Thursday, October 27, 2011

Notes on Hippies, Ghosts and Pink Floyd

Mother, should I trust the government? Mother, should I build a wall?


For me Michigan has always had this bizarre dualism running through it... on the one hand, its got this history of counterculture and hippie-ness running through it, yet on the other hand, it's such a good school that we'll be able to win at the same game we love to hate. Why should we hate the system if it is set up in our favor? Are we hypocrites if we hang around Occupy Ann Arbor, but later go work on Wall Street?


I lamented the decline of hippies in Ann Arbor after sitting on the side of the highway from East Lansing for a couple hours, unable to get a one-hour ride back to Ann Arbor after the football game with thousands of fans making that drive (many already carpooling). I was disappointed in the city. I had always held out hope that maybe AA was still a hippie town in some sense, despite what is generally a lack of coherent activism on this campus anyways. I would have to think that if this place had any semblance of the 60s left in it, the local Occupy wouldn't have fizzled out like it did. Maybe Wolverines have collectively decided that we'd rather win at the system than destroy it anyways. Maybe we're not hypocrites anymore (?) and yet, it does kind of feel like something is lost in making that decision.


I'm kind of a case study myself in whether or not counterculture and the status quo are actually opposites in every sense; I consider myself to be a self-hating republican hippie. Republican in the sense that I don't think big government or high taxes do anybody any good, hippie in the sense that I think society needs to be as open and fair as possible, and that the most important thing society can do is foster an abundance mindset (which so many Republicans distinctly lack, which is why I kind of resent them and why I'm embarrassed to call myself Republican). Is that a defensible position? After all, isn't the idea of high taxes and wealth distribution founded in an abundance mindset? I don't think so, but at the same time I think that's for people smarter than me to figure out.


If that's true, maybe there is still hope for Ann Arbor. There's an old-school block-M logo on a cornhole board that lives on our wall in the apartment... I never really pay attention to it normally, but draws my attention as I sit listening to Pink and Led every once in a while. Something feels right about it, like this living nostalgia that carries on connecting present to past. Maybe there is something to be said for tradition? Ghosts of hippies past, perhaps, wandering this town from the Stairway to Heaven shop to little apartments where rock is played and self-hating hippies live. Too bad they can't give me a ride next time I need one.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Tell Me About It

Being involved in entrepreneurship here at Michigan, I get to hear a lot of people talk. I've heard from million-dollar CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, student start-up masters, you name it. I estimate I've spent probably about 100 hours, if not more, listening to these people both in person and online recordings. I've pretty much heard it all. And quite honestly, at this point I'm getting kind of sick of hearing about it.


Here's how the vast majority of these speeches go:


'Well, you know, I've been different ever since I was born. I was a crazy kid. Yeah, that was me. When I went to college, I met these other crazy kids and we came up with some crazy ideas. We didn't realize at the time just how crazy we were, but you know what, that was a good thing because if we knew how crazy it was for us to try that, we would have never done it. So we were stupid and crazy, but we did it anyways. When we told people what we were doing, they called us crazy.


But we did it, and it was sooo hard. Sooo damn hard. You have no idea how hard it was. Seriously. We failed like, 18 hundred million and a half times. Maybe 19, I'm not sure. But I learned soooooo much. Sooo damn much. You have no idea how much I learned. Seriously. And it was sooo crazy what we did. Sooo damn crazy. You have no idea how crazy it was. Seriously.


So I have three key take-home points for your. Write these down, because they're really really important. I wish somebody had shared this with me, because I didn't know these. First of all, you gotta find your passion, man. Pash-shun. That one, singular thing that gets you so cracked-up effing excited you give yourself hernias and intestinal bleeding just thinking about it. You have to be that excited about it. Second, you gotta learn how to fail. Fayl-yur. You are gonna fail so hard and so often that average people would probably rather kill themselves with staple guns and hot sauce than fail that hard. Finally, you gotta talk to people. Like, everybody. Net-werk-ing. You should pretty much be best friends with the world. You're doomed if you don't.


Alright, now go do something! Just go do it already! You know that one thing you always wanted to do, ever since you popped outta your momma you said to yourself, dammit I need to go do this! Yeah, that thing! Go effin' do it already! Every second spent waiting is a second spent wasting away. Get out of here and just go do something. Thank you all for your time. Oh by the way, I'm really rich too.'


These speeches sound great the first time you hear it. You feel so inspired and awe-struck, you end up ruining your week by spending it daydreaming up your own success story. It's so satisfying and so easy to do. But I think these types of stories have a lot of problems built in, and may end up doing more harm than good. Let me explain.


Let's start from the top. First of all, the only people we ever hear from are the raging success stories. Nobody ever invites a failure to come up and talk about their story. There is a massive survivor bias built in to this whole network that skews perspectives about entrepreneurship. 'I became wildly successful by following these steps. Follow those steps too.' The trouble is, that doesn't always work. There are so many intangibles and external influences that factor in to the success or failure of a venture, and often the speaker doesn't even realize it. I want to also hear from the people who crashed and couldn't pick themselves up off the floor, whether it was their fault or not.


