Readable Stuff

i normally dont post stuff written by others on my blog, but i guess i am bending that rule now. the content really appeals to me and i thought it would be good to share it with others. these are excerpts from the websites and blogs i normally read. thats it , enjoy the wow moment

1. Mark Cuban, blogmaverick.com 

These investors, including myself, know what you don’t, and they are not telling you. The minute you ask for money, you are playing in their game, they aren’t playing in yours. You are at a huge disadvantage, and it’s only going to get worse if you take their money. The minute you take money, the leverage completely flips to the investor. They control the destiny of your dreams, not you.

Investors don’t care about your dreams and goals. They love that you have them. They love that they motivate you. Investors care about how they are going to get their money back and then some. Family cares about your dreams. Investors care about money. There is a reason why venture capitalists are often referred to as Vulture Capitalists. The minute you slide off course from the promises you made to get the money, your dreams fall in jeopardy. You will find yourself making promises to keep investors at bay. You will find yourself avoiding your investors. Then you will find yourself on the outside looking in. The reality of taking money from non family members is that they are doing it for only one reason, to make more money. If you can’t deliver on that promise, you are out. You will be removed from the company you started. You will find someone else running your dream company. If this sounds like a scene out of the Sopranos or an episode you would watch on TV about a loan shark, you are right. The only difference is that it’s all legal.

There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customers pockets. I personally would never even take money from a family member. Could you imagine the eternal grief and guilt from your mom, dad, uncle or aunt because you blew your nephews college money or the money for grandmas last vacation… I cant.

You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders. I started MicroSolutions by getting an advance from my first customer of $500. The business didn’t grow quickly in the first couple years. We didn’t grow past 4 people in the first couple years, and we all worked dirt cheap.

So what’s wrong with that? It’s OK to start slow. It’s ok to grow slow. As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t.

The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

2. Also from blogmaverick.com 

At no other time have their been 3 financial news networks and thousands of websites providing so much financial information and opinion. The sum of which  has definitely lead us into a situation of  “Paralysis by Bullshitalysis”.  Everyone is afraid to buy. Everyone is afraid to sell or short.  Sales forced by de-leveraging is the catalyst for the market.  However, there are so few buyers, the de-leveraging sales are taking forever.

Who knows what the new normal is. No one has any idea what is going to happen in this market. NO ONE.  Personally, I am completely hedged. I bought puts, sold them. Sold Puts, bought them back, then decided to hedge every long dollar and then some with big puts on the market. This allowed me to be protected on the down side, and tip toe on the long side. As stocks go down, my hedge allows me to buy more of the stocks I like. If the market takes off on the up side, hopefully my longs will more than cover the cost of my puts. If the market does nothing. I’m stuck right where I am, with my puts losing time value every day.

Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t.  What I do know is this, everyone is a genius in a bullmarket. The last 5 years, that wasn’t a stock market. THIS is a stockmarket. This time it is different. This may just be the new normal.

The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about,  enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do. 

3. Paul Graham, paulgraham.com 

For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn’t benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn’t otherwise have afforded them. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect Google to do.

Microsoft isn’t so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn’t seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google’s. Could there be a connection?

You can see how there would be. When you’re small, you can’t bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you’re big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it’s easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.

You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So “Don’t be evil” may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I’m sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt “Don’t be evil.” The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don’t think you’re going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.

4. Steve Jobs, stanford.edu

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

…..

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

…..

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

citoyen du monde

in 1948, Garry Davis, a leather jacketed world war II bomber pilot had walked into the American embassy, turned in his passport and renounced his american citizenship. he said he was sick and tired of wars and rumors of war. he then tried the UN to declare him as the first ‘citizen of the world’. 

he failed. he shouldn’t have. 

sixty years later, we still fight for fictitious reasons in the name of national and religious pride and honor. agreed national pride and honor helped countries like japan and germany come up after the war, but around the world it has done more harm than good. 

also, i fail to understand why people give so much importance to their motherlands and are even ready to die for it. as far as i think land is lifeless. how dumb it is to give away lives for something lifeless. instead of valuing human life, the soul, the heart and the intellect, we value a stretch of stones and mud. 

agreed i would be sadder if there happens to be an earthquake or something like that in india than anywhere else in the world. but that shouldn’t be the case. in an ideal modern society, logically speaking, there is no reason why there should be any difference between people. 

in fact, as far as i think, people should be given the highest priority, not their faiths or nationalities. imagine where we would have been had all of us considered each other equal and worked for everyone’s profit. there would no stupid wars, people would be working hard everywhere, the world economy would have bloomed, science and technology would have grown and we would have been at least ten times better than what we are now. 

in fact, with the formation of european union and the development of BRIC nations, more or less, the entire world is expected to achieve some sort of a economical saturation throughout. what i am suggesting is that we speed up the process as much as we can. national pride and honor didn’t do anyone any good. loving your country is one thing, feeling proud about your country and looking down upon others is bad. these things are only empirical, the sad part is nine out of ten people actually endorse the ‘my country greatest’ ideology. it only ‘feels’ good, very soon you are going to die and the stretch of stones and land which you call your country is going to remain unaffected. human life is precious, scarce and dignified. why invest your emotions and intellect on lifeless things which can’t even reciprocate any of your feelings.