Be Misunderstood for Years

In September 2016, Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. The reaction was immediate and enormous. A petition demanding Apple reverse the decision gathered over 300,000 signatures. The Verge called it "user-hostile and stupid." Samsung ran ads mocking the decision. Google released a parody video celebrating that the Pixel 5a still had a headphone jack. A YouTuber proved that a headphone jack could physically fit inside the iPhone 7 without removing any major components, which made Apple's justification look even weaker.

Apple's official explanation was that it took "courage." This was mocked relentlessly, and honestly, it deserved to be. It's a bad word for what they were actually doing. But what they were actually doing turned out to be right.

Within a few years, every major competitor quietly followed. Samsung removed the jack from the Galaxy S20. Google removed it from the Pixel 6a. The same companies that had run ads mocking Apple's decision adopted the same decision. Samsung even tried to delete the ads.

AirPods became one of the most successful consumer electronics products in history. Apple and Beats ended up controlling nearly 50% of global Bluetooth headphone revenue. The wireless audio market, which barely existed in its current form before the iPhone 7, became a multi-billion dollar category. The headphone jack went from universal standard to vestigial organ in about four years.

This is the pattern I want to write about: the willingness to be misunderstood for an extended period of time as a competitive advantage.

The standard version of this story focuses on the technology. Apple saw that wireless audio was the future, made a bet, and the bet paid off. But I think the more interesting version is about the psychology. Specifically, the psychology of the people making the decision, and why most organizations can't do what Apple did even when the logic points the same way.

Because removing the headphone jack wasn't a hard technical decision. Bluetooth existed. Wireless headphones existed. The direction was clear to anyone paying attention. The hard part was tolerating two years of being publicly wrong. Two years of mockery, bad reviews, angry customers, and competitors using your decision as a marketing weapon. That's not a technology problem. That's a temperament problem.

Jeff Bezos said this explicitly in his 2016 letter to shareholders: "If you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments. And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time whether they're going to work. Experiments are by their nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of failures."

But then he added the part that I think matters more: "Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs."

And then: "Big winners pay for so many experiments."

Bezos built Amazon on this. AWS was years of internal investment before the rest of the market understood what cloud computing would become. The Kindle was sold at a loss when the ebook market barely existed. Amazon Prime launched in 2005 when the idea of paying $79 a year for free shipping sounded bizarre. In each case, the decision looked wrong for a while. And in each case, being willing to look wrong was the actual advantage.

I think this is one of the most underappreciated asymmetries in business. Most correct long-term decisions look wrong in the short term. This is almost a law. If a decision looks obviously right to everyone immediately, it's probably not a very bold decision. The truly category-defining moves are the ones that require a period of looking foolish. And the length of that period, and your ability to tolerate it, determines whether you can make those moves at all.

Most founders can't tolerate six months of being wrong in public. Most CEOs can't tolerate a quarter of bad press. Most product teams can't tolerate a launch where the reviews are negative and the metrics dip. So they hedge. They compromise. They ship the version that nobody hates but nobody loves. They keep the headphone jack.

The cost of this is invisible, which is what makes it so dangerous. You never see the decisions that weren't made. You never see the features that weren't removed. You never see the bets that weren't placed because someone in the room said, "But what will people say?" The cost of intolerance for being misunderstood doesn't show up on any dashboard. It shows up years later, when you realize you're still doing what everyone else is doing, and there's no strategic distance between you and your competitors.

Apple has a long history of this specific pattern. They killed the floppy disk drive. People were outraged. They killed the CD-ROM drive. People were outraged. They killed the physical keyboard on the phone. People were outraged. In every case, the outrage lasted between one and three years, and then the rest of the industry followed.

The pattern isn't just that Apple makes bold decisions. It's that they absorb the backlash without flinching. There were no apology tours after the headphone jack. No "we hear you" blog posts. No compromise dongles shipped as a hedge. They made the decision, took the hit, and waited. They trusted time to do what explanations couldn't.

I think this willingness to absorb short-term pain for long-term positioning is one of the rarest traits in organizations, rarer than technical talent, rarer than capital, rarer than good ideas. Because ideas are cheap. The world is full of people who can see where things are going. What's rare is the willingness to go there first and spend years looking stupid for it.

And I think there's a structural reason why this is so rare. Most organizations are set up to minimize short-term criticism, not to maximize long-term correctness. Quarterly earnings calls punish unpopular decisions. Social media amplifies backlash. Press cycles reward skepticism. The entire feedback environment of modern business is tuned to the frequency of "what do people think right now?" And if you optimize for what people think right now, you will never make a decision that people need two years to understand.

This applies to founders more than anyone else. Because the founder is the person who has to go on stage, or post on Twitter, or face the board, and defend a decision that the world thinks is dumb. The psychic cost of that is enormous. Most people underestimate how painful it is to be publicly wrong, to have smart people writing confidently about why your decision is stupid, to watch your competitors use your move as a punchline.

And the tricky part is that during that period, you can't fully distinguish between being misunderstood and being wrong. They feel identical from the inside. The headphone jack looked like a mistake in 2017. It looked like a mistake in 2018, too, to many people. The only thing Apple had was conviction based on their own analysis of where the market was going. They couldn't prove they were right. They could only wait until reality proved it for them.

I think that's the key insight. Conviction isn't certainty. Certainty is easy. Certainty means you know you're right and you can prove it. Conviction means you believe you're right but you can't prove it yet, and you're willing to look foolish until you can.

The competitive advantage isn't being right. Lots of people are right. The competitive advantage is being right and being willing to look wrong for long enough that everyone else gives up and does the safe thing instead.

Samsung saw the same wireless future Apple saw. Google saw it too. They all had the same data. But they kept the headphone jack for years after Apple removed it, because they weren't willing to take the hit. They chose short-term approval over long-term positioning. And then, once Apple had absorbed all the criticism and the market had moved, they followed quietly.

That's the pattern. The first mover takes the beating. The followers take the credit. And the only thing that separates the two is the willingness to be misunderstood.