The three-business-card life

Pre financial collapse, in business school, a professor told me that our generation's employment would more diversified than any generation prior. "Many of you will not be with the same company for 35 years," he said. "Rather, you will simultaneously work at about 5 different places. A day at one job, the next someplace else, volunteer on Sundays, and spend a night or two a week working part time for a different organization." He could not have been more correct if he were predicting the trajectory of my immediate post-collegiate life. I'd go as far as saying that his words ring true in our other behaviors, too. The last time you searched the internet for any one thing, how many other pages did you wind up opening in your browser? I don't remember this occurring seven years ago, in the pre app era. But I digress.

I was reading an article entitled "How San Francisco's new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country," by Nathan Heller, and it made me think back to professor's forecast. If you read it, you'll find out why:

In recent years, San Francisco has become the capital of what someone described to me as the "three-business-card life." People might give a lot of their time to one startup while keeping a substantial equity share, and maybe a nominal job title, in one or two others that are just getting off the ground. They might help fund-raise for one company while investing in another one. Entrepreneurialism is a high-failure business, the thinking goes, but if you keep a few pots on the burner sooner or later something will boil. They can live off that payoff for a while or invest in in other things.  ...young and urban and professionally diffused [people] tend to regard success in terms of autonomy -- designing your life as you want -- rather than Napoleonic domination.
The ecosystem used to funnel lots of talented people into a few clear winners.  Now it's funnelling lots of talented people into lots of experiments. Why be Gordon Gekko when you could make enough to have a nice place and go paleo on local greens -- and then take a day or two off to cycle out to Stinson Beach? Isn't that freedom more distinguishing than cash or a CEO title, which everybody [in the San Francisco tech industry] has access to? SF's young entrepreneurs appear less concerned about flaunting their earnings than about showing that they can act imaginatively, with conspicuously noble ethics.
"The word 'entrepreneur' has undergone a redefinition," Ben Casnocha told me over lunch one day at LinkedIn's Mountain View campus, down the road from Google.  "For a while, it was like you're either running the laundromat or the coffee shop, or you're trying to create the next Apple. But there's been a whole flourishing of people who are starting different kinds of businesses -- who are having pride in small business that gives them autonomy." It is difficult to say what Casnocha's job is, it is easy to see that he does it well. He writes books about the entrepreneurial life style (1). He sits on the board of Comcate, a company that helps local governments streamline their compliant responses (2). He runs a speaking series (3), and a salon (4). And he is the "chief of staff" to Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn (5).

Persist until you succeed

My girlfriend has recently entered that place that many, many graduating college students get to/have been getting to/are in. She doesn't know what she wants to do for a career. And when she thinks about the years upon years that she has spent  (both money, and time) learning from people whose job it was to prepare her for whatever it is to do upon completing her educations, it makes her feel all the more unsettled.

I have been fielding text messages and phone calls dominated by this topic lately -- and as someone who is in a very similar position to her, am not the most qualified person to provide counsel. But I was reading an article by a favorite author of mine that become pertinent to this situation. The article profiled someone named Jack. 

Jack's Story:

Jack was fascinated with listening to a police scanner as a kid. He enjoyed what they were reporting: 1. where they are. 2. where they were going. 3. what they're doing. 

He then got into computers, and was particularly fascinated with something called Internet Relay Chat which allowed him to watch programmers code. 

Jack dropped out of NYU with one semester left. 

He started doing some computer programming, but quit because he didn't care for it. 

In 2002, at age 26, broke from attempting to be a massage therapist, he moved into his friend's house in San Francisco in exchange for babysitting his kids.

Then he started taking fashion classes. His fashion design career didn't go anywhere. 

In 2005 he met a successful web designer in a coffee shop, sent the man his resume, and asked him for a job coding software. The company was failing. 

As the company was failing, the owner allowed his employees to "work on anything they want, in hope it would take the company in a new direction." 

The "Away" tags from AOL Instant Messenger caught Jack's attention because they provided the sort of information he liked about people: 1. where they were & 3. what they were doing.

So he created a company called STAT.US.  It failed. 

Then Jack had an idea to use "short message service to report what you're doing, and also receive news of what everyone else is doing." Jack Dorsey went to the dictionary and suggested the name Twitter.

I sent a version of this story to my girlfriend, and she said what many of you are likely thinking: He's the 1%. 

My take:
Jack Dorsey didn't know what the heck on G-d's green earth he was doing with his life. But he persisted, which in his case boils down to: he continued to learn, and he did not stop moving or working. Even when Jack was babysitting his friend's kids for free rent, he was the best babysitter. 

And sure, he was fortunate-enough to create the most successful application of all time, but after reading his story, I understood that Dorsey was not going to stop until he created success. 

Persist until you succeed. 

Jordan

The reason I am writing a blog

My friend Eric just texted me that “Twitter kills anyone’s ability to read a book.”

After that, he responded to a quote I posted in my first blog entry. He quickly and to the best of my knowledge, brilliantly, stated: “1. The author is assuming a Patriot could only be of US origin 2. The US flag itself owns as much a “stain of slavery” as the Confederate flag and 3. The quote says ‘you can’t possible claim a sincere understanding of your country if you would have interest in breaking away from the Union.’ The US broke away from the British over taxes! They literally decided to self govern and said we don’t want to pay the taxes anymore. Had the South won, their history would have been no different than the 4^th of July."

I agree with Eric on both counts. Twitter finds or frames the most compelling sentence in an article, and pushes it out to the masses to consume quickly. Quickly like how we consume our fast food. It's easier to watch the highlight reel. It's easier to read abridged versions of books (and now articles). But it's not, and will never be better. Those who take the road less traveled will come out on top in almost all circumstances. Those who grind -- who do what others aren't willing to do when they are not willing to do it -- become successful. As a lifelong member of the tribe known as wrestling, I firmly believe this. 

