In the middle of the eighteenth century a man named Jonas Hanway walked through the rainy streets of London and he held a strange thing above his head. It was a frame of wood and wire covered in oiled silk and it was the first umbrella many people in England had ever seen.

The people did not look at the dry clothes on his back and they did not think about how much they hated the cold wet wind of the city. They saw something new and they saw a man doing something different and they decided he was a fool before they ever felt the silk for themselves.

The coachmen were the loudest and they threw rocks and they yelled at him because they thought his new tool would take away their business and the rich men laughed because they thought it was a sign of a weak mind to hide from the clouds.

Hanway walked with his silk roof for thirty years while the world mocked him and he never stopped and he never hid and eventually the people realized that being dry was better than being proud. They had dismissed the thing because they wanted to look like they had high standards and they wanted to show that they knew what was proper and what was not but they were just staying wet to keep their place in the crowd.

The Armor of Rejection

We do this same thing every day and we do it with our books and our food and the way we spend our time on the web. We find a new thing and we see that other people like it and we immediately decide it is beneath us because saying no makes us feel like we have a better eye than the rest of the world.

We think that by rejecting a thing we are showing that we have a deep soul and a sharp mind but usually we are just showing that we are afraid to be wrong. It is easy to stand on the side of the road and say that a car is ugly or that a road goes nowhere and it is much harder to get behind the wheel and see where the path actually leads. We have turned our lack of knowledge into a badge of honor and we wear it so everyone can see how picky we are.

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The jam starts in the head and ends on the road. When a driver thinks a lane is a waste of time, they pull out and create a mess because they judged the flow before they were in it.

– Maya A.J., Traffic Pattern Analyst

I met a woman named Maya A.J. at a dusty bus stop last summer and she works as a traffic pattern analyst for the city and she spends 39 hours a week looking at how groups of people move through tight spaces. She told me that the biggest problems on the road do not come from broken engines or flat tires but from people who think they know what is happening three miles ahead.

Maya said that the jam starts in the head and ends on the road and she explained that when a driver thinks a lane is a waste of time they pull out and they block everyone else and they create a mess because they judged the flow before they were in the middle of it. She sees this in her data every day where 432 drivers will follow a single person into a mistake because they all want to feel like they are smarter than the map.

The Waterfall in the Dark

I felt this same pull last night when my toilet started to leak at 3 am and the water was spilling onto the floor and the sound was like a small waterfall in the dark. I stood there with my feet in the cold pool and I wanted to say that the whole thing was junk and I wanted to call a man to fix it because I felt I was too busy or too smart to learn how a ballstick works.

I had dismissed the work of pipes as something for other people and I had told myself for years that I did not need to know the guts of my own home. But the water did not care about my pride and the water kept coming and I had to get down on the tile and I had to reach into the tank.

I fixed the leak with a bit of wire and a new seal and I felt more like a man than I had in months because I stopped judging the work and I just did the work.

Beyond the Phantom Walls

This is the same trap we fall into when we look at the world of online play and the way people find joy in digital rooms. There are millions of people who look at a site like

gclub

and they wave it off as a game for the bored or a place with no heart.

They have never seen the way the live dealer looks at the lens or the way the cards move in real time from a physical room in a place like Poipet. They hear that a platform has been around since 2004 and they do not stop to ask how a brand stays alive for 19 years in a world where everything dies in a week. They do not see the 8,640 hours of work that go into keeping the stream clear and the banks safe and the games fair for everyone who enters.

They stay on the outside and they make a face because they think it makes them look like they have a refined taste but they are missing the truth of the system. When you look at a licensed place that has served members across Asia for two decades you are looking at a machine that works because it is honest.

You are looking at a space where automated moves and fast pay and strong walls for data are the standard and not the hope. Most people will never know this because they are too busy being the man who laughed at the umbrella and they would rather be wet and right than dry and surprised. They think that by calling it a casino or a game they have solved the mystery but they have only closed their eyes.

Empty Houses and Clean Rooms

The world is full of these phantom walls that we build to keep ourselves feeling high and dry. We do it with the music we refuse to hear and the food we refuse to chew and the games we refuse to play. We think we are protecting our time but we are really just shrinking our world until it is the size of a postage stamp.

We think we are being careful but we are really just being lazy because it takes work to look at a thing and see it for what it truly is. It takes no work at all to say that something is bad and it takes no effort to say that a thing is not for you.

If you spend your life dismissing the things you have not tried you will end up with a very clean house that is completely empty. You will be like the nobleman who would not eat the tomato because he heard it was the fruit of the devil and you will starve while the rest of the world is having a feast.

You will be like the driver Maya spoke about who makes the traffic worse because they think they know the end of the road before they reach the turn. You will be the person standing in the 3 am flood with a sneer on your face while the water ruins the wood.

It is better to be the person who gets their hands wet and it is better to be the one who clicks the link and sees the live dealer for themselves. It is better to know how the gears turn than to guess and be wrong. Whether it is a tool for the rain or a platform for a game or a pipe in the wall the value is only found in the experience.

The culture will always reward the person who says “I am above that” but the world only gives its secrets to the person who says “let me see.” The history of the umbrella shows us that the majority is often wrong about the new and the history of my bathroom shows me that I am often wrong about the old.

We are all living in a middle ground where we have to choose between the safety of the judge and the dirt of the doer. I would rather be the doer every single time because the judge never learns anything new and the judge never feels the click of a piece fitting into place.

Hard to Please or Hard to Fool?

We can look at the track record of a long-standing name and we can see the license and we can see the transparency and we can realize that our dismissal was just a way to avoid the weight of a new thought. We think that by being hard to please we are being hard to fool but the opposite is true.

The easiest person to fool is the one who thinks they already know everything because they will never look at the evidence that proves them wrong. They will walk past the gate because they think they know what is in the yard and they will miss the garden every time. It is a lonely way to live and it is a boring way to think.