an amazing opportunity to use the data that comes from the cell phones that we carry with us to understand what it takes to live an appropriate life. Because I think that’s what Owaves is all about, is understanding what is the fundamental nature of a human being, what’s the body all about.”
While technological innovations have improved quality of life, Marty talks about how a one-size fits all approach to creating products may no longer apply due to individual differences. This calls attention to the need for personalized solutions that target more specific problems different people experience. One prominent example of this is the Precision Medicine Initiative by the All of Us Research Program that aims to personalize medical treatment by considering individual differences.
“Historically, we have tried to put people in boxes and silos because we’ve had this view that we have economies of scale. If you make all the products the same, they’re cheaper and therefore more people can have them. And we’ve forgotten the fact that every human being is different than every other human being. That’s a fact. Well, it’s a fact that I made up, but…but it happens to be true. If you examine the human genome, the number of possibilities is so great that it’s pretty close to a probability of the definition of what zero is…the probability that two people are identical. Identical twins are not identical…they’re not even close to being identical.”
To create personalize solutions, Marty emphasizes how technology can be used to measure our physiology and contribute to health research. Data analytics from health tracking apps can be used to monitor and analyze physical wellbeing.
“One of the problems with older people… is falling…we don’t really know what happens when somebody falls, and you would think that having, just as an example of an experiment, pick 10,000 people and have them wearing their cell phones or something or something, and measure the data and see what really happens when somebody falls. That’s just a trivial example. There are so many things that you could measure…with regard to Owaves, you could validate a lot of the things that the circadian rhythm analytics predict, but you could validate them with real experimental evidence.”
2. Be objective and patient
For the entrepreneurs out there, Marty’s biggest advice for coming up with an original idea is objectivity. This means removing your personal enthusiasm towards your product and objectively assessing whether it solves a real problem for society. When the first mobile phone prototype was created, Motorola went through a 10-year process of bringing it to the market. Marty states the most important part of this 10-year gap was objectivity. He references his team and colleagues at Motorola who prioritized doing what was right for society over personal interests.
“What were the things that were important to that 10-year period? The number one was objectivity. The people, at least at Motorola, did not…were not thinking about their own personal objectives. They were thinking about doing what’s right. And so, the chairman of the company, Bob Galvin, had a responsibility to the investors of the company, and he also had ethical views. He wanted to do what’s right for society and he ended up betting the company on ideas of a bunch of kooks like me, which was just…just incredible…we were not thinking about ourselves, about our personal fortunes, we were thinking about doing the thing that was right for society, right for people.”
A significant aspect of objectivity is understanding whether your new product is a realistic solution to a problem.
“You have to pick a problem and come up with an objective solution that is real, and coming up with a real solution, that doesn’t happen very often. So there’s a little patience involved in that.”
Marty talks about how good products take time, simply because good products solve real problems, and real problems are often complicated. Thus developing innovative products requires patience and persistence.
“There are very often no shortcuts. If you look at the really hard problems, we don’t solve them all that quickly, and it takes a little patience and hard work and persistence.”
Even Motorola slowed things down when developing their cellphone to ensure they are sticking to their mission of keeping people mobile.
“For a period of time, Motorola was actually slowing down the process. The Bell System was saying, “We’re ready to go!”… And we’d come back and say, well, we’re not quite ready yet. We want to change this… it had to do with the…technology wasn’t ready yet, so we actually deliberately slowed things down.”
3. Understand yourself
Finally, the last and arguably the most important lesson of all, Marty emphasizes the importance of understanding yourself. This includes understanding your values and goals, and consistently working on yourself to become the person you want to be.
“When I look at the peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy, my…my very typical peak is: “Do you like yourself?”
Marty uses the metaphor of the sculpture and the sculptor to illustrate the process of creating the best version of yourself. At the core of this self-development journey is identifying your goals.
“If you understand yourself, you can create yourself in a way that achieves your objectives. The hard part of that is to have a vision of what your objective is. You know, an artist has to have some view, some vision, some idea of where she or he is going. And that really is the hard part.”
Central to working towards our goals is our ability to use our time intentionally. Without setting aside time to engage in activities that align with our goals, we remain stagnant and vulnerable to external influences that may distract us from our objectives. Royan, the CEO of Owaves describes:
“You own your time, because right now your daily flow can be totally dictated or just on autopilot from who knows what influences. But if you are a sculptor and you’re…you’re here in this world and you want to sculpt your life, your day, your future, I feel like time is that common denominator, that unless you set aside time for yourself to give you that freedom to invest in what you care about, it will be taken from you. I think Jim Rohn has this quote: “Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
Marty adopts this philosophy of using his time intentionally not only in his business ventures, but also in his day-to-day routine. With goals to stay physically and mentally active, Marty not only lifts weights and hikes three times a week, but also dedicates time to working his mind daily.
“Exercising my brain and continuing to think is the most important part of my life… So when I sit in my hot tub at night, which I do quite frequently, I do one of three things. Number one, I fantasize. Number two, I solve problems. And number three, I sing.”
Although day planning helps the sculptor sculpt his time, it is just as important to be flexible and adjust your schedule as you go through your day.
“Do you have a rigid view of what this sculptor is going to look like, or is he going to be like this woodcarver that I encountered and he says, you know we woodcarvers never, ever make a mistake. Think about that…whatever you have carved, you can always adjust it and make it into a thing of beauty… serendipity has got to be a part of this thing.”