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Gary Edwards

Drew Houston's Commencement address - MIT News Office - 0 views

  • They say that you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with
  • f you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying and planning and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.
  • Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Bill Gates's first company made software for traffic lights.
  • Steve Jobs's first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phone calls
  • Both failed,
  • From now on, failure doesn't matter: you only have to be right once.
  • There are 30,000 days in your life.
  • So that’s how 30,000 ended up on the cheat sheet. That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story.
  • So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting.
  • I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that's made all the difference.
  • Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.
  • Excelsior
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    Excellent and well worth the time to read! Founder of DropBox tells his story and it's full of insight, wisdom and naked truth. excerpt: "I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing - who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk. The problem is a lot of people don't find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong - I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn't going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best. It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice. "
Gary Edwards

J.C. Herz Ringling College Commencement Speech: Harvesting the Creative Life - 0 views

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    Wow!  excellent advice, top to bottom.  Very well thought out flow of wisdom. excerpt: The important work that you build your reputation on - you can't just Google it. You don't cut and paste it from Wikipedia. You roll up your sleeves, and bring all your creativity and meaningful skills to bear on the problem of building something.   This is what the world requires - this is what the world rewards. Not just calling yourself creative, but understanding how to exercise your creative powers to some end, to bring your vision and skills together in a meaningful way. This is a powerful thing to be able to do. It gives you tremendous value in a society where attention is currency - being able to capture people's imaginations is the scarcest kind of power in a fractured culture. Creating work that transports and transcends is one of the few ways to create sustainable value in a disposable society. What you do, if you do it well, is never going to be a commodity. Vision, magic, delight. Heart-rocking spectacle. Pulse-pounding action. These things don't get outsourced to some cubicle drone in the developing world.   You are an influential group of people, and today is an important moment, as you set forth to become the chief stewards of your gifts. Because, this is what it means to be a creative professional: figuring out how to be the best steward of your gifts, so that your power to create grows and deepens meaningfully over time. So that your edges stay sharp, and your light stays bright. The life you've chosen is not one that simply requires clocking in and clocking out. You've got to bring your soul to it every day. You've got to be on your game.   That takes discipline. And it takes awareness - of how you're spending your time, and of how what you're doing affects your capability and your capacity. You are going to have to ask yourself, at every turn: is this project making me smarter, or making me stupider. Is this job stoking my fire,
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