"The qualities that made for success in a fighter-pilot seemed to be just those sturdy qualities that made for success in other professions; observation, initiative, determination, courage, including the courage to run away. In course of time it appeared that men who had a private axe to grind beyond the public axe of the King's enemies were especially successful."
- Jim Bailey, The Sky Suspended
"If your standards are low, you're going to stop pretty early on in the process."
- Aimee Mann (rock singer)
I should think of ways to practice each of these characteristics.
What are some of the habits entrepreneurs have that other people don't?
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-t ... eople-dont
What is your story of meeting any person in Forbes list of world billionaires?
http://www.quora.com/What-is-your-story ... llionaires
Elon: So we had just an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue screen. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses. So when we went and talked to VP's we could actually say we had positive cash flow. That helps, I think.
[...]
[One] lesson [is], spend very little money. That was a case where I had very little money, so there really wasn’t any choice. I only had a few thousand dollars. And then my brother came down and he had several thousand dollars. We just rented an office for $400 or $500 a month — some really tiny little office in Palo Alto. [It] was cheaper than an apartment. And then [we] bought futons that converted into a couch, which was sort of like a meeting area during the day. We would sleep there at night and shower at the YMCA, which was just a few blocks away. That was [an] extremely low burn rate. [It was] way cheaper than a garage. Garages are … expensive. So we were able to … putter along for several months until we got venture funding. I think that’s a good lesson…. When you are first starting out you really need to make your burn-rate ridiculously tiny. Don’t spend more than you are sure you have.
How to Practice:
Counter-examples:
So there I was at Berkeley, living in my little dorm room on the first floor of Norton Hall, my best school year ever. I could mesmerize an audience of kids with tales from this article and what Steve Jobs and I had been trying to do. I started gaining a reputation as the dorm’s “phone phreak,” which was fitting. Because one day I explored our dorm and found an unlocked telephone wire access box for our floor. I saw enough phone wires going up to the higher floors— there were a total of eight floors of dorm rooms, including my own above the common area— and I tapped pairs of wire and connected handsets to them. The idea was to determine for a fact which lines were the ones going to which dorm rooms. So I ended up being able to play around and find any particular phone line I wanted to.
[...]
...the twenty pounds of saltines I’d swiped from the cafeteria by stuffing a few packets in my pockets at every meal. [iWOZ]
[...]
I did like to use the Blue Box to see how far it could get me. For instance, I would make a call to an operator and pretend I was a New York operator trying to extend the lines for phase measurements, and she would connect me to London. Then I’d talk that operator into connecting me to Tokyo . I would go around the world like this sometimes three times or more. And by this time I got great at sounding official, or doing accents, all to fool operators around the world. I remember one very, very late night in the dorm when I decided to call the pope. Why the pope? I don’t know. Why not? So I started by using the Blue Box to call Italy Inward (country code 121), then I asked for Rome Inward, and then I got to the Vatican and in this heavy accent I announced I was Henry Kissinger calling on behalf of President Nixon. I said, “Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope.” [iWOZ]
[...]
For ages and ages, I always told people how I was the ethical phone phreak who always paid for my own calls and was just exploring the system. And that was true. I used to get huge phone bills, even though I had my Blue Box that would’ve let me make any call for free. But one day Steve Jobs came alone and said, “Hey, let’s sell these.” So by selling them to others we really were getting the technology out to people who were using it to call their girlfriends and the like and save money on phone calls. So looking back, I guess that, yes, I aided and abetted that crime. We had a pretty interesting way of selling them. What we would do is Steve and I would find groups of people in various dorms at Berkeley to sell them to. I was always the ring-leader, which was really unusual for me. I was the one who did all the talking. You know, I thought I’d be so famous doing this, but it’s funny, I didn’t know you had to talk to a reporter to get your phone phreak handle (mine was Berkeley Blue) in articles. Anyway, the way we did it was just by knocking on doors. How do you know you’re not walking up to somebody who’s going to turn you in? Someone who might see it as a crime?
