The Secret to Accurately Predicting your Future

Today's quote is related to future success. It is increasingly difficult to predict the future based on the past, but Peter Drucker has the answer:

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
― Peter F. Drucker

Following others will not help you here. You have to forge your own future. This is what entrepreneurs do. They create their own reality. You won't find them looking for success in increasingly crowded market spaces, but instead they are creating new spaces where they have first mover advantage.

Be a leader not a follower.

I can recommend a fantastic book on this by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, called From Zero to One.

Good luck with your business pursuits.

Regards

DK

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Controversy in Silicon Valley

Mark Z from Facebook is making waves again after blocking drag queens in SFO from using Facebook as they won't use their real names. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very thoughtful article on this titled Silicon Valley’s Empathy Problem by Ian P Beacock. The quote below taken from the article is illuminating:

Empathy doesn’t seem to be a very popular tool among Silicon Valley’s leading digital dreamers. To its great credit, the tech industry promises to improve the world. Yet it’s hard not to notice its passion for issues that look like problems only to people who look like Silicon Valley itself: overwhelmingly white, male, young, educated, and affluent.

Inequality soars, and the world unravels, but from Silicon Valley we’re presented with apps and services designed to save us from those most heinous of tasks: parking, doing laundry, and (gasp) buying groceries. If solipsism is the conceptual motor of the industry, it should be no surprise that we read with some regularity about tone-deaf Google Glass wearers or start-up whiz kids, unable to imagine why their actions could possibly alarm others.

To be fair, coding workshops and computer-science classes don’t ask budding developers to imagine the lives of others and see the world for the complex, uncertain place it really is. That’s what the humanities are for.

When I teach students about the First World War or Berlin’s Golden Twenties, I’m challenging them to suspend their assumptions and step outside themselves to make sense of a foreign world. Novels make similar demands. Art historians help us see that the world can be expressed and perceived in a million different ways. In other words, the humanities encourage the use of empathy as a way of thinking and solving problems.

The liberal arts get short shrift in Silicon Valley—why fill out your college degree when you could be dropping out and diving into programming languages on a Thiel Fellowship? The humanities don’t necessarily trump coding literacy. But the insights of both will be essential if this age of mobile technology is going to live up to its promise and create a world we all want to live in.

Technology without a human face is dangerous and when Silicon Valley is so skewed by the demographics of its innovators there is a real need for some balance. For myself a background in the humanities, science and technology has been very enlightening and beneficial.

Have a great day and a profitable week and read a good book :)

DK

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Creativity is so Disruptive

Creators and innovators build their own roads while they are traveling them. Creativity can be nurtured but not taught.

As Robinson points out in his famed TED talk, Schools Kill Creativity, the end product that universities produce is university professors. To get to be a professor you need to get A's on your academic journey. This means you have to parrot what you have been taught. Original thought rarely gets an A grade because it doesn't fit the norm.

There is reason that Jobs, Gates, Ellison and Zuckerburg left university before graduating, and that is that the university system rewards conformity, not creativity. They got frustrated by the sausage factory of conduit based education.

Being creative brings a newness that challenges the status quo. It's hard for professors when their students have thought patterns and ways of thinking different from the prevalent educational dogma. How do you mark the work of Jobs, Gates, Ellison and Zuckerburg when you don't understand what they are saying.

The world is a better place because these original thinkers bucked the trend and struck out on their own.

Self Education will make you a Fortune

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

– Jim Rohn

I just found the quote above and it is very true. If you look at the great entrepreneurs most of them were self starting and self taught. Many such as Gates, Branson, Rose, Karp and Zuckerburg dropped out of college or didn't go to college at all. College will help you to understand how the world works now, but only rarely will it teach you about what is to come or what is happening at the fiery leading edge of real innovative thought.

Entrepreneurs are by nature confident in their own abilities and don't need any outside affirmation or degrees to bolster what they do. They just go out and do it.

Taking the formal education route in business (esp. MBA's at Ivy League schools) will leave you burdened with debt that will cripple your ability to be truly innovative. The money spent on formal education could have been diverted into developing your own business or furthering your innovations.

I am not against formal education as I have graduate and post graduate degrees but I have learned more on how to succeed by self education and learning from business projects that stretch my skills and gain me experience.

Formal education will indeed help you to make a living (though many MBA's are struggling to get jobs and pay off debt) but what you learn by yourself may be the pathway to a fortune. Following conventional wisdom will not equip you to handle and think about the next unique, groundbreaking advance.

DK

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