The Beautiful Mess: Frame-shifting and what it means
Newsletter 004: Lessons from this week and the curse of being over-productive!
Hello Meta Builders,
Welcome to Zoiver Media’s The Beautiful Mess newsletter, a weekly reflection on the art, science, and chaos of building in the age of AI.
Here, we explore how ideas take shape through systems, curiosity, and imperfection. Because all meaningful creation begins as a mess, albeit a beautiful one.
Quite a week. If I look back at it, there are two things that stand out. We have been in productive overdrive, the type where you forget you exist because you forget to blink, and you forget to blink because you have been zoned in your computer screen. The output is productive, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Over-productivity, isn’t, that is.
The second is meaningful and exciting meetings. I do not mean the type where you are logged in for hours and days. I try to stay away from those as much as possible. I mean the type where you meet people, preferably in person, or even virtually, but it is about meeting another person, about getting to know then or about sharing ideas and having a conversation with them. If I look back, such interactions always pay back in a compounded way over time. For me personally, they motivate me and excite me. One of the pleasures of being an entrepreneur is to meet a variety of folks across a variety of cultures, and this will remain to be one of the most energizing aspects of my life.
This week, we will talk about frames of reference. Take meetings for example. If we change the frame of reference for them, it is possibly that we will get to know a human in it, and that can translate into infinite possibilities.
The Hidden Superpower of Every Successful Entrepreneur: Mastering the Art of Frame Shifting
There’s a hidden battle happening inside your mind every day. Not between different ideas, but between different ways of seeing those ideas. This battle determines whether you’ll spot a ‘billion-dollar opportunity’ that everyone else walks past, or whether you’ll make decisions with absolute certainty that later turn out to be spectacularly wrong.
The culprit? Your frame of reference, the lens through which you perceive the world.
Consider this: Two people look at the same coffee shop on a Monday morning. One person, say a venture capitalist, sees a failed business model with too much overhead. Another person, a businessman, sees something entirely different. They see a community hub where people gather, where trust is built, where routines are formed. The first person has the financial frame. The second person has the opportunity frame. Same coffee shop. Radically different conclusions.
This ability to shift your frame of reference, to see things from multiple, even contradictory perspectives, is perhaps the most underrated superpower in entrepreneurship. It’s what separates the people who disrupt industries from those who get disrupted. It’s what allows ordinary entrepreneurs to create extraordinary outcomes. Yet, it’s almost never taught systematically.
Einstein understood this deeply. In his famous reflection, he said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
This is frame shifting in its essence: spending more time asking which lens to look through than looking through any single lens.
The Curse of a Fixed Frame: Why We Make Terrible Decisions
We suffer from an inherent human curse: we assume the way we see things is the way things are.
This manifests in predictable ways.
Strong Opinions Without Understanding Context
Example: We form fierce judgments about public figures based on superficial traits, how they dress, their mannerisms, their social media persona, something we heard about them without knowing whether it was true or not, completely divorced from their actual capabilities or character. We take these surface-level observations and build elaborate mental models on top of them. Result? We’re absolutely certain about things we barely understand.
Judgment by Appearance, Not Competence
In professional settings, this translates to hiring decisions based on “fit,” discounting candidates because they don’t match some imagined ideal. We promote people who sound confident, even when confidence is divorced from actual judgment. We avoid people who make us uncomfortable, even when discomfort might be the catalyst for growth.
The Illusion of Black and White
The world presents itself to us in binary. Success or failure. Talent or incompetence. Innovation or legacy thinking. But this is just your frame. The moment you shift it, shades of gray appear everywhere. That “failed” venture? It might be a perfect proof-of-concept for a different market. That “boring” traditional company? It might possess distribution capabilities worth billions that a startup will never rebuild.
The most dangerous part is that we’re unconscious of our frame. We don’t think, “I’m looking at this through a financial lens.” We think, “This is reality.” That’s the trap.