The reason I posted the quote that Eric referenced was that I was surprised its radical and strong rhetoric was printed in the Atlantic, a very prestigious magazine. I will be honest and say that I did not read the article -- but found the quote to be very powerful and thought-provoking. 

Part of the reason that I am taking to this blog is that I want to remember the really good times I have. But all too often my personality takes me from one thing to the next without ever sitting back and reflecting.  Is it my fault for not reflecting often enough?  Probably.  But does anyone ever think about our society and the effect it has on our memories? We consume media and data all day. A barrage of advertisements are constantly attacking the space in our brain that is not currently being consumed with Kardashians, twitter feeds, and those things we used to have back in the day… what are they called??? Oh – yeah, that’s right: THOUGHTS.  

So if I can take a few minutes and write down the good nights out with friends, dates with my girlfriend, thoughts, and ideas that move me -- maybe it will help me remember them better.  Because aren’t those the things we live for anyway?

JB

I spent Saturday of this past weekend with my old friend, JB.  He is a remarkable man. An unfortunate reality of our society is that remarkable men are few and far between. But ones that become remarkable after life deals them an absolute shit deck of cards are all the more special. JB's shit deck consisted of being from small town, Upstate NY where his mom worked four jobs (F-O-U-R), day and night, her most lucrative being a prison warden. That didn't leave Mom much time to raise Justin, particularly because his father walked out and left her to do it.  JB willed himself into a wrestling program, willed himself into getting good grades, raised his two brothers (six and eight years their elder, respectively), and somehow developed an obsession with Cornell University. It's safe to say that the kid version of Justin had a lot on his plate.  This is a very condensed version of how it all went down:

He got into Cornell. Think about that for a second. Try and get accepted into Cornell WITH parents who can not only pay for for SAT Classes, extracurricular sports programs & summer camps, tutors, etc. but can also afford to raise you.  Take ALL of that out of the equation, and add the task of raising two significantly-younger brothers. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, a betting man would have money on two of three of those boys wind up in prison or dead. Right? Not in this case. JB, as I mentioned graduated from Cornell, and is now an executive on Wall Street. Middle brother is a Dentist and head high school wrestling coach. Little brother was an NCAA Champion wrestler, and is now an Officer in the Navy SEALs, and is single handedly the most impressive human I've ever seen walk G-d's bountiful green earth. Anyways, JB tilled the proverbial soil that wrought this insanely powerful trio.

So JB and I caught up properly in Georgetown. We watched a football game (until then I didn't know GTown had a football field on its campus) that we randomly had mutual friends participating in, walked the Exorcist stairs -- well, JB climbed the wall beside the stairs,

had a beer at the legendary Tombs, and then had another beer at his friend's brand new home in Cleveland Park where Justin regaled us with travel stories. He travels the way we all wish we traveled: he has great stories of immersing with Cambodian locals, for instance. Most recently he visited Japan, where he hiked Mt. Fuji, alone, taking a break only to take a 2 hour nap in a shack on halfway up the mountain. He is inspirational in that he just does it. Many of us are guilty of saying "I want to go to Morocco," and then never actually getting there. JB actually does it. And when those trips compound and all of the stories add up, it makes for a freaking remarkable man.

First

This is my very first blog.  I don't know the purpose of this blog, perhaps I'll figure it out along the way.

Last night was exceptionally great for a Monday night because my dad was in town for business.  He met me in my apartment at about 5:30 as I was wrapping up some emails, and we watched ESPN together and caught up on football; the Cleveland freakin Browns in particular.  He had been at the game on Sunday but left before the worst QB in the league made one of the dumbest plays I've ever witnessed. I can't say it costed us the game -- that is a title that the defense holds -- but the play certainly dismantled any semblance of Cleveland hope. Had the Browns won vs. the Lions we'd be going into week seven with a 4-2 record.  Anyways, we then ventured down to Wholefoods where I tried to convert my dad to these new protein bars I've been eating lately for snacks. They have pea protein instead of soy or whey, which is supposedly better for you. I have been listening to the Mike Dolce podcast while on the road lately, and it's making me try and eat more naturally-grown foods. This makes sense, as it doesn't take Marion Nestle to tell you that eating foods that are created in labs and can be shipped to the Afghani desert on a daily basis isn't all that good for you. Dolce's passion for healthy lifestyles borders on radical, but we certainly do need and deserve change. Foreigners who move to the US skinny are obese within 5 years...what does that tell us about our food climate? I heard Bill Burr do a bit the other day about having never seen a fat old person. He's seen old people that smoke, but he's never seen a fat old person, living. Think about it.
Anyways, back to my dad being in town. After we walked around Wholefoods and bought some Kombucha and healthy protein bars, we wen to this awesome restaurant near my apartment, Cava, and waited at the bar for Alex to show up. While we waited we enjoyed a delicious cocktail: an Old Fashioned made with Bulleit Rye Bourbon. When Alex arrived we moved to a table, and had an outstanding meal: Cava vegetables served with greek yogurt, street gyros, this crazy good fried chicken, and dessert was challah french toast. Conversation was fun but intense as Alex is in the phase of figuring out her professional career, so my dad gave her advice, while I mostly listened.
I'm going to remember to take pictures of things to share on this blog.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”—Steve Jobs

"If a patriot can stand in front of the White House brandishing the Confederate flag, then the word "patriot" has no meaning. The Nazi flag is offensive because it is a marker of centuries of bigotry elevated to industrialized murder.

But the Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/280559/

I need to read more,

Jordan