Imagine

I have had a few posts on charactertics around facing adversity, challenges and playing David like 300, I Like It Rough and then my last post recently on (Pride), Determination and Resilience.

You can imagine how excited I was to read an article by Melinda Beck, from The Wall Street Journal, here on how some very successful household names had to face failure before they became what they are today. The article to me was a "Celebration of Failure"!

• J.K. Rowling's first book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury, a small London publishing house, picked it up.
• Twenty-seven publishers rejected Theodor Seuss (Dr. Seuss) Geisel's first book, "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street."
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity basketball team sophomore year.
• Decca Records turned down a contract with the Beatles, saying "Groups of guitars are on their way out."
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor who said "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."

Here are some snippets that I want to make a note to self:

What makes some people rebound from defeats and go on to greatness while others throw in the towel? Psychologists call it "self-efficacy," the unshakable belief some people have that they have what it takes to succeed.

I only think that a few people rebound and most throw in the towel.

Where does such determination come from? In some cases it's inborn optimism -- akin to the kind of resilience that enables some children to emerge unscathed from extreme poverty, tragedy or abuse. Self-efficacy can also be acquired by mastering a task; by modeling the behavior of others who have succeeded; and from what Prof. Bandura calls "verbal persuasion" -- getting effective encouragement that is tied to achievement, rather than empty praise.

Some quotes:

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. That's why I succeed," - Michael Jordan
"I didn't fail 1,000 times," he told a reporter. "The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." - Thomas Edison
"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." - Winston Churchill

Two big failures I have faced personally are:

1. My application for a student visa to study for my MS during my first attempt (1995) to follow my dream to the US, was rejected twice in 2 days. I could not apply for another two years as it was mandatory after 2 consecutive rejections. [I finally applied again in 1999 and made it]
   
2. My 3 years of being "vocationally challenged" during the downturn after the dot-com days. That enabled me to discover social networking online (starting with LinkedIn where I eventually went to work) since I was living it off-line. My LinkedIn profile only details those days since I value my achievements then as one of the best
   

Finally, as Henry Ford said: "Whether you think that you can or you can't, you're right."

Imagine: The Pursuit IS Happyness

I recently saw another Terrence Howard movie called Pride and the swimming team he coached was PDR - The Philadelphia Department of Recreation.

He goes on to coach a bunch of kids playing basketball on the street to win a major league but only after he makes them believe in PDR:

"Pride, Determination and Resilience"

Imagine: Startups without the above

Needless to say, having a wee bit of imagination is a good thing. Unlearning to learn some visual tools and skills seemed appropriate so here is what I have just picked up and reading currently.

More on it when I get through it but I can tell you that after about 40 pages, I am buying a big whiteboard for the home.

Swimmy, Stripes and Orbitting the Giant Hairball are all excellent hand drawn visual presentations of very powerful messages. Furthermore, with coffee shops being a part-time habitat for me, napkins are always plentiful.

LinkedIn always had a tradition of celebrating its milestones when a significant number of users had signed up.

They just celebrated 20M users and a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the much newer and larger team. See all the fun pictures on their blog post here. I started using LinkedIn:

• As a user in 2003 when they had 40k users and with it my initiation to all things social/Web2.0
  
• As an employee in 2004 when it had about 1.5M users
• Left in 2006 when it had about 6.5M users

2 years later and they have grown by about 3 times!

Two of them where I was in on the journey are below. I can spot myself in the second one but had no luck with the first

It took me a day in 2003 to see that LinkedIn worked and it would always work. Why?

"People Always do Business with People

Imagine: It is that simple

I have talked about  caterpillars Stripe and Yellow, then the fish Swimmy so I thought a horse would be a nice addition.Here is a great Sufi legend about a Horse I picked up from Paulo Coelho's (If you have not read The Alchemist - drop everything and read that first) blog:

"Many years ago in a poor Chinese village, there lived a peasant with his son. His only material possession, apart from some land and a small straw hut, was a horse he had inherited from his father.

One day, the horse ran off, leaving the man with no animal with which to till the land. His neighbors - who respected him greatly for his honesty and diligence - came to his house to say how much they regretted what had happened. He thanked them for their visit, but asked:

- How can you know that what has happened has been a misfortune in my life?

