In his recent talk at the London School of Economics (listen the podcast here for free), Thomas L. Friedman, bestselling author of The World Is Flat, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, made a great point about the financial crashes in history and compared to that of today.

His reasoning goes like this:

• In the late 1800’s, when the US railroad bubble collapsed, it left the country with an amazing railroad network.
• In the early 2000, when the dot com bubble burst, it left us with a highly developed Internet infrastructure.
• When this latest credit bubble broke at the end of last year, it left us with nothing more than half-built condos and worthless credit.

This got me thinking: In the end, companies go down all the time, people lose their jobs every day, and there is no such thing as financial security. The world is fragile and unpredictable. If my employer went bankrupt, pretty much no one would notice. Or even more, if my tiny home business didn’t fly, who on earth would care?

That’s why we need to ask ourselves a new question: If your company went down today, what would be the legacy it left behind?

There are days when I think life would be so much easier if I just gave up on my most ambitious goals and gave up to the normal way of life. I could sleep longer in the morning, I would be less stressed out, and in the short term, I would have more free time.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll start by a contradiction: No matter what the title says, just doing things is no guarantee for success. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, and you’ll hear that success is a combination of hard work, one thousand hours of practice, and equally importantly, pure luck. Being in the right place at the right time. And if you want to challenge your thinking even more, check out anything written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (I suggest Fooled by Randomness). He will show you how most of the things we see as cause and effect really are just manifestations of randomness at work.

Read the rest of this entry »