Turning Pro:

” …someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours-a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God-and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly-not miserably-knowing how to die.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Is knowing how to die any different from knowing how to live?

As the Oligarchs ruled Athens in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, a statesman named Theramenes was caught negotiating the struggle between democracy and tyranny. He gave a speech to the assembly decrying the brutalities of the ruling party – no moral judgment but rather that it was stupid and self-destructive to treat ones citizens as though they did not matter. Dictatorship or not, they ought not use violence as a solution to political problems. In what looked like one of those uniquely Greek moments where an issue is decided on the merits of its public explanation, he was overwhelmed with applause, the clear winner of his case. But when the jury went to deliberate, the ruling tyrant Critias ordered troops to shackle and remove him under a sentence of death.

As they dragged Theramenes through the streets, he screamed the injustice of Critias at every house and home. Him today, he cried, you tomorrow. When guard told him that he’d soon come to regret not silencing himself, he replied “Shall I not still suffer, if I do?” and continued to shame his peers for their inaction.

They handed him the hemlock, which he quickly downed – but not before pouring one out for his homies and saying “Here’s to that delightful fellow, Critias.” [1][2]

[1] A History of My Times, Xenophon (Penguin)

[2] Pour out a Little Liquor

UD: Pour One Out

I decided to put my money where my mouth was a little bit so I am now running FAIL DOGS

If you saw the site before, you can tell that I stripped off most of the advertising, I’m posting more often and doing all the stuff I tell all new bloggers to try.

It’s really fucking funny and you should subscribe. I am going to blow this thing up over the next few months. I’ll write about it here so we can talk about what works and what doesn’t. (This one’s the best)

Have you been to Chiptole recently? It started as a place that gave free drinks to students, really cheap prices and had a distinctly different attitude. Today, they’re revoking the drink idea, scaling back how much food you get and trying to upsell you wherever they can. I think it’s pretty obvious who is calling the shots now. The first approach created value, the second mines it. One is sustainable, the other is not.

One of the people I work for put it nicely – “we do innovation, not exploitation.” The theory is that most of the big Boomer companies haven’t done anything innovative in half a century. And their conservative, publicly traded leadership is incentivized to milk what they already have rather than create something new. But his logic, although it seems counterintuitive, is that it’s actually a lot cheaper to be innovative than it is to pour over spreadsheets for extra pennies.

If you do your research, the 80’s wasn’t the bull market people think it was – mergers and buyouts were just burning off value for temporary stock jumps. Nobody way doing finance, they were just shuffling cards. The only growth came from massive fees which were debited from the accounts of – you guessed it – the innovators of the last generation.

I guess there are some economic explanations for why this is short-sighted and ultimately suicidal. Umair does an amazing job of it. But to me, the debate is deeper than that. Which person would you rather be? The raider or creator? Is that why you get up every morning, to pick up a few extra scraps from an inefficient entrepreneur? You studied six years in college to do someone else’s paperwork?

The people who are writing their memoirs or teaching your college classes have a lot to gloss over. Mainly the fact that their entire way of thinking creating a smoke and mirrors bureaucracy that hasn’t done much besides institutionalize mediocrity. That system is broken. I think you (I) know which person you want to be. It’s also fairly obviously what slots the system wants you to fill. So, do you want to be the host or the parasite? Do you want to innovate or exploit?