All in Entrepreneurship
Talib Kweli Greene wrote an article recently on Medium called In Defense of Ms. Hill. The article is, as the title suggests, about Lauryn Hill, who first rose to fame with The Fugees, and specifically about what rights and expectations we can have of her as as an artist.
One of the cool features of Facebook is On This Day, where it shows you memories of what you posted on a specific date in prior years. I came across this one from Kevin Smith that I shared last year:
It’s New Years Day and many of us, myself included, will sit down and ruminate over the year ahead. What we want for ourselves, what are our plans, what are our goals. And, in doing so, many of us will plan for the difficulties and sacrifices these goals will require.
I have a hard time accepting that being a sore loser is a bad thing. I mean, if I believe in what I'm doing, if I've put my heart and soul into it, if I've given it everything I have, am I simply supposed to accept the result and calmly walk away? Isn't it natural for me to react with emotion? With anger?
The point of protest is to create discomfort. The point of pushing our boundaries is to break things, and, yes, to break through. The point of being different is to provoke an alternate reaction.
These discomforts, breakthroughs, reactions have a purpose. They are to topple the old order, to change our minds, to drive change.
Yesterday, a buddy of mine shared a couple of remarkable phrases he found on Reddit:"At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and none of you knew it."
Or:
The thing is we all want certainty. We all want to know that the effort we are putting in will be worth it. That the time and money and sweat and blood and tears had some merit. And that ultimately, it wasn't all for nothing. But the truth is, that that isn't life. You won't know any of that for a fact.
As parents, we always strive to do the best for our kids - to give them the comfort, the opportunities and the means that we never had. It's the natural progression of things - to always want more for our kids than what we had when we were children.
"You have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing...because it's so hard, that if you don't, any rational person would give up...the ones that were successful, loved what they did, so they could persevere...and the ones that didn't love it, quit, because they're sane!"
When you’re cooking a dish, it makes sense to have the best individual ingredients possible. It’s fair to say that the better the ingredients, the better the end product.
If you don’t, you’re putting the entire meal at risk. Not just the taste of it, but the entire experience (during and after).
It was the late 1800's and James McNeill Whistler (the man behind the painting "Whistler's Mother"), was at a party with Oscar Wilde (considered to be one of the great wits of the nineteenth century). Apparently, Wilde also had the reputation of appropriating clever expressions spoken by others.
There's a whole new world out there where everything that we took for granted over the last 10, 20, 30 years is now being democratized. Access to money, technology, infrastructure, is a non-issue. You just need a good idea. And the balls to go do it.
On July 25th, 1965, Bob Dylan went onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in his electric guitar and played the chords to "Maggie's Farm". The audience, who had come to see an acoustic poet, the folk voice of the generation, were caught by surprise.
When we enter into a negotiation (in particular, a B2B deal), our usual (and natural) goal is to push for the very best deal possible. We analyze our situation, detail our requirements, assess the competition and evaluate alternative options that meet (or come close to meeting) our needs.
I was at a conference recently and one of the speakers was sharing the story of how he built his firm - an organization he grew over a number of years, one that he ultimately sold for over a Billion dollars.
We put a lot of work into achieving our goals and getting ourselves to where we want to be, whether in our relationships, our ventures or our careers.
There are a number of writers and thinkers I look to on a regular basis for ideas, inspiration and insight, and Seth Godin is one of them. For many years, now, he has upended my view of what is important, what we should value and what we should focus on. It was his writing that got me started with my own blog.
I've never bought the premise that we "shouldn't take it personally, it's just business".
What it suggests is that we are detached from what we do. That we conduct our work devoid of any emotion. That, on any given day, we engage in our work dispassionately.
All too often, we're paralyzed by this delusion that is inspiration. We harbor grand ambitions, our dreams to 'be' what we aspire to be. But our movement towards those goals remains stalled, as we wait. For inspiration. For motivation. For some exogenous force to provide us with the impetus to change, act and transform.
We should argue.
Seriously.
We should argue.
So long as it's about the content. So long as our intent is positive. So long as we're...
