May 21st, 2008 by admin
There’s some great lessons in this profile of Dr. Larry Brilliant, leader of google.org:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/19968512/the_guru_of_google
Larry Brilliant, the man anointed by Google to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of the company’s money in the next few years, admits that he’s a deeply flawed human being. “I make a hundred mistakes a day,” he says. “I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything.” When Brilliant speaks of his personal failures, he is not talking just about his late-1990s turn as the head of a couple of Silicon Valley companies that vaporized $100 million or so.
And he’s not talking just about his failure, which he knows was not his alone, to keep his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead from killing himself with drugs and excess. He’s talking about deeper things, like the mismatch between what he wants to do for the world and what he can do for the world. He is talking about our tendency as human beings to be distracted by money, glamour, sex and personal glory.
May 20th, 2008 by admin
This is some good advice from legendary professors in economics & finance:http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll-never-get
One by one, some of the most revered names in investment theory were brought in to school a class of brilliant engineers, programmers, and cybergeeks on the fine art of personal investing, something few of them had thought much about. First to arrive was Stanford University’s William (Bill) Sharpe, 1990 Nobel Laureate economist and professor emeritus of finance at the Graduate School of Business. Sharpe drew a large and enthusiastic audience, which he could have wowed with a PowerPoint presentation on his “gradient method for asset allocation optimization” or his “returns-based style analysis for evaluating the performance of investment funds.” But he spared the young geniuses all that complexity and offered a simple formula instead. “Don’t try to beat the market,” he said. Put your savings into some indexed mutual funds, which will make you just as much money (if not more) at much less cost by following the market’s natural ebb and flow, and get on with building Google.
The following week it was Burton Malkiel, formerly dean of the Yale School of Management and now a professor of economics at Princeton and author of the classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The book, which you’d be unlikely to find on any broker’s bookshelf, suggests that a “blindfolded monkey” will, in the long run, have as much luck picking a winning investment portfolio as a professional money manager. Malkiel’s advice to the Google folks was in lockstep with Sharpe’s. Don’t try to beat the market, he said, and don’t believe anyone who tells you they can—not a stock broker, a friend with a hot stock tip, or a financial magazine article touting the latest mutual fund.
May 19th, 2008 by admin
The publication Investors Business Daily has a column presenting advice from successful people. Many of the people interviewed for the column have the following characteristics.
Via WallStreetFighter, the tips are:
1. How You Think is Everything: Always be positive. Think success, not failure. Be aware of a negative environment.
2. Decide Upon Your True Dreams and Goals: Write down your specific goals and and develope a plan to reach them
3. Take Action: Goals are nothing without action. Don’t be afraid to get started. Just do it.
4. Never Stop Learning: Go back to school or read books. Get training and acquire skills.
5. Be Persistent and Work Hard: Success is a marathon. Not a sprint
6. Learn to Analyze Detail: Get all the facts, all the input. Learn from your mistakes
7. Focus on Your Time and Money: Don’t let other people or things distract you.
8. Don’t be afraid to Innovate, Be Different: Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.
9. Deal and Communicate With People Effictively: No person is an island. Learn to understand and motivate others.
10. Be Honest and Dependable, Take Responsibility: Otherwise, Numbers 1-9 won’t matter.
May 18th, 2008 by admin
This graduation speech created with assistance from Tucker Max is one of the best speeches I’ve ever read.
http://www.festeringass.com/archives/post_1.phtml
Some highlights:
“…pay attention to those around you who are successful, and do what they do. As novel and advanced as my game may seem to you, I probably only invented about one percent of it, if that. Almost everything I know I learned by watching and imitating people older and more successful than me. In high school, you learn how to act like a senior by watching the seniors when you are an underclassman. In life, you learn how to be successful by watching the people who achieve success. Figure out what they do that the others aren’t doing, isolate their successful behavior, and imitate it. You won’t become them, but by trying to implement their actions you will naturally develop your own style.”