How Frame Shifting Creates Massive Changes: Real Examples
Steve Jobs: Reframing What a Computer Company Actually Is
In 1997, Apple was on the brink of collapse. The company had a technical problem: it made computers with complex specifications. Its solution? Better marketing of those specs. But then Steve Jobs shifted the frame entirely.
He stopped asking, “How do we market our computers?” He started asking, “What is Apple actually for?”
The answer: not computers. Values. Creativity. Human potential. The intersection of technology and the liberal arts. When he launched the “Think Different” campaign, he completely inverted the marketing paradigm. He didn’t talk about processor speeds or memory. He showed images of people who changed the world because they thought differently.
By eliminating 70% of Apple’s product line, he reframed complexity as weakness and focus as strength. By fixing distribution problems that competitors ignored, he reframed logistics as customer experience. By insisting on design that most engineers considered wasteful, he reframed aesthetics as essential strategy.
Same company. Completely different frame. The result: a trillion-dollar enterprise built not on technical superiority but on understanding that people crave meaning instead of specifications.
The lesson: When you shift from “What do we sell?” to “What do we stand for?”, things change!
Netflix vs. Blockbuster: The Frame That Determines Who Survives
Blockbuster had a frame: “We are a video rental business with physical stores.” Within that frame, the company made perfect sense. Build more locations. Stock popular titles. Maximize late fees. This frame was so strong that even as Netflix emerged, Blockbuster didn’t see it as a threat for years.
Netflix had a radically different frame: “We are solving the problem of convenient entertainment access.” Within this frame, physical stores were irrelevant. The mail could be a distribution channel. Eventually, the internet could be. Technology was irrelevant. The frame was the thing.
Blockbuster’s financial model depended on rental fees. Late fees were a crucial revenue stream. When Netflix offered “no late fees,” Blockbuster dismissed it as unsustainable. Why? Because within their frame, late fees made perfect business sense. They didn’t see that they were solving for revenue extraction when customers wanted them to solve for convenience.
Netflix kept shifting its frame. First from video rental to content delivery. Then from DVDs to streaming. Then from licensing content to creating it. Every frame shift opened new possibilities.
When Blockbuster finally tried to compete, they were playing in Netflix’s frame, not their own. By then, it was too late.
The lesson: Your frame determines not just your strategy—it determines what problems you’re even capable of seeing.
Sara Blakely & Spanx: Questioning Why Things Have to Be Done This Way
Sara Blakely didn’t invent shapewear. Women had been wearing shapewear for decades. What she did was ask a different question: Why does shapewear have to feel this way?
She cut the feet off her pantyhose because she was tired of the visible panty line under white pants. That’s not a sophisticated innovation. That’s a frame shift: “What if the solution is subtraction instead of addition?”
She kept asking questions that seemed absurd within the existing frame:
“Why can’t we make a bra entirely out of hosiery material?”
“Why can’t we put shaping inside denim?”
“Why does it have to be done this way?”
Each question shifted the frame from “How do we make shapewear better?” to “Why are we accepting these constraints in the first place?” The answers led to a billion-dollar company built by someone who didn’t have a background in fashion, didn’t have capital, and didn’t have industry connections.
What she had was the ability to question the frame that everyone else had accepted.
The lesson: Most breakthroughs don’t come from working harder within the existing frame. They come from asking whether the frame itself is wrong.
Elon Musk & Tesla: Reframing Transportation as Energy
When Elon Musk talks about Tesla, he doesn’t talk about “making better cars.” If you listen carefully, he talks about “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
That’s a completely different frame.
Within the car manufacturing frame, Tesla is a car company competing with Ford and Chevrolet on efficiency, performance, and features. That’s a brutal, low-margin business with entrenched competitors. Within the sustainable energy frame, Tesla is integrating energy generation (solar), energy storage (batteries), and energy consumption (vehicles) into a single system.