Well, we’d knock on a door (usually a door in a male dorm) and ask for someone nonexistent like, “Is Charlie Johnson there?” And they’d say, “Who’s Charlie Johnson?” And I’d say, “You know , the guy that makes all the free phone calls.” If they sort of seemed cool— and you could tell by their face if they wanted to talk about such a thing as illegal free phone calls— I’d add, “You know, he has the Blue Boxes?” Sometimes they might say, “Oh my god , I’ve heard about those things.” And if they sounded really cool enough, and every once in a while they did, then one of us pulled a Blue Box out of our pockets. They’d say something like, “Wow! Is that what they look like? Is that real?” And that’s how we knew we had the right guy and he wouldn’t turn us in. Then one of us would say, “Tell you what, we’ll come back at 7 p.m. tonight; have everyone you know who knows someone in a foreign country here and we’ll give you a demo.” And we’d come back at 7 p.m. We’d run a wire across their dorm room and we’d hook it up to the tape recorder. That way, everything was tape-recorded— every single sale we ever did was tape-recorded. Just to play it safe. We made a little money selling Blue Boxes. It was enough at the time. Originally I would buy the parts to hand-build one for $ 80. The distributor in Mountain View where I got the chips (no electronics stores sold chips) charged a ton for small quantities. We eventually made a printed circuit board and, making ten or twenty at a time, got the cost down to maybe $ 40. We sold them for $ 150 and split the revenue. So it was a pretty good business proposition except for one thing. Blue Boxes were illegal, and we were always worried about getting caught. [iWOZ]
[...]
In twelfth grade he built an electronic metronome— one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class— and realized it sounded like a bomb . So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police . The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the [Isaacson - Steve Jobs]
One day Steve Jobs called me and said that Captain Crunch had actually done an interview on the Los Gatos radio station KTAO. I said, “Oh my god, I wonder if there’s any way to get in touch with him.” Steve said he’d already left a message at the station but Captain Crunch hadn’t called back. [iWOZ]
[...]
How could some random friend from high school know who Captain Crunch was? I said, “What?”“Oh yeah,” he said, “I know who he is. His real name is John Draper and he works at a radio station, KKUP in Cupertino.” The next weekend, I was sitting with Steve at his house and told him what I’d found out. Steve immediately called the station and asked the guy who answered , “Is John Draper there?” He didn’t even say Captain Crunch. [iWOZ]
[...]
The cop asked me what it was. I was not about to say, “Oh, this is a Blue Box for making free telephone calls.” So for some reason I said it was an electronic music synthesizer. The Moog synthesizer actually had just come out, so this was a good phrase to use. I pushed a couple of the Blue Box buttons to demonstrate the tones. This was pretty rare, as even touch-tone phones were still kind of rare in this part of the country then. The cop then asked what the orange button was for. (It was actually the button that sounded the nice pure 2,600 Hz tone to seize a phone line.) Steve told the cop that the orange button was for “calibration.” Ha!
A second cop approached. I guess he had stayed back in the police car at first. He took the Blue Box from the first cop. This device was clearly their point of interest, and surely they knew what it was, having been called by the phone operator. The second cop asked what it was. I said it was an electronic music synthesizer. He also asked what the orange button was for, and Steve again said that it was for calibration. We were two scared young cold and shivering boys by this time. Well, at least Steve was shivering. I had a coat. The second cop was looking at the Blue Box from all angles. He asked how it worked and Steve said that it was computer-controlled . He looked at it some more, from every angle, and asked where the computer plugged in. Steve said that “it connected inside.”
Sandoval's raw talent has led him to associate with many musicians, but the most important is Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy, who was a longtime proponent of Afro-Cuban music, has been referred to as a type of "spiritual father" by Sandoval. When the two trumpet players met in Cuba in 1977, Dizzy was playing impromptu gigs in the Caribbean with Stan Getz. Sandoval later said, "I went to the boat to find him. I've never had a complex about meeting famous people. If I respect somebody, I go there and try to meet them."
Allen first met Gates in secondary school in Seattle when he was 14 and the Microsoft chief was a gangly, freckled, awkward 12-year-old, but in reality looked as though he was just eight. Despite this, "he was really smart", Allen remembers."He was really competitive . . . And he was really, really persistent."
To help fund the site, the founders created special edition breakfast cereals, with presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain as the inspiration for "Obama O’s" and "Cap’n McCains".[16] In two months, 800 boxes of cereal were sold at $40 each, which generated more than $30,000 for the company’s incubation[17] and attracted Y Combinator’s Paul Graham.[18]
The idea for Teach for America started as a result, oddly enough, of Kopp's desire to be a writer for a magazine called Business Today, run by the nonprofit Foundation for Business Education.
