Month: May 2012

Just publish

One of my favorite lecturers, Fred Wilson of USV, put it best: “I don’t sky dive, I don’t even like roller coasters, so for me pushing the publish button is that moment of risk taking…”

—Barbara deWilde

Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur

The internet’s life lessons

The lessons from Internet school are life lessons. If I can sum them up I would say they are: 1. The Internet and the emergence of networks have disrupted and will continue to disrupt structures that are hierarchical. 2. Learn technologies and use them to build. We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators. 3. Know yourself, have an opinion and share it. You’ll find others like you. Networks aren’t lonely, they’re empowering. 4. There is very little reason to work for others. If you have the skills that make you hirable, you have the skills to create something for yourself, and in turn, for others. 5. Don’t spend all your time refining, get your ideas out there and see if people like them.

—Barbara deWilde

Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur

Baby wants a story

He hates books and thinks they’re food or objects for throwing until the day comes when he starts bringing you books, one after the other, for him to read. He crawls in your lap and stares at you expectantly and may the gods help you if you don’t start reading double-quick because by gosh and by golly, baby wants a story.

–Chuck Wendig
Transmissions from Toddlertown: the First Year

Breaking the cycle

Almost, they did. Lizzie wanted children; he wanted a wife with city contacts and some money behind her. They were married in weeks. Gregory arrived within the year. Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant’s fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The tragedy of the commons

Wherein Walter Cromwell defines the tragedy of the commons, where the incentive to take advantage for one’s own good outstrips the incentive to behave for the good of all.

He tells them about the Pegasus, and about his father’s brewhouse and how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down other people’s trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the common.

—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Snow, alive in its dying

As omnipresent as the snow was, I also sensed its waning, melting imperceptibly by the minute all around me. It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The world is a story, not an equation

I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Small tasks

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail