Just Do It

I’ve been reading Spencer Ante’s Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (Amazon) whenever I get a chance to breathe - which hasn’t been often lately.  Doriot’s story is a fascinating one for anyone interested in business, and Ante has been blogging some of his notable quotables (“suck it Trebek!”) for a while on the book’s blog.

This one caught my eye recently:

“A real courageous man is a man who does something courageous when no one is watching him.” — Georges Doriot

Like many things about this man, there’s little glitz to the substance - it’s simply factual, universal truth.  I would further argue that you can replace “courageous” with almost any other adjective and it would hold up: honorable, genuine, ambitious, evil, loving, hard-working, the list goes on.

The point is this: anyone can look/act good under the glare a spotlight… people always act when the boss is looking, politicians kiss their wives when the cameras roll, and people will go to unimaginable lengths to do good for a stadium of onlookers; but it’s when there is no spotlight, no charade, no “thank you” at the end of the act that people’s root self is genuinely expressed.

This is not new, novel or particularly insightful — it’s simply factual, universal truth to live by.  I would think the world a better place if assholes would simply be assholes all the time, regardless of circumstance - at least then you know.

My Life in the Clouds

Okay, I’ve finally had enough — after an unexpected and completely dibilitating hard drive crash (aren’t they all?) this weekend, I have, like all victims overcoming tragedy, decided to pickup the pieces and move on.  I am therefore officially making it my goal for 2009 to shift more than two-thirds of my digital existence to the greener pastures of “The Cloud”.

• Goodbye Microsoft Office, hello Google Docs
• Goodbye Quicken, hello Mint
• Goodbye bookmarks, hello Delicious [again]
• Goodbye folders, hello Flickr [exclusively]
• Goodbye iTunes… oh wait :(

IT fanboys may scoff at how quickly I shake off my longheld ties to physical disks and pricey programs, which they will claim to be “more secure”… to which I say:

Anyone willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. — Benjamin Franklin

Freedom, in this case, is our inalienable right to have our information (and media) at any time, in any place, and displayed on any acceptable device with complete integrity and usefulness; to own this information despite that we do not physically possess it; and to decide one day, on a whim just as impetuous as this one, to move our lives and information from one cloud to another.

“We the people” need a Thomas Payne for the Information Age.

Graduates: Keep Learning (That Goes for Everyone)

The graduation season may have passed, but Jonathan Rosenberg (Google’s SVP of Product Development) has some sound advice to offer recent grads, aspiring Googlers and CEOs alike:

Keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn’t end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market.  Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

Insatiable curiosity which inspires a lifelong pursuit of knowledge is a quality that doesn’t get mentioned enough.  While few fields reward such behavior directly, save for perhaps R&D and academia, it is definitely the most universal of qualities I have found among the truly successful and interesting people I have had the pleasure to meet over the years.