That's what we're doing isn't it? When we blog, we tweet, we take photos...the minute we set something to "public" (or don't change it) we secretly hope that someone gets our message... that one hundred million bottles wash up on our shore.
Do you know what your hundred million bottles look like? Is it a person? Is it a job? Is it money?
Is it anything as long as its different than what you have?
Think about what it is... Don't tell me. Just think about it, and pass this on...
All in Random Stuff
I dusted off my analyst skills and crunched some data...
Since October 1, 1928, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit a 5 year low 28 times, including today. Those days all clustered around three previous periods:
April 1942
May 1970
October of 1974
Even the crash of '87 didn't put us anywhere near historical 5 year lows for that period--investors were still way ahead.
If you went back put money into the market right at the close of any day that the market hit a 5 year low, here's what your returns would look like over the next year:
Average 1 year return: 36.1%
Average 3 year return: 13.3%
Even the worst cases didn't look so bad:
Minimum 1 year return: 16.5%
Minimum 3 year return: 9.1%
If I had any extra cash right now, I'd be a buyer.
I was talking to my entreprenuership class the other day and made an important discovery--a lot of them lacked for inspiration from the people around them. A lot of us have great friends--mostly people that life just put in our laps by geography or by shared interest--and they wind up being people you share a lot of history with.
However, those aren't always the people that get your brain stirring the most. You know what I'm talking about--when you can actually feel, even hear, that little hamster spinning away on the wheel. Your mind races faster than you can speak, and you trip over your words as you try and get them out into a verbal blueprint of some big mental breakthrough.
Marc Andreessen once quoted Dr. James Austin on the topic of luck, and how just getting your mind going increases the chances that you stumble upon something big:
"A certain [basic] level of action "stirs up the pot", brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate.
Motion yields a network of new experiences which, like a sieve, filter best when in constant up-and-down, side-to-side movement..."
I have a friend that is always coming up with big and sometimes ridiculous new ideas. Once, he was going to get an aquarium for his apartment and populate it with agressive fish--"fish that eat other fish". He was so psyched about it. I couldn't help but be equally excited, but also somewhat suspect about the feasability of this endeavor. Either way, it got my mind going.
Nate has a similar effect on me, too. He has an idea a minute. Perhaps one day he'll settle on something, but for the moment, he remains the Wile E. Coyote of Silicon Alley--always working up blueprints for something big. You can't help but get the wheels turning when you talk to Nate, even if you totally disagree with him, because you're going to wind up exploring the idea and learn something along the way--or take something away from it that could help you with something completely different.
These are the kinds of people I go out of my way to spend time with. I probably take about three meetings a week with people who have inspiring ideas completely unrelated to what I'm up to, because it's a mental workout for me. It helps me think better and gain perspective about my own ideas--a rigorous cerebral exercise. What I was trying to explain to my students is that, if you're going to make a living off of your creativity and innovation, you need to set your life up in such a way that you spend more time with people who inspire you to think, as opposed to just spending your time with whoever lives on your floor, or the people next to you in class.
Along the way, we've all met pretty interesting people in passing, but we don't always stop them and demand more of their time. That's active management--making a point to be more deliberate in our scheduling, and its something we all should do more of. When's the last time you had a really inspiring conversation with someone? Who was it? What did they make you think about? How likely is it that you'll talk to them again soon? Perhaps you should ensure that happens sooner rather than later by asking them to grab coffee or something. My life is filled with what I call "onesies"--people not really connected to the rest of my world but that I've pulled in because my interaction with them really lights a fire for me.
Who does it for you? Why don't you drop them a line...
Hi folks... I'm competing in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge. Basically, each blogger selects a set of educational projects they'd like to encourage donations to. These are individual teachers and the projects are usually just a couple hundred bucks--like buying supplies, visual aids, etc.
Check out the projects I've selected. If half my blog readers give ten bucks each, we could easily fulfill all of these projects!
But most of all, I want to raise more than TechCrunch does. Why? Because by reading this blog, you're just a better person. :)
The more that I think about $700 billion, the more I think that kind of dependence on debt we can't handle is how we got into this mess in the first place.
Roger says that this bailout is about keeping the credit windows open for small businesses to "support both business and personal economic growth," but at some point don't we ever have to pay the piper? Shouldn't we at least have to feel a little hurt from all our excesses?
