I was recently asked “what is the most fascinating thing you’ve learned in the past month?”

Last week, I finished Mastery by Robert Greene. In it he discusses the concept of Negative Capability. This idea, combined with Greene’s explanation of it’s importance, is the most fascinating thing I’ve learned in the past month.

Wikipedia defines Negative Capability as the “ability of [an] individual to perceive, think, and operate beyond any presupposition of a predetermined capacity of the human being.” It amplifies the power of Positive Thinking, as discussed in books like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist – and illustrates a critical hurdle in the pursuit of greatness. Greene explains how important Negative Capability is to “Awaken The Dimensional Mind” and embrace the full potential of our creativity – his last step before Mastery.

Many times, what holds us back from achieving what seems impossible is that we conform our beliefs and ideas to fit into a world that others have defined for us. Avoiding this trap is never easy, but doing so – as Dr. Ben Carson points out - is the key to excellence. When we pursue our passions without allowing outside reasoning to influence us: possibilities become limitless.

The ability to “operate” from a mindset not bounded by predetermined capabilities is the most important differentiator between doing work and doing exceptional work. Dimensional Thinking, achieved through a state of Negative Capability, encompasses abilities that I aspire to. These ideas certainly represents the most fascinating thing(s) I’ve learned in the past month and will continue to work on understanding further.

• Share

• Share

I’m almost done with Robert Greene’s latest book, Mastery. It’s an excellent read and I highly recommend it, along with his other work.

Without giving too much away, Greene explains that the right apprenticeship – i.e. observing an expert – studying an expert – working for an expert – is critical to developing Mastery.

Before schools and universities, people learned through apprenticeships. At a certain age, you decided what profession you wanted to pursue, then applied to train under an “expert” in that field. That didn’t mean you needed a famous teacher or the top person in the field from day one (although that’s certainly ideal). It meant you developed your talents by seeking out and working with those who knew significantly more than you. You’d repeat this process with more advanced teachers until you were learning directly from the greatest people in the country. Finally, you’d branch off and pursue your own creative genius. Within this system, you were responsible for your own education. Greene provides plenty of examples of how this cycle played out and impacted folks like Da Vinci, Darwin, and Mozart.

Unfortunately, we’ve lost sight of this strategy to achieving excellence and the result is our modern, “industrial” education system. We’ve decided to align our efforts behind standardized tests and curriculum, while acquiring degrees and certificates. Very little of our system today gives much consideration of practical knowledge, hands-on experience, or any of the rich learning opportunities that can only happen in an organic environment. In the process, we dismiss the idea of taking more control of our own educations. What’s more concerning than that is the fact that our system manages to actually stifle creativity. Through excruciating repetition and often times dogmatic philosophy, we manage to extinguish or oppress the light that is “true talent” or one’s “true self” at an extremely early age.

After our educational check-boxes are complete and our fear of pursuing our passions is well entrenched, we proceed to choose salaries and perks over environments where we interact with excellence. We let our egos and pride dictate our career decisions, instead of letting our hearts and aspirations guide us and inspire us to strive to be great at what we love.

As Sir Ken Robinson pointed out in his now famous TED talk, “we don’t need education evolution, we need a revolution”. Robinson goes on to strongly recommend that we move away from the “industrial model” of education, focusing less on the people and more on “linearity” and “conformity”, and adopt an “agricultural model” of education, focusing less on predicting outcomes and more on supporting individual growth. He elaborates by saying we cannot prescribe a single formula for individual human development, rather we must create an environment that nurtures individuals, helps them grow, encourages them to try, fail, find their true talent, and allows human development to flourish.

I’m not saying school does nothing good. People fought long and hard in this country to have the opportunity to attent school and I am in no way suggesting that anyone shouldn’t feel very fortunate to be able to go to high school, college or graduate school. It’s a privilege and honor to have that opportunity. My experience at college changed my life for the better, no doubt. What I’m saying is that we need to take control of our educational journey, stop following single-file lines into our careers, and stop relying on the “mechanical machine” that is our system to walk us through everything we’ll “need”. The first step of the revolution is not rejecting the current system completely and losing sight of the value it does provide. It’s simply re-claiming the confidence and discipline to create our own learning path and not relying on the system to know everything that’s right for us.

This is all much easier said than done. I didn’t come by these thoughts on my own. A combination of ideas from others, plus my own apprenticeships and advice from experts I ladmire has helped me start to wrap my head around the changes that I’m observing in our economy.

I believe we each have talents that it is our distinct honor and responsibility to find and develop. Skills and interests that fill us with joy and that we have the ability to master. These talents are all very intricate, complex, and unique. And I can’t believe that a system rooted in conformity has all the nutrients necessary for the type of growth we want to strive for.

