Indecisions, Visions and Revisions
From Evernote: |
Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There's nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.
Not all those who wander are lost.
It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters . . . It's in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.
. . . to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both. The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Caribbean) and died all over France, but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.
Many years ago, I was an obituary clerk for a daily newspaper near Rutgers University called The Home News Tribune. I remember one submission that distinctly taught me a life lesson: it doesn't matter how much material goods you accumulate or how much money you have in the bank when you die, it matters what impact you've had to those around you while you were alive. Death -- and holidays -- remind me of the limited time we have here and how important it is to give back with passion and integrity.
With Thanksgiving tomorrow I felt compelled to write this post and include a video my team and I produced a few weeks ago of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and investor at Greylock Partners. We asked him to talk about impact and the importance of giving.
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REID HOFFMAN: On Giving and Impact
"What obituary would I want to have written about me?" Reid Hoffman asks, "What should I do with my life?"
Posing these questions is an important first step in finding the path to making a difference.
Reid explains that he is "inspired by people, who through their individual efforts, build something at massive scale that changes the world."
The message is to anyone watching, although Reid is a shining star among entrepreneurs, and it is easy to see him directly speaking to our startup community.
"The new generation of entrepreneurs are heavily focused on how they change the world. How do they use technologies, inventions, business models," Reid says. "They are inspired by seeing an opportunity to deploy these tools in order to make these world changes."
Reid asks us to support this new generation of entrepreneurs by inspiring them and helping them access the right resources.
"True impact in changing the world is scale in two dimensions," Reid says. "One is number of people and the other one is time."
According to Reid, Full Circle Fund, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that funds social impact projects and organizations in the Bay Area, makes an impact by innovating on these two vectors -- people and time.
Engaging a large number of people on systematically valuable things on an ongoing basis will create the most positive impact, Reid says.
This video was shot and produced for Full Circle Fund and Startuplive.tv by MediaGuns, Inc. and Attachment Media. Thank you to all who contributed to this project.
