Gabor’s Positive Thoughts

If it's in a manual, if it's the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It's boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister's record wasn't. He was just faster ... but it doesn't matter.

Don't you love it when people go out of their way to be nice? Like when someone waits to hold the door for you. Or when a stranger waves you into a line a traffic. Or even when a coworker shoots you a friendly smile along with a "have a nice day." If everyone was a little bit nicer to the folks they encountered each day, perhaps the world would be a more pleasant place. Operation NICE was initiated to remind you that a little NICE goes a long way.

Operation Nice

We're living in a dangerous world. But we are also living in a world in which deep, structural forces create stability. We have learned from history and built some reasonably effective mechanisms to handle crises. Does that mean we shouldn't panic? Yes, except that it is the sense of urgency that makes people act—even overreact—and ensures that a crisis doesn't mutate into a disaster. Here's the paradox: if policymakers hadn't been scared of another Great Depression, there might well have been one.

-- Fareed Zakaria, The Sky Isn’t Falling

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?

Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

-- Larry Page, Commencement Address, University of Michigan, May 2009

The Hunger to do something creative. The Hunger to do something amazing. The Hunger to change the world. The Hunger to make a difference. The Hunger to enjoy one's work. The Hunger to be able to look back and say, Yeah, cool, I did that. The Hunger to make the most of this utterly brief blip of time Creation has given us. The Hunger to dream the good dreams. The Hunger to have amazing people in our lives. The Hunger to have the synapses continually fired up on overdrive. The Hunger to experience beauty. The Hunger to tell the truth. The Hunger to be part of something bigger than yourself. The Hunger to have good stories to tell. The Hunger to stay the course, despite of the odds. The Hunger to feel passion. The Hunger to know and express Love. The Hunger to know and express Joy. The Hunger to channel The Divine. The Hunger to actually feel alive.

The Hunger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

A willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame. A willingness to question conventional wisdom and rethink the old dogmas. A lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige - and a commitment instead to doing what is meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.

That's the spirit that led a band of patriots not much older than you to take on an empire. It's what drove young pioneers west, and young women to reach for the ballot; what inspired a 30 year-old escaped slave to run an underground railroad to freedom, and a 26 year-old preacher to lead a bus boycott for justice. It's what led firefighters and police officers in the prime of their lives up the stairs of those burning towers; and young people across this country to drop what they were doing and come to the aid of a flooded New Orleans. It's what led two guys in a garage - named Hewlett and Packard - to form a company that would change the way we live and work; and what led scientists in laboratories, and novelists in coffee shops to labor in obscurity until they finally succeeded in changing the way we see the world.

That is the great American story: young people just like you, following their passions, determined to meet the times on their own terms. They weren't doing it for the money. Their titles weren't fancy - ex-slave, minister, student, citizen. But they changed the course of history - and so can you.

"Cash on hand is just one important variable in a startup’s life, but it’s not necessarily the most important. What matters most is the number of iterations the company has left."

-- Eric Ries via Garry Tan

"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself."

-- Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love

Gabor