Yesterday’s death of Paul Allen not only deprived us of another of the Computer Age’s pioneers, but it also made me think about the way those pioneers went about their business.

The mythos – the new mythos – has Gates and Jobs and Cook and Allen following their guts, shunning the expected in favor of a solution that was truer to who they were as individuals, so that their products not only worked and worked elegantly, but reflected the visions of their creators, no matter how idiosyncratic they might be.

That’s a great mythos that looks even greater the further you get from MS-DOS, but there’s more than a grain of hopeful truth in it. The first products from Apple and Microsoft were idiosyncratic reflections of their creators because there wasn’t enough money for them to be anything else. Given a couple of billion in R&D they might have been a little more mainstream, a little less endearing, and a little less likely to give you the Spinning Wheel of Death with every sideways glance.

Business does not reward idiosyncrasy or iconoclasm. Those traits are reserved for the entrepreneurs who fail to secure Series B funding.

More’s the pity, because modern entrepreneurism could use a few rough edges, a little bit more of the unexpected and a little less of the incremental advance.

I get why that’s not so; I’ve worked in insurance, and I’m a market researcher. Nothing says “let’s play it safe” like a market researcher counting heads in Insuranceland.

But I’m here to tell you that I may not be your answer, that you should ignore the people I survey, that you should wear blinders and white-noise headphones and just go, push it out all the way, and let your pure vision be seen by all.

Sometimes.

And to understand why, look at pop culture.

Pop culture is collapsing in on itself. Country music rehashes old themes, rearranges hackneyed clichés and mimics itself in a genre more formulaic than bluegrass and one-tenth as interesting. Pop music is scarcely better, save for the out-of-left-field slap in the face like Lorde’s “Royals.”

Movies play it safe with their hundred-million-dollar budgets, sticking to the predictable green lawns of superheroes, raunchy humor, and animation. They’re franchises now, like McDonald’s, save for the occasional fourth-time remake of A Star Is Born. (Though this: I would watch Lady Gaga in anything, even NCIS: Lompoc.)

Comic books are soap operas in the deep shadows of the movies they spawned, magazines are dead, novels are desperately trying to prove they’ve outlived their usefulness, and television brought back Magnum P.I., which I’ll leave right there.

Like most people, I place some of the blame on the digital age, but for some different reasons.

It may seem otherwise, but the essential purpose of our digital card catalogs and wish books – otherwise known as Google and Amazon – is not to show us the vast panoply of the virtual world, but to narrow it down to a handful of choices.

One of the reasons why Google is arranged on pages and not on a constant scroll is because it’s a way of walling off the desired choices from the less-desired.

Less-desired by whom? Well, by Google, of course, whose paid search steals this key lesson from the Talking Fraternity Blues School of Marketing: If you want good friends, they’re gonna cost you.

Much as it pains me to admit it, the right-wing blowhards who are suing Google for relegating them to back pages have a case. You can’t build walls without deciding who stays in and who stays out, and those choices are never 100 percent impartial.

It’s almost worse over on the Amazon side. Buy x and you’re told that other people like you buy y. Is Amazon telling the truth? Who knows – but it’s clear Amazon wants people to buy x and y, not x and j or k or lmnop.

And voice search – you know, the Alexas that are infiltrating every home – only exacerbates the narrowing. Instead of seeing a page of results, Alexa gives you one.

I contrast the Google-Amazon axis with what influenced me as a writer, and how it came into the mix. A junior-high teacher supplied Thurber and Benchley. College chipped in Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” A library shot-in-the-dark added Ernie Pyle’s Home Country. Ed Zern arrived via an NPR obituary, and Red Smith’s stellar book of remembrances, For Absent Friends, came in a used-book sale. That book contributed Joe Palmer, Stanley Woodward, Grantland Rice, Bill Heinz, and John McNulty. McNulty brought me back to The New Yorker, and Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, Ruth McKinney, Dorothy Parker, and Benchley and Thurber again.

I may be the only writer with a sphere of influence that goes Thurber-Benchley-Wolfe-Talese-Pyle-Zern-Smith-Palmer-Woodward-Rice-Heinz-McNulty-Mitchell-Gibbs-McKinney-Parker-Benchley-Thurber, and I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m thrilled.

And there’s no way I could have created this warming, inspiring sphere relying on Amazon and Google.

Back in the real world, the elimination of choice is everywhere. StitchFix grabs your data and then sends you a few minor variations on the StitchFix theme. Blue Apron liberates you to cook fettuccine alfredo the same way everyone else does. Go to Cabo once and Expedia will never let you get it off your mind, to the neglect of the Albanian coast, Malta, Marfa, or a thousand other roads less traveled.

And Spotify – well, it sends you a list of songs it wants you to listen to based on what you’ve listened to, but every time I look at the list it seems bent on drawing me inward, not expanding my musical horizons.

It’s the Doppler effect in reverse. Instead of a stone making outward ripples in a stream, the digital ripples move inward from the source, creating a little black hole that sucks down everything. And meanwhile, the water remains placid as quicksand.

In an environment like that, it’s the rare piece of research that doesn’t confirm things you’ve already known. Do Millennials like to shop on the Internet? Sure; they like having hard choices made for them. Do they read reviews? Absolutely; they want to know what their contemporaries like, so they can like the same thing.

It’s no wonder people say they crave authenticity; after having their lives relentlessly crammed down a funnel, it’s refreshing to see something flourishing outside, like the field of plants over the hill at the very end of Wall-E.

A big reason why maximizing customer experience works so well for businesses of every type and stripe is because it functions outside of this ever-tightening noose of conformity.

You can buy your clothes the way everyone else does, or you can sit down with someone who really cares about how you look, asks questions and listens and encourages you to take chances, so you can have a style that’s your style, wherever that may lead.

You can let Spotify drag you down the spiral to the One Universal Song, or you can go to a record shop and let a knowing clerk blow your mind with Nico, Rochereau, and Roger singing “Le Chant de Malory.”

You can spend five times as much for Blue Apron, or you can go into a kitchen with a couple of pork chops, a spice rack, and a recommendation from the butcher, and see what happens.

I’ve been working on a book on sports training for kids, and in putting it together I was talking with Taylor Twellman, ESPN’s soccer analyst. At one point he said this: “If a parent of someone 12, 13 years old comes to me and said, ‘I want my child to be like you when they grow up. What should I do?’, I would simply say, ‘If there was a formula, all of us would be doing it.’”

There is no formula to any of this stuff. We’re only told there are formulas, and we’re arbitrarily placed into algorithms based on one or another personality trait that isn’t even one one-thousandth of who we are.

I think Jobs and to a lesser extent Gates and Allen understood some of that, but most of the rest of us have forgotten, and we need to be reminded: When passion meets formulas, passion wins.

If all you have are formulas, it might be time to look inside.

Passion And Formulas