• Share

I was chatting with a good friend of mine yesterday, Jason, who I hadn’t seen in awhile. We were talking about the election and areas we hope to see our country start to really focus on. Climate change and the environment was one of those areas.  He asked me why I had shifted my focus from solar cells to programming and I realized that decision was something I’d thought a lot about, but hadn’t really put into words.

Efficiency has always been a passion of mine. How can we waste less; time, energy, attention, material, and so on? For that reason, I fell in love with the beauty of a solar cell. It was capable of taking a renewable resource and with zero moving parts or harmful by-products, convert that resource into electrical current. Quantum physics told us that eventually we’d reach a limit in how efficiently a solar cell could convert energy from a photon to moving electrons. So, pushing the technology to that limit was fascinating to me. It felt like the area where I could make the most impact on “world efficiency” and the overall environment.

After spending two years studying solar cells in college and almost four years working in the solar industry, I came to realize two things that made me question what I thought about where I could make the most impact on efficiency.

The solar industry felt like a race to the bottom, not a race to the top.

The driving force within the solar industry is “grid parity” which refers to the point in time when it costs the same or less to generate electrical power using solar technology as it costs the utility company to generate the same amount of electrical power using the cheapest alternative. As you can imagine, calculating the cost target for grid parity and how to get there is very complex. But, when the industry hits this point (and in many circumstances it already has), the game completely changes. It’s clear that solar is better for the planet and when it costs equal or less to generate power with it – utilities, business owners, and policy makers whose interest it is not to switch to solar, will not only have scientific facts and society’s concern for the environment working against them, they will also have basic economics forcing them to embrace the technology.

What concerned me about this concept was not how to get to grid parity, rather it was what does it mean for the industry when we do? Although the solar industry still has big technical challenges to solve, I felt like there was a relatively straightforward path to grid-parity. You continue to drive efficiency to it’s maximum and cost to it’s minimum. Right now, that’s fun and exciting and inspiring. It’s the good, clean guy against the big, dirty guy. But at the end of the day, the electricity market is a commodity market. And that’s what I mean by a “race to the bottom”.

Everything is about driving out costs and when you wake up the day after reaching grid parity, guess what? You’re a company that supplies a commodity. And at least for me, it was a bit frightening to think of being an expert in a technology that (best case scenario) is sold as a commodity. It’s not a consumer market. I wouldn’t interact with end customers, really. I’d have less of a chance to “impress and delight” real people. I’d be behind the scenes, making the stuff that lets my lights turn on and off. People don’t love their utility company like they love their car company or their computer company or even their refrigerator company.

Although you can add value both from the top (products, features) and the bottom (costs, processes), new markets, world-changing technology, innovation almost always comes from the top. That’s where truly transformative companies like apple and amazon and networks like twitter and kickstarter are born and live and where entrepreneurs are pushing the envelop as hard as they can. I wanted to invest in a career that would build skills for “competing from the top”, not “racing to the bottom”.

Inefficiency in consumption is equally if not more important than inefficiency in generation.

What I mean by this is that it doesn’t matter how efficient the solar cells on my roof are if I waste the energy they produce. All this time, I was concerned about how energy was generated in our country (which is still very much a concern), but hadn’t really considered how energy is consumed in our country. It turns out we waste a crap ton of it! Think about how often you leave the TVs/computers/lights on when they aren’t being used or crank the temperature up or down all day so you dont come home to a freezing or scorching house. This is all incredibly inefficient. By just replacing old windows on their house, my parents cut their energy bill by 40% last winter. That kind of efficiency gain is massive! And it has everything to do with consumption, not generation.

Cool. So what’s the point? Go around turning people’s lights off when they aren’t home?! Seems kinda low-tech and boring. Actually, that’s it exactly!  Nest is a perfect example of this idea in play. Although Nest is compared to Apple in terms of their attention to design detail, simplicity, and user experience – what makes Nest so innovative is not their hardware, it’s their software. It’s the fact that their system studies your behavior, your preferences, and learns how to manage the temperature in your house. All you have to do is act normal and it is working in the background to make sure you are always comfortable at home, without wasting any unnecessary energy. It’s not bugging you to think about yet another decision throughout your day, it’s just taking care of it for you.

It’s obvious to me now that this is the future. We are in the middle of seeing the Internet shift from our desk(top) to our lap(top) to now mobile. It won’t be to long until all the products in our living rooms, kitchens, and garages are online too. And they’ll be capable of making smart decisions for us, in turn making our stores, offices, and homes more efficient. When I considered this idea along with arguments like Douglas Rushcoff’s Program or Be Programmed, I knew that I wanted to understand the world of software and contribute to making products and services that make things logically more efficient.

