A Community of Ideas.
It’s not just who you know or what you know. It’s both. We need the educational tools to learn what we don’t know and a supportive community of peers to help us navigate what we don’t even know we don’t know.
As Charlie Munger said,
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”
Leveraging Community Resources
In school, getting help from others is considered “cheating.” In the school environment, all work products must be ours alone. We aren’t encouraged to enlist the help and capabilities of our peers.
But in business and life, collaboration is the name of the game…
Act from the point of power.
Often, I have stumbled by not paying attention to where I was at in the moment. Sometimes it’s physical repercussions like stubbing my toe or bumping my head, or tripping down the stairs. Mostly it’s mental consequences of wasting an opportunity to create an inflection point. I get distracted obsessing over past events and what I should have done or said or worrying about future scenarios.
It happens to American football receivers. They run their route, the quarterback throws to them, and they get distracted hearing the steps of a defender closing in or planning their run after they catch…
Creative Destruction and Survival
We are in the midst of massive change. Post-Modern life and our economy are in a state of accelerating change. There is no longer such a thing as a stable career or job security. Industries are eaten by software and devoured by robots. Waves of disruption put companies out of existence.
Think Kodak.
They dominated the film industry, creating and developing it. Then cameras dematerialized into smartphones, and film became obsolete. Overnight. All the jobs associated with that industry evaporated, as did the enterprise value.
The age of corporate paternalism, where we can rely on a company to employ us and take…
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Persistence is an excellent concept to keep focused on when slogging through the ups and downs of developing a startup.
Here is a quote from Calvin Coolidge, who was a U. S. president in the early twentieth century, that describes the power of persistence,
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
Entrepreneurship is an essential subject and set of skills to develop, own, and implement. Besides helping individuals gain agency and control in their lives, the products and services created that help customers can significantly impact society.
The process of creating successful startup companies has transformed over the past few decades. The reality of what works and what is just an exercise has become more apparent.
We used to treat startups as nascent versions of existing companies and entrepreneurs as mini versions of CEOs.
The exercise always began with lots of top-down research into markets and elaborate detailing of products and…
In the mid-20th Century, there were unprecedented modernist influences on architecture, furniture, graphic, and industrial design.
Midcentury modern is still a sought-after period for collectables because these designs were practical, functional, and beautiful. Designers created new forms of furniture, buildings, homes, logos, and products.
Designers such as Eero Saarinen, Russel Wright, Alvin Lustig, and Charles and Ray Eames created vases, chairs, book covers, and homes that combined innovation, practicality, and beauty. Forms became sleek and streamlined and stripped of superfluous ornament.
The great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe proclaimed “Less is More.” …
This is an announcement I post to my students each semester. As I was posting this for the spring, I thought it contains some advice we all can be reminded of:
There is an important life lesson buried in these assignments. It is to challenge yourself to do your best work.
Take the discussions seriously and thoughtfully. Practice your writing and communication skills. Remember, there is no good writing, only re-writing.
Go the extra mile in the group work. Use this as a laboratory for navigating team and personal dynamics. …
Questing In Search of an Ideal Lover
In October 1817, John Keats returned to London with a new purposefulness. He was steadily working on Endymion and planning another long poem.
But the world was too much with him in London. In October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine printed an article “On the Cockney School of Poetry”. It was the first of several attacks on Hunt and his circle by John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson. His association with Hunt created ill public criticism for Keats.
On top of this, Keats’s brother Tom now clearly had tuberculosis, and his brother George was out of work and needing money. He…
Yes. We should all always prepare for a severe market turndown. To be prepared is to be forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Preparation prevents piss poor performance.
A downturn is inevitable. We know the market behaves cyclically, and corrections are part of the circle.
That being said, we have no idea when it’s going to occur. It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our collective heads. If we prepare, take it as inevitable, and don’t freak out and sell when it happens, we can weather the storm.
It’s like a rainstorm. When it occurs, we put on our inclement weather…
The remarkable talents of the age congregated there to discuss liberal politics and have literary conversations.
That month of October, besides writing his first great poem, Keats met Leigh Hunt. Hunt recalled their initial encounter
“the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.”
Clarke called it:
“a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. . . . …
