The workday secrets of the world’s most productive philosophers

THE WORKDAY SECRETS OF THE WORLD’S MOST PRODUCTIVE PHILOSOPHERS

BY: DRAKE BAER

Haters gonna hate, thinkers gonna think, philosophers gonna philosophize. But how does one philosophize? Would someone whose thoughts would later shape the world shape their days differently than you and I? As Josh Jones notes at Open Culture, the answer is “not really”–aside for some serious devotions to long, lonesome walks. As we’ll see below, the irregularly outsize output of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Immanuel Kant was marked by exceedingly regular days. As the literary saying goes: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” So let us get to the orders. Read more of this post

Ben Horowitz: Cash Flow and Destiny; “Until you generate cash, you must heed investors even when they are wrong. When you generate cash, you can respond to silly requests from the capital markets the way Kanye would”

10.08.13 // Cash Flow and Destiny

Ben Horowitz

Wait ’til I get my money right
Then you can’t tell me nothing, right?
—Kanye West, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”

If you are an entrepreneur, you have probably heard some crusty old CEO or investor say something like “cash is king.” You probably read the Twitter S-1 and thought to yourself: “What the hell are those old guys talking about?” Twitter is still burning cash six years after founding and they, not cash, seem to be king. In a situation such as this, I usually just say to myself: “That’s the problem with wisdom, you can get it, but you cannot share it.” But this particular nugget is so fundamentally important that I will attempt to represent the old guys in this imaginary conversation. I was a founder/CEO during the period when cash seemed more like a serf than a king in 1999 and 2000. It was the era of “go big or go home.” Investors loved anything Internet and could not care less about profits. I grew my company and I grew it fast. In less than nine months after founding, I booked a $27 million quarter. I was going big and definitely not going home. Then the dot com crash happened and investors changed their collective minds. Investors hated anything Internet and wouldn’t fund anything that couldn’t fund itself. Read more of this post

Ben Horowitz: Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

08.12.13 // Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

Ben Horowitz

If I knew what I knew in the past
I would have been blacked out on your a**
—Kanye West, Black Skinhead

Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. What happened, Ben? I thought founders were supposed to better? Are you going to update your “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” post? In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will write this post. There are three main reasons why founders fail to run the companies they created:

The founder doesn’t really want to be CEO – Not every inventor wants to run a company and if you don’t really want to be CEO, your chances for success will be exceptionally low. The CEO skill set is incredibly difficult to master, so without a strong desire to do so the founder will fail. If you are a Founder who doesn’t want to be CEO, that’s fine, but you should figure that out early and save yourself and everyone else a lot of pain. Read more of this post

Disasters, Rebuilding and Leadership – Tough Lessons from Japan and the U.S.

Disasters, Rebuilding and Leadership – Tough Lessons from Japan and the U.S.

Oct 03, 2013

On March 11, 2011, deep below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, enormous seismic forces reached a tipping point. At 2:46 p.m., one of the earth’s tectonic plates suddenly shifted, thrusting violently underneath another. The North American plate was pushed upward with such force that the movement generated a massive tsunami. It took the wall of moving water 51 minutes to reach the coast of Japan, some 45 miles away. In some places, the tsunami towered more than 125 feet above the ground when it hit. Thankfully, the height of the wave was far less where it came ashore near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant — “only” 50 feet high. Still, the nuclear disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami has been rated by the International Atomic Energy Agency as equal in severity to the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster on record. The complex catastrophe — earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown — killed close to 20,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands more and contaminated a large swathe of beautiful countryside for decades or longer. More than two years later, Japan is still struggling to recover and prevent even more devastation. On May 24, 2013, the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL) sponsored a panel at the Wharton Global Forum in Tokyo to consider the leadership lessons generated by the Fukushima disaster, and to look at its impact on Japan’s energy policy and the resettlement of afflicted areas. Read more of this post

Hallmarks of Successful Growth Companies

Hallmarks of Successful Growth Companies

In collaboration with GE Capital, Jun 05, 2013

Being an entrepreneur is difficult. Yet some start-up and growth-stage companies do more than survive — they thrive. Experts from Wharton and GE Capital reveal that business success often doesn’t depend on stunning innovations but instead on common-sense business practices such as embracing change and choosing the right partners and board members.

Disney will stop issuing stock certificates, delivering shares only in electronic form in a blow to would-be collectors of the documents featuring drawings of Bambi and Mickey Mouse

Disney Stops Issuing Stock Certificates in Blow to Fans

Walt Disney Co. will stop issuing stock certificates on Oct. 16, delivering shares only in electronic form in a blow to would-be collectors of the documents featuring drawings of Bambi and Mickey Mouse. When investors transfer shares, they will be reissued without certificates, Disney said today in a regulatory filing. That will shrink the supply for websites pitching the items as a way to interest children in investing. Read more of this post

NASA Keeps Chinese Away From Aliens; Chinese nationals carry the burden of their country’s weak commitment to intellectual-property protection and strong commitment to espionage

NASA Keeps Chinese Away From Aliens

If Martians landed on National Aeronautics and Space Administration property, Chinese nationals wouldn’t be part of the welcoming committee.

That’s one potential — if far-fetched — consequence of federal legislation and a March moratorium that bans people from China and a handful of other nations from being granted new access to NASA facilities. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s rationale for the moratorium was to protect the U.S. and its space technology from spies. This came in the wake of espionage allegations at a NASA facility that turned out to be false. (The downloaded secrets were actually, ahem, downloaded porn.)

An actual consequence of the U.S.’s actions is that Chinese students and researchers will not be allowed to attend a November conference on alien worlds at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. As a result, several prominent researchers are boycotting the conference. Read more of this post

Cash-Challenged CERN Lifted by Nobel Hunts for BRIC Funds; ““It took us 50 years to complete our description of the visible world. It’s high time to go into the dark universe. To open that window would be just great.”

CERN Hunts Missing Universe After Higgs Boson Pioneers Win Nobel

The Geneva research center that made the most important find in particle physics in half a century, helping explain how the visible universe holds together, is tapping developing nations to help fund its follow-up act. CERN’s observation of a Higgs boson last year led to a Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their theoretical work predicting the particle’s existence. CERN is now considering new multibillion-dollar projects that may prove that other dimensions exist and track what happened after the Big Bang formed our universe. Read more of this post

New York Set to Reach Climate Point-of-No-Return in 2047

New York Set to Reach Climate Point-of-No-Return in 2047

Temperatures in New York are increasing, and after 2047 they won’t return to the historical average of the past one and half centuries, according to a study today in the journal Nature. “Climate departure,” when the average temperature for each year is expected to exceed historical averages from 1860 through 2005, will occur in Jakarta and Lagos in 2029, Beijing in 2046 and London in 2056, according to the study. New York will match the global departure 34 years from now and tropical areas will get there sooner. Read more of this post