The evolutionary reason behind trees bearing fruit is one of the most poetic facts I know about science.
Apparently they bear fruit to be eaten by the animals (including human animals) so that they seed get scattered on earth. In other words they bring their best forward and give it for free to unthankful yet mobile cohabitants in hopes to provide for their offspring.
A lover is like an ocean wave. His aggression and arrogance stay no more the moment he hits the warm sand. And that is the beauty of love.
CBInsights just released the following stats: 75% of funded startups get orphaned or die along the way. And those are already a small fraction of all startups. On its face, it is pretty disappointing. All that effort and hope – poof! It goes down the black hole.
But Bill Gates says it is ok. I wonder why. Looking at how other amazing things around us come about, there is an underlying theme. As if it can’t be any other way. The vast majority of mutations are harmful. They fail to contribute their tiny step in the marvelous evolution process. Most sperms fail to reach the egg, the very reason they came to existence. And almost all of the parallel universes collapse right after their big bang. In other words, to create, to bring life, and to thrive towards perfection, there will be a lot of brave victims. Those who choose to fluctuate out of nothingness. Those who choose to swim along 250 million rivals. And those who choose to change blindly in hope of a better fit to their environment. Without them, none of the rest would have happened. Startups live in a safe heaven comparatively.
In Monza Italy, they banned round fish bowls since they considered that to distort the vision of the fish and the understanding of its surrounding and hence animal cruelty. But how can we tell between our view and a view of a goldfish in such bowl which is distorted and which one is real? Does that question even make sense? If the fish was anything of an authority, could it have banned our view to the world?
“The reality is in the eye of the beholder”. Says Stephen Hawking
Last wednesday I woke up to a shocking news. As I just opened my eyes, I heard FB msg alert on my phone. A friend of mine was messaging me 6 am in the morning:
“Hey Mahyar, I was so sorry to hear Paco de Lucia died. I was planning to see him…” What?!!!! Paco died?!!! I jumped out of my bed to open the news on the laptop… couldn’t believe my eyes.. I suddenly felt empty and broken.. A mix of headache, dizziness and throat clenching pain..
It is hard for someone who has not experienced this situation to understand why I from Iran may be in love with a 66 year old man from Spain who doesn’t know me and for all I know could have had strange habits, and little care for my love, if he ever knew me. But I was in love. For me Paco was the beacon of perfection.. The unreachable.. The unbeatable. The god.
Like many of his admirers, Paco was one of the reasons I fell in love with the guitar and certainly the reason that I love flamenco. When I was a young boy learning guitar, I naively aimed to reach his famous ‘picado’ speed. As a student, I remember one year that I spent my invaluable “Norouz” holiday of 13 days sitting in my room and practicing day and night, while everyone else was having a good time vacationing. Needless to say I failed to reach his speed, but perhaps I learned to appreciate that great things cannot be achieved in a matter of days. It was a humbling experience. What I did to mitigate my pain was to write a computer program that played Paco’s melody faster than Paco. The melody sounded really bad on the computer.
As a newbie, Paco’s magic to me was his unbeatable speed. But, as I grew up and matured, I learned more about music and grew further appreciation for his later works. Those that did not only have a killer technique but also complex harmony, rhythm and musicality. But, aside from this appreciation, Paco had become like family to me: I grew up with his music and appreciate it differently at different stages of maturing just the same way that one appreciates parents and what they do for them differently at different stages of life.
His death felt horrible. But I am glad that he died relatively young and functioning so that the aging didn’t have a chance to make him less than perfect. In a way his early death was the only way to immortalize his mastery over the guitar.
One of the side effects of insomnia is that you may end up dusting off your antiquated blog at 4:14 am. My previous post before the long absence was wishing Google, Apple, MSFT to cure my pain and build something grand for me. These days, I am taking a stab at it myself. The great thing though about running your own startup is that you will never have a boring day in your life. Every morning, you wake up to a new idea or to witness the progress of your idea.
The scary thing is that sometimes you feel like you are living in a “cloud cuckoo land” (my co-founder often use the phrase 😀 ). When that feeling gets in you and you try to react rationally, what is the best thing to do that comes to your mind? Going and talking to people! Letting people get you out of your cuckoo land!
Well.. I have to say that is oftentimes a humbling experience and is well recommended to both novice and seasoned entrepreneurs. However, sometimes that attempt backfires in your face when you find yourself in a room with entrepreneurs or rather “wantrepreneurs” who indeed do live in the cuckoo land. As a matter of fact, for every single visionary people in the startup space, there are a bunch of wackos. What bites is that you don’t know which one you are, neither does anyone else.
PS: Sometimes when you pitch to a crowd, you feel like Homer Simpson singing ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It’.
I don’t know about you folks but every time I leave home or office, I need to check the holy trinity in my pocket: phone, keys, wallet. I feel like it is almost about to time to pray them in unison aka have them all in one device.
Of course that only means the integration of your car lock and door lock and credit cards and health insurance and drivers license and so on and so on and so on with your smart phone. But as far as I can tell, that can’t be too hard.
Ok dear tech giants (ms, google, apple) what are you waiting for. I don’t care if it is x-pocket or g-pocket or i-pocket. I need lighter pockets and you need to whoop each others’ asses. So, sounds like a win-win to me.
In a few days, I am leaving “the land of opportunity” with the goal of exploring new opportunities. Is it out of my comfort zone? Sure it is. Doesn’t it hurt to leave loved ones behind? Sure it does (and it did by the way), but I am no stranger to that feeling. Is it worth it? I hope so.
Martin Buber says: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
Imprinted on my ticket is Cambridge. However, something tells me that Cambridge is only a connection to my secret destination, which I embrace with open arms.
Along the new habits that I have been trying to pick up lately, this year I wrote down a page of resolutions and goals. ‘Experts’ say that writing them down has a positive psychological impact, so I am here to either challenge their theory or help myself.
I hope 2012 brings happiness to the habitats of this lonely planet. I intentionally used ‘hope’ instead of ‘wish’ because unlike wish, hope demands you to be realistic and active. I believe in the goodness of humans and I believe creating happiness will create even more happiness and the process continues.
Scream out loud HAPPY 2012!
Redwood Guitar 