Old Men Having Fun

I’ve mentioned my Myrtle Beach Golf Club before. Once a small group of friends, mostly high school buddies, we spend a fun week every year in Myrtle Beach golfing. And our connection continues all year long via group email.

The conversations are good natured and redundant. They center on what my kids (and, I’m sure, their kids) call “Old Man Humor.” The routine is as follows: One of us (usually JM) posts a joke or cartoon that is some combination of corny, crude, and/or nostalgic. This is immediately followed by a rush of what, in our era, we called ball busting: i.e., ad hominem reactions.

Recently, a new topic was introduced: our increasingly rapid physical and intellectual senescence.

I’m not sure why I’m sharing this with you. It is disgusting. But also – if you are a coeval of ours – informative.

First, from JM, there was news about the Toto Wellness Toilet – the “best in health” winner at the CES 2021 consumer tech showcase in Las Vegas – which uses “multiple cutting-edge sensing technologies” to scan your body and your “key outputs” each time you sit on the toilet. It then analyzes your waste and suggests dietary changes through a mobile app.

And then, from KK, there was this:

“Speaking of shit, I just read some good news about FIT, which stands for fecal immunochemical test. You are sent a small cardboard mailer containing equipment and instructions for taking a stool sample and returning the test to a lab…. A week or so later, the results show up on an online patient portal….

“No starving and shitting your brains out, no need to skip work or find someone to drive you home after anesthesia, no colonoscopy!”

I will spare you the comments from the group that have followed.

Ridiculous as these particular examples sound, new product ideas are essential to the success of a growing company. The trick, of course, is to come up with products that have a good chance of making it in the marketplace.

And that brings me to today’s essay – an excerpt from the upcoming new and revised edition of Ready, Fire, Aim.