“A corollary to this is to READ. A LOT. Humans have been recording history for about 10,000 years. You won’t be the first person to go through anything that you go through. My grandfather told me: ‘an idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.’ The more you read, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you can figure out how life works and what to do and what not do without having to screw up first. “Even so, go live life. Go out and experience everything you can. Do everything that you have an opportunity to do. Wisdom is most often earned and not learned, and the best way to get earned wisdom is to experience as much as possible. The more you see of the world, the smaller and more understandable it becomes.”
May 17th, 2008 by admin
This article is a couple of years old, but the advice is still awesome:http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/RetirementandWills/EscapeTheRatRace/TheRichHaveMoneyAndPassion.aspx
“When people dream of getting rich, it’s about more than nice clothes and fancy vacations. Being rich means freedom: to spend your time as you please, to pursue your real interests and to take chances without courting utter ruin. Paradoxically, the road to riches often means acting as if you already have that freedom.”
May 16th, 2008 by admin
http://www.marshallbrain.com/million.htm
Marshall Brain is the founder of How Stuff Works, a company and web site recently purchased by Discovery Communications for $250 million.
May 15th, 2008 by admin
Jeff Bezos is the highly successful CEO of Amazon.com and a multibillionaire.
Josh Wand took notes from a presentation by Mr. Bezos at the NYU Stern School of Business. The entire notes are located here:
http://joshwand.backpackit.com/pub/1452859
Some great quotes/paraphrases:
Decisions that can be made with math are great—there’s a right answer.
We make money when we help [customers] make purchase decisions.
Customer-first orientation requires that investors take a long-term perspective.
Long term, customers and investors interests are aligned.
Look at current customers—what do they need? customer-needs-focused form of strategy generation.
Close following is a perfectly acceptable business strategy—let others go down blind alleys, and when someone finds something, double down on it.. but it doesn’t work that well in a fast moving industry.
Q: helicopter crash, near death experience—how has it influenced you?
A: …no big change – it was traumatic… makes you pause, think if you’re doing what you love.. but for me, I was already doing what I love
May 14th, 2008 by admin
Autodesk is currently a multibillion-dollar company and the publisher of leading computer-aided design software AutoCAD. The cofounder, John Walker, has since left Autodesk and is now engaged in projects at Fourmilab.
For information on how a successful entrepreneur thinks, his history of Autodesk is wonderful:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
He also maintains a blog at: http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/
May 13th, 2008 by admin
Felix Dennis is a multimillionaire (hundreds of millions of $$$) publishing magnate and poet.Source (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1084093.ece)
“Honestly speaking, what kind of people get to become rich?
An interesting topic. There is a confidence that radiates from first-born sons and daughters. Not in all the cases but in too many for it to be a coincidence. A similar confidence is to be observed, more often than not, in people who are rich, no matter whether they were born with it, inherited it or acquired it through their own efforts.
You can see it in the way they walk into a hotel or restaurant they have never visited before. In the irritating disposition of rich women to haggle in an Oxfam shop over a designer dress — unlike any working-class woman, who would be horrified at the thought of doing any such thing, even though she perhaps needs the discount while the rich woman does not.
You can see it, too, in the way the children of the rich appear to assume that the world was created entirely for their sole benefit. Money brings a kind of insouciance with it. It is among wealth’s least attractive characteristics.
Whatever qualities the rich may have, they can be acquired by anyone with the tenacity to become rich. The key, I think, is confidence. Confidence and an unshakeable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do it.
Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt.”
The whole piece is amazing.
May 12th, 2008 by admin
Steve-O is a performer who is famous for his stunts on the famous/infamousJackass TV series as well as the Jackass movies.
Before he was wealthy and famous, however, he wrote down what he felt was the meaning of life, captured on this well-worn piece of paper:
Further background information is on this page (not safe for work):
http://www.steveo.com/importantstuff/meaning1.html
Now he helps other men overcome their fears and create meaning in their lives:
http://www.drsteveo.com/
And his reaction to meeting Motley Crue is awesome:
I was proud of everything about meeting Motley Crue. There wasn’t anything I really wanted to ask or say to them, but meeting them changed my life forever. …meeting Motley Crue taught me that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to. It doesn’t matter what you want, it simply matters how fuckin bad you want it and that you never stop going for it until you have it.
From billionaires to Jackass, finding inspiration wherever I can 
