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.
Haha, this has got to be the simplest but elegant nerdy toy I have seen in a long time!
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.
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