Second, I'm sick of hearing about how unbelievably awesome you have to be in order to be an entrepreneur. We make these lists all the time... Visionary, dedicated, passionate, leader, creative, innovative, persevering, on and on and on. You know what, nobody is all of those things. And a lot of those things aren't inherent traits. The only thing these lists accomplish is putting entrepreneurs on an even higher pedestal (as if it weren't high enough already). When speakers go up on stage and yak about how mind-blowingly difficult their thing was to accomplish, and how they had to have all of those puffy traits and more, it just further distances those E-Deities from the rest of us. That only makes people less likely to start and far less confident in themselves that they have what it takes.


Third, stop giving us these clichéd lists of what to do next. Follow your passion! You know how many people I know who have found their one single-minded passion at this point? Very very few, myself not included either. This is a very big point that a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand: a lot of people just don't know yet. This whole follow-your-passion thing sounds great on the surface, but let me explain how it puts the rest of us off. Passion doesn't develop out of nothing. It's not like you can wake up one morning and all of the sudden say, 'I want to develop recuperative energy systems for drivetrains!' and leave it at that. That takes a lot of time to develop, and it involves a lot more factors than just your heart rolling the dice and saying, 'let's do that'. So for those of us who don't have a confident answer to 'what's your passion?', and there are a lot of us, the statement 'work on that thing you are passionate about, everything else is a waste of time' translates as 'don't do anything.' Because if we are trying to decide whether or not to start a project and the key question is 'are you passionate?', then the answer is no, and passion never develops.


Finally, I have serious problems with the amount of guilt-induced time pressure that gets thrown around. So many speakers, competitions and events conclude with that sentiment, and it's destructive. The trouble with that is, as MPowered knows, most students are quite simply not ready to be entrepreneurs yet. But nobody else seems to recognize that. All we hear is how many resources there are here, what a great opportunity we have right now, how much better it is to do entrepreneurship while you're still young, etc. And if we aren't starting businesses right now? Well, then, we are wasting all of those resources, all those opportunities, all that time. That layer of guilt doesn't feel good sitting on the brain, and it certainly isn't going to help us do what we need to do. Opportunity is a relative term. Sure, an experienced entrepreneur might foam at the mouth over the prospect of having the CfE, MPowered, the Tech Arb, etc at their disposal, but that's because the timing is right for them. They have the skills and are in position to make use of it. Most of us aren't. It's like when old geezers say 'youth is wasted on the young'. What does that accomplish? And when it does happen that a student becomes a successful entrepreneur, we sure as heck will celebrate it, but I think everybody in this community knows underneath that a little part of us dies when that happens. They listened. They took advantage of those resources and opportunities. You... didn't. Hmmm.


All I'm trying to say with this is that maybe we need a little bit of a paradigm shift here, to use a fancy word or two. I think MPowered is moving in the right direction with this. The most value to students happens when entrepreneurs aren't put on a golden pedestal, when passion isn't a test that has to be passed, when a dose of realism is put into the inspiration machine, and when we allow people to start things on their own time frame and their own terms instead of yelling at them to do it. When we as students stop being just an audience captivated by fantastic stories of larger than life people, when we stop doing these little things to appease our conscience that tells us we need to be doing something, only then can we start to make wholesale progress as an entire community rather than just showing off our stars.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Things I Think About When I Run

This is one of those days when you can taste the air, just after the rain stops and the leaves on the ground are still soaking. They give off air that tastes so clean you can't help but breathing deep. It's like making tea using maple, oak and birch leaves, or like a hookah without the smoke. It has to be one of the only natural decay processes that smells crisp and fresh. I love running on days like this, if for no other reason that to be able to breath harder.

The world is going to be changing soon. I don't mean change in the obvious way that the world is changing continuously; I mean that the way we live will be very different in the very near future. This is not a rational thought, although I could probably come up with a thousand reasons why, it's just a feeling that has been building strength in my head for quite a while. Quite honestly I don't know what that change is even going to look like, if my gut is correct, but I don't think I'm alone in premonition.

More people than usual in the Arb today, especially for today being so cold, breezy and wet outside. It's a shame that running requires your full breath. I would talk to everybody here if I could. The people that come to the Arb, me included, come here to clear their heads... to get away for a moment from the forced motion of life and taste the unforced motion of nature. The river. The wind. The chipmunks, which are out in force today. I wish I could press a big pause button right now. But my calves are firing in sync and I'm not stopping.

As I recognize the strength of that 'premonition' feeling in my gut, my brain is rationalizing it. Is that because I'm an engineer? Or because I'm a guy? Or just because I'm a human? I don't know. That's a thought for another day. Regardless, I see what I'm feeling. And oddly enough, it's all around me. The leaves and acorns are falling and being carried away by a swelling river. Old trees are dying and falling. Some of the animals won't make it either; the rest are getting out of town. It's the natural cycle of things.

The sun is setting, the temperature is dropping, and my muscles are tightening up. I make a push to get up the long hill on the path back home. Somewhere overhead the hospital's helicopter is flying around. I catch up to another runner going up the hill a little slower. I glance over; she's obviously running on fumes, probably having run a lot further than me. This hill only gets steeper as you go.

The natural cycle of things. Renewal. I believe the human world is at a point of renewal. We've been here before. Old systems are showing obvious weaknesses while new ideas fall like seeds and acorns, ready for spring. It's the economy. It's politics. It's the way people think about the world. The spring that began with the Baby Boomers has had its summer and is on its way out. That generation turned over the previous aging system, injecting values like humanism, corporate responsibility and accountability into the workings of the modern world. I believe the world is due for another round of just that. The snow is already falling.