"My education at Princeton revolved around extracurricular things," she says. "Business Today needed writers and I was definitely into writing - I was into journalism.
"So I wrote some stuff for them and then I just got sucked into that organization. Toward the end I was managing the organization, which had over $1 million budgeted and 50 staff members. And I was creating a lot of new programs, running conferences, publishing a magazine."
In deciding where she might aim her leadership, she realized in her thesis that education would be the perfect place.
"Teach for America is really built on the experience that I gained at the foundation," she says.
Straight out of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and versed in fund-raising, Kopp spent the next year getting donations - from the likes of Philip Morris and Ross Perot - to start her teacher program.
Then she hired a staff and solicited applications from college seniors for two-year stints in blighted urban and rural classrooms. Teach for America chose 489 graduates from schools that included the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Berkeley and Yale. There were 2,500 applicants.
PLAYBOY: Were you always so driven?
HSIEH: I always fantasized about making money because I knew it would give me the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. I was always doing little businesses. I started a worm-farming business when I was nine, which went okay until all the worms escaped. I tried other things, but what took off was a button-making business I advertised in the back of a magazine. I was the Asian kid making around $200 a month in middle school from that.
(...)
PLAYBOY: What life lessons came from running a student pizza grill at Harvard, aside from the fact that your best customer, Alfred Lin, later became your chief operating officer at Zappos?
HSIEH: Just like anything else, to get proficient at something, whether it’s playing piano, playing a sport or being an entrepreneur, you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Running the pizza business helped me get closer to that 10,000 hours faster.
Rice credits his speed to his chasing down a beautiful black stallion named Pete. Rice had to run after the horse in order to ride it each day and did what it took to get that reward.
His hands and focus were honed working for his father, a brick mason, on scorching hot days. Rice would stand on the scaffolding and catch bricks from his brothers to hand to his dad — with any dropped brick being deducted from his paycheck.
"Even though I was not playing football, I was preparing myself for it," he said.
2015.11.19 - The Verge - The Hobbit movies were awful, and now we know why
Like a lot of people, I loved Peter Jackson's original Lord of the Rings trilogy (although we can all admit Return of the King didn't quite know when to leave the party). So I was pretty surprised when Jackson took over from Guillermo del Toro to make the Hobbit trilogy, and the first film turned out to be such a boring mess. Even more so when The Desolation of Smaug rolled around, and the problems somehow seemed to get even worse. In what can only be described as the most honest promotional video of all time, we find out why: the movies were made completely on the fly, without a script or nearly any advanced planning.
The above clip is from a behind-the-scenes video on the Battle of the Five Armies Blu-ray, and it features Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and other production personnel confessing that due to the director changeover — del Toro left the project after nearly two years of pre-production — Jackson hit the ground running but was never able to hit the reset button to get time to establish his own vision. In comparison, he spent years prepping the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, and on the Hobbit things got so bad that when they started shooting the titular Battle of Five Armies itself they were essentially just shooting B-roll: footage of people in costumes waving around swords, without any cohesive plan for how the sequence would actually play out. (A choice Jackson quote: "I didn't know what the hell I was doing.")
I started out posting comedy sketches, but they didn’t really get that much attention. I started to post pranks on my channel and I’d get more views on one of those than I would on all my sketches combined. After a while, it got to a point where my subscribers only wanted to watch pranks. I couldn’t even post a sketch video without them saying, “I didn’t sign up for that! You suck! Post a prank!” So, I decided to turn it into a full-blown prank channel.
Curry was born in Akron, Ohio, but grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his father Dell played for the Charlotte Hornets. Curry's father often took him and his younger brother Seth to his games, where they would sometimes shoot around with his team during warm-ups.
Bill Gates (saying he'd be a millionaire by 30)
Warren Buffett (saying he'd be a millionaire by...?)
Q: You share your everydays on your site and via Twitter. Is publishing them an important aspect of the process?
Sharing them is definitely a big part of this process. It helps keep you honest in terms of not just spending three minutes and saying, "yeah that counts for today." If yer putting yer stuff out there, it makes it a lot more objective in terms of whether or not that day "counts."
Q: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to try it?
