Getting to the Point of “I Can Do This!”

Posted inEntrepreneurship7 Comments on Getting to the Point of “I Can Do This!”

Before you can embark on a new project, you need to believe you can do it. In order to believe you can do it, you need have to some self-confidence. In order to have self-confidence, I think you need to do one or both of the following:

  • Accumulate small wins. Successfully take baby steps. So if you want to write a book, for example, you first write and publish an article that gives you confidence in your writing ability.
  • Expose yourself systematically to the techniques and habits of those who have already done it. In other words, demystify the accomplishment. If you want to start a company, read tons of first-hand accounts and talk to entrepreneurs to understand step-by-step how they did it. This will de-mystify the achievement, not allowing you to attribute John Doe’s success as some “magical talent” that’s been with him since the womb (a typical excuse).

By the way, self-confidence — telling yourself, “I believe I can do this!” — is only half the job. The other litmus test before starting something is, “Does this excite me?” Both must check out positive for the project to succeed.

How else do you cultivate the self-confidence that will allow you to set forth towards an ambitious goal?

(hap tip to Cal Newport for helping spark and think through this idea)

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The Surest Defense Against Evil

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From Joseph Brodsky‘s 1984 commencement speech at Williams College:

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.

Wonderful. Found in his collection of essays entitled Less Than One.

(hat tip: Robert Faggen)

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CEO Pay Gap – Research Summary

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Bob Sutton has a great summary of the research around CEO comp and how overpaid CEOs affect business performance / recruitment. Here are the findings he cites, some editing on my part:

  • You can overpay other senior executives too and thus entice them to stay; or you can create a big gap between the overpaid CEO and everyone else, which leads other senior executives to jump-ship. Either way, overpaying the CEO has costs beyond the extra dollars the CEO gets.

  • When there are bigger pay differences between the CEO and other members of the top management team, organizational  performance tends to suffer — and the negative effects of such pay dispersion is most pronounced in high-technology firms.

  • When the CEO is getting a lot more money than the next executive, he or she will likely be afflicted with other signs of narcissism.

  • If the CEO is overpaid, the decision to overpay the rest of the top team isn’t a purely good thing — reducing pay dispersion when the CEO is overpaid can cause a company to waste even more money.

  • While this research so far seems to be that paying the CEO a lot more than others isn’t a good thing for the company, there are some studies that suggest this isn’t always the case.

I’ve seen firms fall prey to the fourth point — they pay the CEO what the market rate is (they have no choice if they want the best) and then, in an effort to narrow the gap between his comp and everyone else’s, they overpay the senior execs. I would advise a company to pay the CEO what he could command in the market, pay the senior execs what they could command in the market, then use other types of incentives to retain and please the senior execs as opposed to simply escalating their cash comp to reduce the pay dispersion between #1 and #2, 3, 4, and 5.

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Peter Thiel’s Optimistic Thought Experiment

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Peter Thiel is one of the most successful start-up entrepreneurs in recent time (PayPal), start-up investor (Facebook), and hedge fund manager (Clarium). Needless to say, it’s worth following his thinking.

I’ve now twice-read his 10,000 word essay in the latest Hoover Policy Review entitled The Optimistic Thought Experiment: In the Long Run, There are No Good Bets Against Globalization. I still can’t get my head around all his points, including his proposed connection between financial bubbles and the level of globalization. Hopefully you, dear reader, can help me. Until then I thought I’d excerpt some of the more interesting paragraphs that jumped out at me.

He frames his essay thusly:

For macro investors, it would be an abdication not to wrestle with the central question of our age: How should the risk of a comprehensive collapse of the world economic and political system factor into one’s decisions?

From the point of view of an investor, one may define such a “secular apocalypse” as a world where capitalism fails. Therefore, the secular apocalypse would encompass not only catastrophic futures in which humanity completely self-destructs (most likely through a runaway technological disaster), but also include a range of other scenarios in which free markets cease to function, such as a series of wars and crises so disruptive as to drive the developed world towards fascism, anarchy, or both.

Are all past bubbles part of The Great Boom?

It is beyond the scope of this essay either to enumerate all drivers of these trends or to determine whether the pro- or anti-globalization forces will gain the upper hand in the longer term. Still, the following conclusion seems safe: Since we are very far from any stable equilibrium, the future is likely to be much more or much less globalist than the present.

Nevertheless, this Great Boom is also very different from all previous bubbles. This time around, globalization either will succeed and humanity will achieve a degree of freedom and prosperity that can scarcely be imagined, or globalization will fail and capitalism or even humanity itself may come to an end. The real alternative to good globalization is world war. And because of the nature of today’s technology, such a war would be apocalyptic in the twenty-first century. Because there is not much time left, the Great Boom, taken as a whole, either is not a bubble at all, or it is the final and greatest bubble in history.

On technology vs. “technology”:

…There also exists a critical distinction between technology and investments called “technology.” To take a particularly easy case from the prior technology bubble, a “technology” company that sells pet food online by purchasing Super Bowl advertisements offline may not be a technology company at all. The solutions to hard engineering problems are not necessarily valuable, but it is unusual for the solutions to easy engineering problems to have much value in the long term.

On the China bubble:

To say the least, there are many eerie parallels between the Chinese stock market of early 2007 and the Nasdaq of early 2000: an abstract story of long-term, exponential growth; rampant speculation; and unprofitable or overvalued companies.

One intermediate possibility is that the China of 2014 will be like the internet of 2007 — much larger, but with winners very different from the ones that investors today expect. The largest New Economy business is Google, a company that scarcely registered in early 2000. Might it also turn out that the greatest Chinese companies of 2014 will be concerns that are private and tightly controlled businesses today, rather than the high-profile and money-losing companies that have been floated by the Chinese state?

By the way, here are some video interviews with Thiel on the BigThink, a wonderful collection of stimulating, brief interviews with smart people.

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Are You a Golden Juggler?

Posted inWriting4 Comments on Are You a Golden Juggler?

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle with golden balls, says Joseph Epstein:

The golden jugglers are the ones with wit, the ability to pierce pretension, and the calm detachment to mock large ideas and salvationist schemes. They eschew anger and love small perfections. They go in for handsome gestures…have wide sympathies, and understand that a complex point of view is worth more than any number of opinions.

That’s from Epstein’s latest essay collection called In a Cardboard Belt! via a Claremont Review of Books review. The late Bill Buckley called Epstein the wittiest writer alive.

Other Epstein nuggets found in the review:

  • “Charm is the desire to delight, light-handedly executed.”
  • “Writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”
  • On how to act now that he’s 70 years old: “If the game is to be played decently at seventy, one must hark back as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one’s youth, no matter how truly golden they seem…Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one’s intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about nowadays dreary, third rate, and decline and fallish. A big mistake. The reason old people think the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is because they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case, how good really can it be?”
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