The car becomes merely one expression of an integrated energy ecosystem. Now Elon can talk about the Gigafactory, solar roofs, power walls, and autonomous fleets all as part of the same coherent vision.
This frame shift enabled Tesla to think about public transit, heavy-duty trucks, and shared autonomous fleets, not as diversification, but as different manifestations of the same core mission. It attracted capital, talent, and regulatory support that pure automotive competitors couldn’t access.
The lesson: Reframe your industry from “what we make” to “what problem we solve globally”, and suddenly the competitive landscape transforms.
IKEA: Reframing Furniture from Luxury to Democracy
For most of history, good design was expensive. That was the frame: Design is a luxury for the wealthy. This frame seemed immutable. Of course good design costs money. Of course the average person accepts mediocre furniture.
IKEA shifted the frame: What if good design should be available to everyone? Not as a compromise where it’s “good enough for the price”, but as genuinely good - beautiful, functional, well-made, and affordable.
This frame shift led to the flat-pack revolution. It forced the company to rethink manufacturing, suppliers, logistics, and design methodology. But the fundamental shift was not operational. It was philosophical: reframing who deserves good design.
Today, IKEA is taking this frame shift even further with “Design for Disassembly”, shifting the frame from linear consumption (”buy, use, discard”) to circular thinking (”design for multiple lives”). Same company, new frame, new possibilities.
The lesson: The frame determines not just how you operate but who you serve and what’s possible.
Dollar Shave Club: Reframing an Entire Distribution Model
For decades, razors were sold through retail channels: supermarkets, drug stores, specialty shops. The frame was so strong that it seemed inevitable. Gillette had built a moat around this model by owning shelf space and shelf positioning.
Then Dollar Shave Club asked: What if you didn’t need to be in stores? What if the product came directly to people’s homes?
That single frame shift, from retail distribution to direct-to-consumer subscription, made the product cheaper. It made it more convenient. It let the company build a direct relationship with customers instead of being mediated through retail gatekeepers. It created recurring revenue instead of one-time transactions.
And it forced Gillette, a company worth billions, to completely redesign their business model because their existing frame (retail dominance) had become a liability.
The lesson: Sometimes the biggest opportunities don’t come from making a better product. They come from shifting how the product reaches people.
When Your Frame of Reference Blinds You to Reality
The coffee shop example from the beginning illustrates a critical point: your frame of reference determines what you notice and what you miss.
If you visit a coffee shop at 9 AM on a weekday, you notice the pace is different from Friday evening. If you’re there at a different location, like an airport, the customer behavior is different. Same coffee shop chain. Different frames reveal different truths.
This is where frame shifting becomes essential for decision-making quality. Without frame shifting, you’re blind. You see the coffee shop at one moment in time, in one location, and you make decisions as though that snapshot is reality. You might decide to open five more locations, never realizing that morning behavior doesn’t predict evening profitability, or that location dynamics are completely different.
With frame shifting, you see complexity. You think about the customer at different times of day. You consider different neighborhoods. You think about the barista’s experience, not just the customer’s. You think about supply chain economics, not just transaction economics. You ask: “Why do customers come at this time and not others? What would change that?”
This shift from monolithic thinking to multidimensional thinking is what separates mediocre entrepreneurs from exceptional ones.
The Practical Framework: How to Shift Your Frame
Frame shifting is a learnable skill. Here are the mechanisms:
1. Ask “Why?” Relentlessly (Not for Root Cause, But for Context Expansion)
Most people use “Why?” to find the root cause: Why did this fail? Why did we lose? Why did the customer churn? But the deepest form of “Why?” is contextual: Why do people want this? Why is the current solution inadequate? Why do we assume this is the only way to do it?
2. Shift Your Physical and Mental Perspective
Don’t just think about the problem from your desk. Go where the problem exists. Stand where your customer stands. See through their eyes. Literal movement changes what you notice. A person examining a product from across the room notices different things than someone using it. The user discovers pain points the observer never sees.