Yes, START TODAY!!!!!11 Once you get some days behind you, you'll have some momentum and it will get easier and easier to not miss a day. I would also definitely recommend choosing an activity that you can do from start to finish everyday. Having an objective goal really makes it a lot harder to fudge it and start slacking off. A project like this is about the process and incrementally getting better at something so pace yerself and be prepared for a whole lot of sucking!!!!1 :)
Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
Bill Gates
Allen first met Gates in secondary school in Seattle when he was 14 and the Microsoft chief was a gangly, freckled, awkward 12-year-old, but in reality looked as though he was just eight. Despite this, "he was really smart", Allen remembers.
"He was really competitive . . . And he was really, really persistent."
I was working a full time job while I made Gunpoint, so I only worked on it at weekends. I didn’t work on it on weekday evenings – I thought that would burn me out – and I also stopped doing any overtime or freelance work for my day job.
I didn’t work on it if I really didn’t feel like it, and I stopped if I got frustrated. I didn’t cancel any social plans I really wanted to go to, and I never cancelled any family plans for it. In the first year I estimated I worked on it about one weekend a month, and I once forgot about it for two months.
As it came together in the second year, I got more excited about it and worked on it more consistently. I learned to stop judging myself by whether I finished what I expected to in a weekend, and only ask myself two questions:
Did I work efficiently?
If not, what can I change for next time?
If I only finished 10% of what I expected to, that’s fine. Time estimates are wild guesses. But if I spent the weekend on something I later realised wasn’t important, I had to change my process. I couldn’t afford that kind of waste.
In the third year, I started working on it more intensively from my own desire to get it finished. At one point late that year, it looked like I had almost a year’s worth of work still to do. I couldn’t face that, so I cut all but one of the game’s planned scripted scenes, a few planned features I thought were essential at the time, and booked a three-month sabbatical from my day job to get it finished. I released it two months later.
This is one of the best examples of persistence I've ever seen.
I need to transcribe all of these sections of the movie:
56:30 - You've got to make decisions; you've got to keep making decisions, even if they're wrong decisions.
1:07:24 - It occurred to me that I should set definite targets.
1:15:30 - I got rid of all my gear. (Lowering burn rate)
1:17:00 - It had taken ages to go 25 yards...I can be insanely stubborn.
1:21:00 - It was driving me mad to be able to hear water and be so thirsty.
1:23:41 - He thought it'd be nice to just lie there, and it wouldn't hurt...it seemed irrational to keep crawling if you didn't think it was going to do any good...I didn't crawl because I thought I would survive; I wanted to be with somebody.
1:26:20 - He finally got some water and it was like fuel, he could immediately feel himself getting stronger.
One of the most important elements, that we had to learn during our fundraising process was the concept of “Ratio thinking”. Jim Rohn, the famous motivational speaker, probably explained it best:“If you do something often enough, you’ll get a ratio of results. Anyone can create this ratio.”It sounded simple enough as a concept to us, but man, this was one of the toughest things to learn. Here is how Joel described it in a recent article on ratio thinking:“The law of averages really comes into play with raising investment. Overall, we probably attempted to get in contact with somewhere around 200 investors. Of those, we perhaps had meetings with about 50. In the end, we closed a $450k seed round from 18 investors. Perhaps the most important part of our success in closing that round was that Leo and I would sit down in coffee shops together and encourage each other to keep pushing forward, to send that next email asking for an intro or a meeting. In many ways, the law of averages is the perfect argument that persistence is a crucial trait of a founder.”I believe that this is in fact one of the most valuable things to know up front. It requires a huge volume of work and meetings.
Their lone off day of the week nearing an end, Darrius Heyward-Bey and Antonio Brown were plotting how to wrap up Tuesday night when Brown mentioned something about hitting the gym.
Heyward-Bey checked the time and shook his head.
"It was almost 10 o'clock," Heyward-Bey said with a laugh. "I said, 'You go ahead. I'm going to go home and sleep.'"
So away Brown disappeared for another solitary workout. Nearly five months into another season packed with GIF-generating touchdown celebrations and looks-like-a-typo numbers, the Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver is still pushing, driven by a relentlessness that is nearing mythical status inside his own locker room.
"He's the hardest-working dude in football," Heyward-Bey said.
(...)
