I talk a whole lot. I always feel like sharing all my thoughts- whether there is someone willing to listen or not. I wouldn’t call myself a writer (I probably didn’t even use the previous dash correctly). But being successful at sharing ideas is tough. Writing is hard of course, but that is not what I am talking about. It is hard because in recent times we have developed an expectation for writers to be “experts” in the topics they write about. What does that mean anyway?
Last night I had the pleasure to go to a fantastic ‘unofficial’ TED conference organized in San Francisco. For those who don’t know what TED is, let me save myself some typing and quote Wikipedia:
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Note: For some reason, starting essays or blog posts with sentences such as “this is indeed an interesting topic” is considered amateurish. However, I like doing it because it puts me in a conversational mindset, and I rather communicate to others (regardless of being through voice, video, or text) in a casual manner. In this post, I am just going to start with this long unnecessary paragraph in order to achieve the same result. I accept suggestions on other ways to be explicitly informal.
At a Business Today International Conference, I had the pleasure to hear many distinguished keynote speakers. I honestly can’t remember any of the speeches, but there was one that I always think about and quote to other people. The speaker was the CEO of a middle-man-fuel-trading type company—I don’t recall his name. He stood up in the podium and said something like the following:
you guys are young, you have a lot of time and your minds have not yet been polluted by society. You guys should spent much of this time figuring out what your world views are: Do you believe in God? Why? Would you get an abortion? Why? Do you feel you owe to your country? Your family? Why? Don’t just follow a belief just because the people around you follow it. Allow yourself the opportunity to explore ideas and find which world views best match you—a unique individual […]
The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, establishes that 80% of a process’ output comes from 20% of the inputs. If we consider our job or school such a process, this would mean that it would take us 20% of our time to achieve 80% of the results we would achieve if we spent all of our time focused on such endeavor.