3. Invite Perspectives from Outside Your Frame
Engineers see problems as technical. Marketers see them as communications challenges. Finance sees them as numbers. None of them is wrong, but none of them is complete. The breakthrough often happens when you synthesize contradictory perspectives rather than eliminating the contradictions.
4. Challenge Your Assumptions by Making Them Explicit
You probably operate with dozens of unconscious assumptions.
“Customers want to go to stores.”
“Pricing is limited by production costs.”
“Products need to be sold through established channels.”
“This is how things have always been done.”
The moment you surface these assumptions, you can question them.
5. Ask “What If?” Instead of “How Can We?”
“How can we make our business more profitable?” keeps you within the existing frame. “What if profit wasn’t the primary measure? What if growth wasn’t the goal? What if our customer wasn’t who we think it is?”.
These questions open entirely new frames.
Why Entrepreneurs Need This More Than Anyone
Entrepreneurship is the art of seeing what others don’t. Not necessarily seeing the future, but seeing the present through a different lens than everyone else is using.
The entrepreneur who sees a coffee shop and envisions a different model, the one who sees a distribution problem as a design opportunity, the one who questions why things have to be done a certain way, are the people who build empires. And yet, frame shifting isn’t taught in most entrepreneurship education. We teach frameworks, we teach spreadsheets, we teach pitch decks. We rarely teach the meta-skill: How do you see differently?
This is precisely what’s missing. When you understand that Steve Jobs didn’t invent new computer technology but he reframed what computers are for, you realize that the most valuable skill is perspective.
When you see Netflix’s entire rise built on asking “What if delivery mechanisms changed?” rather than “How do we make rental stores obsolete?”, you realize that the difference between disruption and obsolescence often comes down to which frame you’re operating from.
The Entrepreneurial Imperative: Build This Into Your Thinking
If you want to create something that matters, you need to become a master of frames. Not because it sounds sophisticated, but because it’s how you avoid the trap that killed Blockbuster, how you find opportunities that others miss, how you make decisions that compound instead of regret.
Start practicing today!
When you see a problem, don’t immediately solve it. First, ask:
What frame am I looking at this through?
What would change if I shifted perspectives?
What assumptions am I making that might be wrong?
Who else would see this differently?
When you make a decision, ask:
Is this the best decision within this frame, or is there a better frame I should be operating from?
When you face competition, ask:
They’re competing better within the existing frame. What if we changed the frame entirely?
This is the hidden superpower. You don’t have to be the smartest person, or the person with the most capital, or the person with the most experience. It’s the person who can see the world in multiple ways and choose the view that reveals new possibilities.
It’s the person who doesn’t just play the game better. They change which game is being played.
The Closing Truth
Your frame of reference will either liberate you or imprison you. It will either show you the enormous possibilities that exist or convince you that the present constraints are permanent. The best entrepreneurs in the world, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, from Sara Blakely to the founders of Netflix and Airbnb - they all share this one superpower. They learned to question their frame before they trusted it.
That’s not so much genius as it’s practice. And it’s the most essential skill for anyone who wants to build something that matters.
A Personal Challenge
Think about a problem in your business or life right now. Not the solution you’re trying to implement but the problem itself.
Now ask:
What frame am I looking at this through?
What would change if I looked at it from a different angle?
Who would see this differently?
What if the constraint I’m assuming is actually irrelevant?
The answers might be uncomfortable. The answers might demand you question strategies you’ve committed to, investments you’ve made, identities you’ve built.
That discomfort is where breakthroughs live.
That’s where billion-dollar ideas come from.
That’s where frame shifting takes you.
Do forward this newsletter to others in your network and ask them to sign up. We are covering something here that is fundamental to each one of us in the Age of AI - how to lead an entrepreneurial life as a non-negotiable.
Think meta, build real.
With warmth,
Team Zoiver!