Hello there, my name is Alex Pooley and I'm a freelance web developer residing in Perth, Western Australia.
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This post is about the terrifying chaos occurring in Iraq right now despite Saddam’s execution, and the fantastic work of a guy called Michael Ware who is an Australian on the ground in Iraq reporting for CNN. I don’t want to turn this blog political, but I had to get this out of my system. It’s easy to forget the crap that other human beings have to go through while we cut roasted food, drink beer, and open presents.
Ware reminds me of another Australian reporter called John Martinkus who is best known for being kidnapped by insurgents for almost a day before being set free. People like Ware and Martinkus are heroes. Unfortunately their voices, and others like them, are continuously drowned out by the sensationalized, regurgitated, and hollow press that is made to fill time slots.
Steve Jobs of Apple and Pixar fame, gave a fantastic speech at Stanford in June 2005. His parting words were “stay hungry, stay foolish”. I’ve read the transcript numerous times and watched the video once as well. I only justed realised that the “stay hungry, stay foolish” idea is my “success formula” (success = ambition * persistence * luck) in different words. Steve doesn’t explicitly mention luck, but there’s the implication that you will catch a break eventually provided you “stay hungry”.
I’ve heard these ideas and stories all over the place since I grokked the concept. Billy Joel sings, “You’re Only Human”, Pete Murray with “Opportunity”, and Scribe raps “Dreaming”.
I left full time employment for a chance at an adventurous life. I’ve been going against the grain for about nine months now. I can walk over the cynical comments, I can dust off from day to day failings, and I can shrug off those who look down on me because I don’t have a “job”. The hardest aspect has been the pressure I put on myself because of the responsibilities I have to others. Inspirational stories like those above help me to keep going, and I hope they do the same for you.
A transcript of his Steve Jobs’ speech is available as well as a video copy on YouTube that I’ve embedded below.
Also, here’s a Conan O’Brien graduation speech to Stuyvesant in 2006. He talks a lot about his background and I always find these types of stories interesting. As you would expect from Conan, the speech has plenty of humor.
Business 2.0 recently published an articled entitled “How To Succeed In 2007″. I would like to take a moment to describe why articles like this are self indulgent tripe, and why it’s an example of your potential to succeed.
The problem with the Business 2.0 article is that much of the “advice” being handed fails statistics 101 sampling. What stuck out for me when reading through these postings is that not a single article includes references to statistics. Rather than providing hard evidence, they simply go on their “experience”. It’s like asking Andre Agassi if he thinks tennis is a difficult game to play. You can read more on the black swan theory on Edge.
Here’s some examples from the article:
“An excellent personnel policy leads to more customer loyalty and therefore, one would probably surmise, higher sales.”
“If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.”
“The image of success is important, but even more important is the ability to focus on solutions instead of on problems.”
Science is falsifiable, it is not provable. Despite this, you only ever see advice from “top N successful business people”, even though it’s equally (more?) useful to get the top 50 failed business people to offer their advice on what not to do.
Anyway, the good news is that this “evidence” is your potential success! This is because many of these people just got lucky, if you don’t believe this then you must also believe that they were somehow able to ensure they were born in a first world country over a third world desert. Sure, they all probably put in a lot of work, but there are many others that have done the same. How much control do you think they really had over their future when they were starting out? Assuming they were lucky, you can get lucky too, but you have to put yourself in that position first.
