Looks like Marc Andreessen has been sharing a lot on the books he has been reading. Which is great, because he’s filtering out the less interesting stuff and only sharing the good stuff! 
This story on persistence inspires me. I’ve quoted Vinod Khosla a lot on this already, but I’ll write it to remind myself: Part of entrepreneurship is persistence. When you run into an obstacle, you either plough through it or you give up (and do something else).
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I have held previous jobs where I felt just absolutely shitty and felt just completely helpless, not knowing how to dig myself out of the deepest trench in my life. Out of challenging moments and difficult times, you always learn something out of it. Consider it character building–the tough way. I read this today and am sharing this here to remind myself in future:
Among small-business owners and employees, those with a stronger sense that they control what happens to them in life are less likely to become angry, depressed, or agitated when faced with conflicts and strains on the job. But those who feel little control are more prone to getting upset or even quitting.
In a study of 7,400 men and women in London civil service jobs, those who felt they had to meet deadlines imposed by someone else and had little say in how they did their work or with whom they did it had a 50 percent higher risk of developing symptoms of coronary heart disease than those with more job flexibility. Feeling little control over the demands and pressures of the work we have to do holds as a great risk of heart disease as risk factors like hypertension.
That is why, of all the relationships we have at work, the one with our boss has the greatest impact on not just our emotional health, but also our physical health.
Two men went fishing. One was an experienced fisherman, the other wasn’t. Every time the experienced fisherman caught a big fish, he put it in his ice chest to keep it fresh. Whenever the inexperienced fisherman caught a big fish, he threw it back. The experienced fisherman watched this go on all day and finally got tired of seeing the man waste good fish. “Why do you keep throwing back all the big fish you catch?” he asked. The inexperienced fisherman replied, “I only have a small frying pan.”
Sometimes, like that fisherman, we throw back the big plans, big dreams, big jobs, big opportunities that God gives us. Our faith is too small. We laugh at that fisherman who didn’t figure out that all he needed was a bigger frying pan, yet how ready are we to increase the size of our faith?
Great story, that I randomly stumbled on. This actually reminds me of something the famed VC Vinod Khosla once said in an interview, that sometimes entrepreneurs fail because they fail to think big enough. The problem is their self-imposed limitations, and they just don’t realize it.
Max Levchin is someone I admire. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he is the co-founder of Paypal that was sold to eBay for $1.5Bil.
Here are some of my key takeaways:
I found this cool interview of him, by iinnovate. Read more about Max on the New York Times.
Interesting thing I read today: Much like how a sculptor’s work is the result of what is taken away, self-control can also be described in the same manner.
Self-control manifests largely in the absence of more obvious emotional fireworks. Signs include being unfazed under stress or handling a hostile person without lashing out in return. Another mundane example is time management: Keeping ourselves on a daily schedule demands self-control, if only to resist seemingly urgent but actually trivial demands, or the lure of time-wasting pleasures or distractions.
From the book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
That sounds to me like people who constantly repeat self-destructive (but addictive) behavior, such as gambling, drinking, .. <insert vice here>. Although it doesn’t even need to be that severe. These days, addiction to TV and mindlessly surfing the wonderful internet aimlessly, squandering precious time is also an indicator of lack of self-control.
It was a painful decision at that time, but I did give up TV. I haven’t replaced the remote’s battery and have been TV-free for more than half a year now. Do I miss it? Only if I start again I will. Have I missed out on the world? Not at all. I’ve also come to accept *not* completely finish reading all my RSS feeds. Even with my carefully culled list of RSS feeds, there’s just way too much information out there, more than I can consume, more than I have the time to separate wheat from chaff. Surfing the web for the pleasure of surfing, I have kept to a bare minimal.
The demon I am fighting today is waking up early. I’m more of a night owl, not really a morning person. But I have taken measures, including external accountability (with friendly bets with friends on how early I will wake up the next day, which if I fail to do, I buy them lunch). Sleep is a waste of time, I am trying to keep that to a minimum. I hate myself for indulging in it.
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I love quotes! And here’s a good one I picked up today from Marc Andreessen’s blog post today:
Marcus Loew, founding father of the motion picture industry and founder of Loews Theatres and MGM:
Ambition!
You must want a big success and then beat it into submission; you must be as ravenous to reach it as the wolf who licks his teeth behind a fleeing rabbit; you must be as mad to win as the man who, with one hand growing cold on the revolver in his pocket, with the other hand pushes his last gold piece on the ‘Double-O’ at Monte Carlo.
As quoted in Neal Gabler’s outstanding An Empire of Their Own.
On another note, today I learned that OLPC’s Linux-based operating system was available for download, and so I wanted to check it out for myself. It’s pretty neat. Now I know what my blog looks like when rendered on an OLPC:
Also interestingly enough, when I uploaded the above screenshot on Flickr, the admin of a group (on Flickr) for the OLPC: One Laptop Per Child group asked if I could use this picture, to which I said yes. Do check out their gallery for more pictures of this laptop.
| Big fat juicy icon. You know you want to click me |
