Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
This mythical wave of girls’ violence and meanness is, in the end, contradicted by reams of evidence from almost every available and reliable source. Yet news media and myriad experts, seemingly eager to sensationalize every “crisis” among young people, have aroused unwarranted worry in the public and policy arenas. The unfortunate result is more punitive treatment of girls, including arrests and incarceration for lesser offenses like minor assaults that were treated informally in the past, as well as alarmist calls for restrictions on their Internet use.
One of my favorite readings from my undergrad Media Studies days was Mike Males, discussing the widespread myths and misconceptions about youth activity and supposed violence. Seems the media hasn't come very far in the past decade, even though youth are actually getting *less* violent.
They recruit and train young Cambodians and Laotians who are trapped in the circle of poverty. These individuals are trained in various IT skills for 6 – 8 months. If they meet the DDD requirements, they are hired to perform IT services for global companies and spend half of their day in school, earning a degree in 3 to 4 years. DDD often hires graduates for management positions and many move on to other careers and fields where they can earn nearly 6 times the local salary.
I met these guys at the TOC Conference in February. Neat model and great mission.
If they were upfront with their employees and said something to the effect of, “we know that you’re not going to retire here; in fact, after two to three years, we know you’ll be ready to move on to a different job. But before that happens, we want to make sure that you feel that you’ve done an excellent job here and are leaving with some solid experience under your belt. Of course, there are a handful of architect and management positions available, but you’ll really need to demonstrate commitment before even being considered for those. Obviously, that path isn’t for everyone.
Time is the singular measure of life. It’s one of the few things you can not get more of. Knowing how to spend it well is possibly the most important skill you can have.
You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. You can touch them all in a week and make sure they’re all pointed in the right direction. By 150, it’s clear that that’s not going to scale, and you’ve got to find some way to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.
And that, to me, is a huge amount of what it means to manage. But I went to Harvard Business School and that never occurred to me the whole time. And I’d started a bunch of companies and never gotten to that understanding, even with one company I had that I did take up to over 200 people.
Airline miles are now a currency like any other, legal tender not just in Airworld but in the economy of flat-screen TVs, washing machines, and even diamond rings. There are an estimated 17 trillion miles in circulation right now, which would get you two-thirds of the way to Alpha Centauri. At their nominal exchange rate of a penny per mile, that's $170 billion—more than the currency reserves of either the United States or Germany. Only a fraction are redeemed, for some 40 million free trips a year. The miles are worth more than the airlines themselves. Not only that, but they are a fact of life for the economy: American Airlines' mileage program, the largest and oldest, now has upwards of 60 million members—one in every five Americans. Meanwhile, our credit cards are pumping out miles by the billion. They were a currency invented and circulated by the airlines—ready for arbitraging. One flier I met buys a new car's worth of plane tickets annually but redeems his miles for tickets worth the equivalent of a new house. Miles aren't taxed.
As it turns out, it's not even just business founders. Mike Meyers said "I still believe that at any time the No-Talent Police will come and arrest me." Jodie Foster said "I thought it [winning the Oscar] was a fluke. The same way as when I walked on the campus at Yale. I thought everybody would find out, and they'd take the Oscar back.
