I have a friend - one of the most intelligent in terms of all-round emotional and rational yin-yang - but not in the league of the geniuses I saw in IIT (I saw only one genius in my entire IIM batch).
He's running his own company and it 's always a pleasure to speak with him. What I love is that his world-view is emerging from the risks he's taken. For example, in a discussion today on firing , many of his thoughts echoed Welch's own tho' he's not read Welch. Perhaps, they went a little beyond too. I recalled a similar conversation with another friend running a startup two years ago in Bangalore. The parallel was that both of them had gone through the teething problem of doing their first firing in a market where resources for fledgling startups is very tough to get.
One of the geniuses I knew of went to Harvard after topping in the IIT. Before that he worked in Microsoft Seattle for two years. After Harvard, he moved on to McKinsey US.
Great.
But if instead of Microsoft, the top company would have been, say, I2, I know he would have gone there. In the end, he just kept hitting the topmost band of whatever he could get. There was no pursuit of passion that he was risking for. Just following his own herd - small tho' it be.
In engineering, I was obsessed with genius.
There were guys who farted it, there were guys who didn't have it.
After almost a decade, it is the latter who surprises me right now.
These are the guys out of job for two years, risking careers/lives for ideals. Not the guys converting their genetically endowed assets to the hottest currency of the day - IB, Consulting, Harvard, Mac, IIM, whatsoever. Of course, there are exceptions - guys who would work for the Microsofts and Macs even if they were not the "hottest" jobs in the market and the guys were toppers from IIM. Exceptions in the same vein as albinos, black swans, six fingers and beauty with brains.
Very funnily, a friend on this trip told me that he was looking for self-actualization this way. But the fact is that the actualization is not self driven at all! It is market driven - big moolah, rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, hot shot, etc. Some of them might go to build their own companies - but I am not talking about just startups per se - even that is a cliche now - guy with top network putting together something with media hype or those horrible juvenalia reeking with BGOs posturing as corporate books. I am talking about self-actualization. Finding what the self is and then actualizing on that. Unfortunately, the former goes with years, if not entire life, of heart-wrenching self-doubt and swimming upstream.
Basically, guts.
I am still forming my thoughts around this and will get back on this. Coz this is basically a reevaluation of my value set. My aim is to steer my own life around this value set; that is if I have the guts to do it.
"If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction" - Shelly
This is a comment from a blog on atheism -
I am totally overwhelmed by Mr. Pierce Butler's pithy intellect.
In the United States, a carefully-cultivated cultural schism includes not only the evangelical religious revival you speak of and a wider ideology with its own "reality" and agenda. This viewpoint, which with typical dishonesty calls itself "conservatism", is hard to delineate because of its frequent shifts and dishonesty: perhaps prototypical is an account in Time during the first Clinton administration, describing a daily talking-points fax series from the Republican National Committee to talk-radio hosts, which one day would describe Hillary Clinton as a nymphomaniac, the next day as frigid, and the next as a lesbian.
Now read this!!!
Incoherent intellectually
but well-organized politically,
this movement relies on
repetition and emotion.
I'm going to print this and pin it to my cubicle!!
Its components include a massive metanetwork of media outlets, numerous churches, think tanks and political organizations, and a followership with numerous legitimate grievances and no comprehension of how its anxieties are being manipulated for an elitist seizure of power. Essentially fascistic, this crusade is possibly unique among its kind for the absence of a central "strongman" leader: though GW Bush may seem to fill that role at present, even if he truly made White House policy decisions he would still be a figurehead, as this movement was quite powerful before anyone outside of Texas had heard of him and will be powerful after he's gone.The resurgence of religiosity in the US these days is only part of a surge of commitment to belief in the counterfactual: consider the high percentages of citizens who firmly believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks and was preparing to hit America with "weapons of mass destruction"; that "just say no" programs could end drug abuse, teen pregnancy, etc; that foreign aid and welfare are the major causes of the federal deficit; that blacks commit most of the crimes around the country; that all gays prey on children; that abortion causes breast cancer; that the people of Haiti, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, etc, etc, even Iraq, are grateful to the US for having been liberated by our troops; that universities are monolithic citadels of anti-American indoctrination; and so on endlessly (I didn't even mention myths regarding the "liberal media", feminists, environmentalists, most racial minorities, lawyers, teachers, unions, global warming, and countless other targets of disinformation and scapegoating).This isn't a Great Swoon, it's a Great Delirium - and it's not the result of blind impersonal historical cycles.