Sure, the markets tumbled 7% today, but you know they'll be up 4% tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then I'll bet you they'll be up for the week. Either way, that's not my food money in there and for most of us, stock market jitters only effect our long term retirement plans.
Housing is a different issue, and we keep talking about people losing their houses like it's the end of the world. Let's keep in mind that if someone has to bite the bullet on their house, they don't automatically become homeless--they just move into a smaller house or rent. Not everyone needs a big McMansion they couldn't afford in the first place. My brothers shared a bedroom growing up--a room that I thought was really small when it was just me. Maybe some kids from the entitlement generation will have to bunk up, get a few less cable channels and send a few less texts. Jeans from Walmart anyone? I wore hand me downs... how many kids today do that?
I just don't feel like paying for everyone who made bad decisions. I bought a place in Bay Ridge in 2005 because I couldn't afford to buy closer to or in the city--you know, because I didn't want to buy something I couldn't afford. Silly me. Had I known the government and other taxpayers would have bent over backwards to
My point is that, maybe in the long run, a bit of hurt isn't so bad and maybe we should just take our medicine now. I don't want to crash the system, but it reminds me of why I don't like taking pain medications. If my knees hurt after playing sports, I don't take anything, because I did something to my knee that is causing pain. I don't want to just mask the pain, because then I might reinjure it worse. I'd rather suck it up, so that I know when it stops hurting and I can get back on the field again.
Duh... of course they should. It's about time!
Alana Taylor, who hopefully will be joining me on a panel at the next SXSW if it gets approved, recently blogged about a class she was taking at NYU with Prof. Mary Quigley as part of a project for the PBS MediaShift blog. (The comments on that post are interesting...) Her post wasn't exactly flattering to her professor, which prompted her to ban Alana from blogging or Twittering about the class again--and then backtrack on that, obviously realizing that she taught at NYU, which is supposed to be on the side of protecting, not snuffing out, freedom of speech.
The ironic part of this story was that the class was about Generation Y and new media. While the professor taught about blogging, it seems she never actually expected the students in the class to go out and blog themselves. The professor's reaction was remenicent of an old school mainstream media company--attack the consumer first, stand behind the letter of the law, and then back off to a more reasonable position. This professor told Alana that she had violated privacy rights by blogging about the classroom activities.
Check out the full story here.
Personally, I can't even imagine telling a student they couldn't blog, tweet, or videotape any of my lectures. Why? If I feel confident in what I'm teaching, I should be excited about the idea of opening up my content to the world for feedback, idea generation, critique, etc. I'd certainly be excited that my students would be using new media tools and working on PBS projects.
If I were Prof. Quigley, I'd work with Alana to figure out how to use all these social media tools to really make the most out of the class. How about reaching out to other students outside of the classroom through blogs and video, or creating a class wiki and blog whereby lots of people could participate with their own knowledge and feedback. Perhaps Prof. Quigley would get it if she started blogging and Twittering herself.
Thoughts? Any teachers want to defend the idea of the closed classroom?
I've posted this before, but it's really all I want to say about this...
Empire State Building at dusk, originally uploaded by pinhole.
"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body." - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
I just bought a Vitamin Water in Grand Central. What are the chances that I'm ever going to need to return this, or prove that I was in Grand Central at 7:45AM today?
I also got one when I used my credit card to pay for my Metro North Ticket. Some people check their credit card receipts against their bill at the end of every month. I don't know a lot about ticket kiosks but I'm pretty sure that whatever transaction processing system they have, it's always going to print the same number it on the receipt that it charged on my card. Plus, if I ever really needed to prove a transaction, that record is on my card...in the cloud somewhere.
Either way, if your time is worth anything whatsover, I'm betting that extensive physical receipt tracking has a negative ROI attached to it.
Plus, how many millions of pounds of paper and ink are we throwing away every year in receipts we don't need? That's what I always think about when I get receipts. I've never in my life used a receipt for anything. I charge most of what I buy on my credit card and pay it off right away (or at least used to before I started a company) and so I have a record in the cloud of my purchases. Could I have been mischarged here and there? Probably, but it might have also been in my favor, so I doubt it amounts to much. I've got better things to worry about.
With all the green things we're supposed to be worried about, who's solving this wasted receipt problem? How about a first step that says that no one gives you a receipt unless you specifically ask for it? Weren't they supposed to be doing that at restaurants with water to conserve? Let's conserve paper and ink and do away with this relic of our analog past.