In a roundabout way, I think I successfully explained these ideas to my friend yesterday. Although there are many other reasons why I’ve become so interested in software and the Internet, these concepts are the two that sparked me to take a career risk and dive into programming and building software.

• Share

We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. – Abraham Lincoln

As we accelerate our path towards open source, transparency, and ubiquitous connectivity – entrepreneurs and businesses will succeed or fail depending on whether they keep their promises or not. That means we need to put as much thought into what’s worth promising as we put into anything else.

It’s very tempting to describe what we are working on as being “perfect for that” or “the X for Y” or to respond to customer feedback by saying “well that’s what feature X will do for you”. But that’s all messy and confusing. We can’t be everything for everyone and by trying to do so – we’ll never be able to make a clear promise to anyone.

Yes, iteration is critical, ideas incrementally improve, and we may not nail our promise from day one. But let’s think less about how to tweak our promise to match what we are working on and more about what promise is worth making and exactly what it’ll take to deliver on it.

• Share

This weekend I saw the new Spiderman movie on IMAX 3D. It’s not that the movie was bad. It’s just that, other than swaping out a few actors and actrices, there was barely an ounce of imagination applied to the same story and cinematic style that very recently went through a 3-movie series.

I’m a big Spiderman fan. In fact, it’s no coincidence that as I type this post, I’m drinking from my favorite Spiderman coffee mug. But, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that Hollywood packaged up and spit out basically the exact same movie that came out in 2002.

The reality is that this new movie is making a ton of money. That’s because we all went and saw the first three and now we are all paying big bucks to go see this new one. It made me think about some of the industries making big bucks with annoying products or services or strategies. Hey entrepreneurs out there, doesn’t that last sentence seem wrong to you?!

For example, take the cable television industry. If I want to (legally) watch my favorite sporting events, I have to pay $30 a month for a package of TV channels – 98% of which I will never watch. [Sorry Kardashians.]

What about when I visit a website that I like, but after clicking on every single link on the page, I’m forced to watch a 10 second promo for the next show on TBS or told that now’s the time to buy a new Toyota. [We don't need cars in NYC].

Sooner or later, Hollywood is going to regret all the unimaginative, regurgitated movies they throw at us, I’ll be able to watch TV a-la-carte, and companies with massive TV and Internet media buys will lose to competitors who treat their brands more like personalities than digital billboards. That’s because creative people will get so tired of these things the way they are that they’ll do something about it.

But as long as these culprits keep making money, they’ll continue to do what they’re doing. So really, it’s my fault that the new Spiderman is what it is. I went to the first Spiderman movie twice in the theater and was there opening weekend for all the rest of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Hollywood exec has a picture of me in the office for everyone to laugh at on their way to the bank.

Anyhow, I hear entrepreneurs (including myself) talk a lot about “finding the right idea”.  Instead of wracking our brains, there are big opportunities all around us. Just look at some of the industries making big money doing annoying things – and set out on a mission to disrupt them. It won’t be easy, but the payoff will be huge.  Boxee’s doing it.  Soundcloud and Spotify did it.  GoChime and many others are working on it.  Why not you too!?

• Share

If you grew up in the 80s – then you know (and most likely love) Reading Rainbow and could probably identify LeVar Burton’s voice out of any crowd.

Last week, we saw Burton announce the launch of Reading Rainbow 2.0 – an iPad app for kids that brings back the beloved television series – this time for a new generation.

This return has me thinking about a couple things. First, I agree with Gary Vaynerchuk here and feel that this re-launch signals a trend that we may start to see much more of soon. More companies and brands will start re-launching products and services that found their original success in the pre-Internet world – this time customized for the web and our mobile devices. This may seem like an obvious move to you, but Burton really is a pioneer with this. There’s a war going on between big, old media companies and the tech world. The big media executives are doing everything they can to squash (or at least delay) Internet innovations that will impact their music, movie, and TV businesses. Burton has shown many times in the past and now again, that he’s taking the opposite approach and chooses to embrace the new technologies. I think the app is going to be a huge success and will re-introduce everything that I loved about RR to millions of new minds.

The second thing this re-launch has me thinking about is how much has changed. For me, watching RR required a different mindset. I knew I’d only be able to see 1 episode at a time – so I cherished it. I knew I couldn’t stop and rewind – so I paid attention. I knew I couldn’t have words I didn’t know immediately defined – so I wrote them down and looked them up after. With the Internet and the iPad, all that changes. Bringing an experience that I knew so well as a kid back has helped me compare how the new generation learns, what their mindset must inherently be, and has me wondering how our overall education system in America may need to change in order to keep up.

By the way – I don’t mean to imply that the tried and true (pre-Internet) techniques for learning are “worse” – and that our new technologies for learning and content absorption are “better”. But, I do feel that it would be a mistake to take the approach that big media companies have taken and try to stall technology and innovation. A better strategy is to embrace it -i.e. – understand the new technology, what it means and how it effects our behavior, and to continue to improve it.