Someone mumbled to a friend: “he can’t accept reality, let him think what he wants, as long as he isn’t saddened by what happened.”

And the neighbors went off, pretending to agree with what they had heard.

A week later, the horse returned to the stable, but it was not alone; it brought with it a fine mare for company. Upon hearing this, the villagers - who were flustered since they now understood the answer the man had given them - returned to the peasant’s house, in order to congratulate him on his good fortune.

- Before you had only one horse, and now you have two. Congratulations! - they said.

- Many thanks for your visit and for all your concern - answered the peasant. - But how can you know that what has happened has been a blessing in my life?

Disconcerted, and thinking he must be going mad, the neighbors went off, and on the way commented: “does he really not understand that God has sent him a gift?”

A month later, the peasant’s son decided to tame the mare. But the animal unexpectedly reared up and the boy fell and broke his leg.

The neighbors returned to the peasant’s house - bringing gifts for the wounded boy. The mayor of the village offered his condolences to the father, saying that all were very sad at what had happened.

The man thanked them for their visit and their concern, but asked:

- How can you know that what has happened has been a misfortune in my life?

They were all astonished to hear this, since no one could be in any doubt that the accident of a son was a real tragedy. As they left the peasant’s house, some said to others: “he really has gone mad; his only son might limp forever, and he is still in doubt about whether what happened is a misfortune.”

Some months passed, and Japan declared war on China. The Emperor’s envoys traveled throughout the land in search for healthy young men to be sent to the battle front. Upon arrival in the village, they recruited all the young men except the peasant’s son, whose leg was broken.

None of the young men returned alive. The son recovered, the two animals bred and their offspring were sold at a good price. The peasant began visiting his neighbors to console and help them, - since they had at all times been so caring. Whenever one of them complained, the peasant said: “how do you know it is a misfortune?” If anyone become overjoyed, he asked: “how do you know it is a blessing?” And the men in that village understood that beyond appearances, life has other meanings."

Imagine: Conventional Wisdom

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

Since I am always driven by learning and unlearning from others and whenever I see, read or hear something that I feel really inspired about, I make it a point to share it here. Here is one that got my mindshare on the treadmill today - the tag line of Marines.com

"We don't accept applications. Only Commitments!

The only currency for startups is commitment:

• Its a small army of 300 wishing to disrupt the might Persian army
• It can not, should not accept mediocrity
  
• Its a passion to make a difference in people's lives
• Its against conventional wisdom
• Its not comfortable - ones works everywhere, wherever and is on duty all the time
  

Imagine: The Few, The Proud!

There is a really neat article in the new issue of The Economist here about social networks, the walls around them and how they are utilities hard to monetize - like webmails. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I thought the one below was very contextual and would say it all.

It is of course possible, that it is a recommendation engine of products - ones that I might need in the future since they have a lot of profile information about my life with startups.

Imagine: Startups can be a hairy ride

I came across this really well written post on "Why Not To Do A Startup" by Matt and Yes - I had some thoughts that are tied to some basic beliefs I have about life and people.

I think his observations were on the money with respect to startups but it is applicable only to people who are doing with the sole focus of making a lot of money overnight. They are inspired by the phenomenal exit for the Founders of YouTube or the buzz of Facebook and its potential large exit. Another parallel was this article on Max Levchin, the Founder and CEO of Slide.com in New York Times - I dont know him and nor can I speak to the accuracy of the article.

I started with a small step by joining LinkedIn very early in 2004 when social networking was not a category and then after 2 years there went on to start CrossLoop with a very neat team. I am definitely not as experienced as many others out there but there is a common question that needs an answer - whether it is startups or your supposedly-secure job in a large company:

"What Drives You?"

If you choose to have a cause that transcends the need for making money, becoming popular, paying bills, need for validation from others - you will NOT experience what Matt suggests and will have one of the most fulfilling purposes of your life. Some hardships maybe but I guarantee no regrets and and a very possible outcome could be that house in Hawaii. Think collateral success - the L-Letter should sum it all up.

Otherwise, I couldn't agree more with Matt - I have known and seen a few people living EXACTLY what Matt describes.

Imagine: A FUNomenal "ride" (and it is short)