"(He) was kind of bound and determined to not just be the small guy who wasn't your typical wide receiver," quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said. "I think that always pushed him, small school, multiple colleges, maybe people not always believing in him, just fueled his fire."
(...)
He prefers not to talk about his rise from draft afterthought to perennial Pro Bowler, repeatedly stressing he is "singularly focused" on beating whatever team the Steelers happen to face that week and flashing a smile that indicates prying any further is pointless. It's as if he's protecting some sort of secret formula, even from the guys he lines up alongside."He's all about his business," Heyward-Bey said. "It's like he turns on a switch. It's time to play ball."
An ethos that isn't relegated to Sundays. Brown long ago started wearing his game pants during organized team activities. During training camp, he started running additional sprints with the defense even after the offense's five-minutes of oxygen-sapping dashes were done. Soon, running back Le'Veon Bell and the rest of the skill players were joining in. Brown treats every snap of every practice like it's overtime in the Super Bowl whether the ball is coming to him or not, an example that has trickled down through a group that includes Heyward-Bey, rising star Martavis Bryant and protege Markus Wheaton.
Young arrived one day at the team's practice facility to clean out his locker and saw Rice out on the field running sprints and catching passes from the groundskeeper nearly seven months before the start of the next season.
"When people talk about Jerry's work ethic and say, 'Oh it's really extreme,' they do it a disservice," Young said. "There's an iron will to it. It's over his dead body. Jerry to the core was driven. You belittle that drive by saying he had just a great work ethic. Most people have an off switch and they choose when to go all out. Jerry didn't have an off switch."
(...)
"There was no way I was going to be denied," Rice said. "I kept working hard and my dream came true. I tell kids do not let any obstacles stand in your way. If you want to achieve something, go for it. I'm living proof with my background and where I came from. I didn't give up and I wanted to be the best football player I could possibly be in the NFL and I was able to accomplish that."
(...)
Rice struggled with some drops early in his career, leading some to question why he was a first-round pick. But Lott saw something right away in Rice, who beat the future Hall of Famer with a sly double move on one of the first days of practice.Then Lott saw Rice's reaction to the drops and knew he would become a star.
"You didn't see many rookies with the ability to perform precision routes like that. It just seemed natural to Jerry," Lott said. "After he had a rough game with a couple of drops, I saw him sitting at his locker crying. For a lot of people when they lose, it's not personal. For him it was always personal. It showed how much he wanted to be great."
(...)
"I knew the system. Now I could just go out there and just play. That was the start for me. But I never gave in the situation of, 'OK, I have arrived now.' I always wanted to come back the next year and have a better season. That was the extra incentive to stay focused and continue to work hard."
(...)
"He was so meticulous about making sure he never compromised the integrity of being a great receiver," Lott said.
2010.10 - Wired - Interview with Aubrey de Grey
Wired.com: I’m glad you brought up the differences between scientists and technologists. At age 30, you switched fields from artificial intelligence to biology. It’s been said people who switch fields at relatively late stages in their careers tend to do particularly inventive work. Why is that, and what from your previous scholarship did you bring to gerontology?
de Grey: First of all, research is a very transferable skill. If you’ve learned how to work on really hard problems, you can apply that to a different domain very easily. But the biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.
I came in having made — albeit unpublished but nevertheless very significant — inroads in software verification. So I had a suitably high opinion of my own abilities to research. Second, I was aware of this general trend in science of new people coming in, so I felt confident I had a good chance of making a contribution. Third, from the beginning my goal was not to become an experimentalist with a lab, but a generalist surveying the literature and coming up with syntheses from disparate areas.
Through my wife, who taught me biology, I was very much aware that “theoreticians” or generalists are almost non-existent in biology. Unlike physics, where you’ve got whole departments of theoreticians trying to bring ideas together from disparate areas, and pacing up and down and talking to themselves and not doing experiments … in biology, that’s virtually unknown.
And to the extent it is known, it’s given very little respect, because it’s awfully easy to do incredibly bad theoretical biology just by going out and identifying some interesting problem and reading maybe 10 percent of the relevant literature and coming out with some gloriously economical hypothesis and rushing into print without actually bothering to read the other 90 percent. This happens a hell of a lot.
But the thing is, a small coterie of theoreticians in biology who do take care have a rather high hit rate. If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you’ll find a fair smattering of people who don’t know how to work a pipette.