• Share

I watched an interesting TED talk by Sheena Iyengar yesterday where Iyengar presents on the “art of choosing”.

There are times when being able to make our own choice is the most important thing.  Other times, choosing between options just stresses us out and causes us to waste energy.  Still others, we aren’t the most experienced, insightful, or skilled person to make the particular decision – yet we still wrestle authority away from those who are.

This concept got me thinking again about the “attention economy” and how the expansion of our information networks will continue to effect our lives and behavior.

It seems to me that many times the most challenging part of decision making is knowing when the choice is worth spending time on and when it is not.

In the business world, it means knowing when to trust others to make important decisions and how to allocate the attention of the organization so that people are focused on what they’re best at, the largest percentage of the time.

• Share

We are often very closed-minded when it comes to process. What I mean by process is the rules for getting things done, the procedure, the flow. In terms of business – it’s how the organization works.

Sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re being closed-minded. Logically it makes sense to think “well it worked before, so it should work now” – or – “it’s not working because you’re not doing it right”. But just as everything around us is constantly changing or evolving, our processes need to change and evolve too and it’s a mistake to not be open-minded to that fact.

I came across a recent interview with Dennis Crowley the other day, where he talked a bit about this topic and how he manages it at foursquare. He explained that sometimes things at foursquare “break” and that many times this is a function of the company’s growth rate – i.e. – growing from a 25 to 50 to now 130 person company in a short period of time. I thought it was very insightful and interesting to here Crowley say honestly (watch the video for his direct quote) – sometimes things just stop working and we have to realize that, figure out why, and change things so that they work again.

Thinking through this has been a reminder to myself that it’s important to stay open-minded to process changes and that just because something worked before or it’s been written down in a book – doesn’t mean it’s always going to work or be the right solution. The goal shouldn’t always be find something that works sufficiently and repeat indefinitely.  It should be find something that works and improve on it as many times as possible.

• Share

This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of attending the Venture for America (VFA) summer celebration event at the IAC building here in NYC.

VFA has an amazing mission.  Their goal is to create 100,000 new jobs in America by 2025.  What’s even more amazing is how they are going to do it.  VFA recruits talented college graduates, pairs them with early-stage startups, and puts them to work for two years.

VFA believes that by encouraging and supporting more graduates to join startups, help small companies grow into big companies, start new companies of their own, they will be fostering the work that will create jobs in America, develop innovative entrepreneurs, and grow local communities.

The Keynote speaker at the event was Tony Hsieh - author of Delivering Happiness - and one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I can think of.  He spoke about his work with the Downtown Project in Las Vegas and noted that 50% (and growing) of the world now lives in large cities.  Thus, investing in the revitalization of America’s downtowns – is also an investment in improving a great deal of lives and the overall American community.

Which brings us to the best part of VFA!  Those talented young grads that they’ve organized are all going to startups operating in underserved cities around the US.  So Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and others are getting some of the support they need to grow local startups and rebuild.

Wishing Andrew Yang the best of luck and my applauds for a great program and the work he’s doing with VFA.

• Share

If you’re building something, you probably won’t find any shortage of people telling you what’s the “right” way and the “wrong” way of doing it.

Web-development as a great example. If there’s one thing that the Internet has plenty of, it’s opinions about the right way and wrong way to develop web apps.

Don’t get me wrong, there are endless examples of times when the right way of doing things is absolutely important. Building a bridge, or performing surgery, to name a couple.

But in other situations, like pursuing new business ideas, writing code to test an idea, creating our artwork, making things, sometimes progress is more important than potentially doing something “wrong”.

The fear of failure is the hurdle that stops us from taking action.  But even after we do take action, our inclination to over-analyze and  ”do things right”, is what holds us back from actually getting anywhere.

We should accept that we’ll probably break stuff. We might even have to fix it all and start from scratch completely.  But if we get to that point, at least it means we found something worth re-building, something worth fixing. What a blessing that would be.

• Share

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. - Paulo Coelho

• Share

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. – Paulo Coelho

• Share

Seth Godin nailed it again with this post.

These days, when our information networks stimulate our brains with good ideas all day, every day – it really is harder to say “no”.

It seems like every direction we look, something is buzzing with interesting stuff. Our networks feed us with great articles, videos, tweets. Our colleagues, friends, co-workers feed us with great ideas and important actions to consume our time.

But I think Godin is right – the “winners” don’t beat everyone else because they work “harder”.  They win because they work harder at the things that matter.  That means, we need to learn when and how cut off the input channels and just say no to the things that don’t matter.

• Share

My last piece of advice is this simple… Persevere. Because nothing worthwhile is easy. – President Obama

• Share