passionistic

10 most important things they did not teach you at school

by David Wong

By the time you’re 30, you’ll be hit with the crushing truth of just how much the grownups didn’t teach you when you were in school. And, while liberals and conservatives haggle over whether public schools need more funding or more lessons on the Ten Commandments, we think all can agree there are some very basic, useful things that our children really, really should know.

Therefore when Cracked starts its line of private schools, know that your kids won’t graduate without having passed…

#10 How to spot a douchebag

Young ladies, you’re in your teens now and already you have no doubt run into some guys who are being suspiciously nice to you. Likely you have figured out that in many cases, this has nothing to do with them being nice guys and everything to do with them desperately wanting you to touch their boner.

What you may not realize is that over the next few years, a string of rejections will cause many of these men to start hating you. Some of them hate you already, because they grew up hating their mothers and it kind of carries over. Boys are like that.

Now, some of these men will then become members of the Pick Up Artist Community, also known as the Seduction Community. This is a loose club of guys who see females as a collection of walking masturbation aids. They have websites and seminars and chat rooms where they trade tips on how to manipulate you into having sex with them.

They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you. Thus many of their techniques work by playing on your insecurities, like “the Neg,” where they first engage you in conversation, then drop subtle criticisms that will undermine your self-esteem and subconsciously make you want to gain their approval (by letting them touch your boobs). Believe it or not, it works—if you’re not ready for it.

This is just one type of douchebag; this class will cover several varieties. And, while we’re not telling you not to sleep with these men, the lesson you will learn from this course is that they will put the same effort into making you happy as they do the semen-encrusted sock under their bed.

Chapters Include:

I. Types of Douchebag;
II. How to Tell When He’s Lying;
III. Why Your Male Friends Almost Certainly Want to Have Sex With You;
IV. Why There is Nothing to be Gained by Showing Your Boobs to a Camera.

#9 Why porn is not a good way to learn about sex

Young men, you’re in your teens now and that means already you’ve seen several thousand hours of Internet porn. Many of you will soon engage in your first sexual encounter, having no practical instruction to guide you beyond those videos.

Unfortunately, what you see on PornTube represents only what certain men wish sex was like. We’re not saying that you’ll never meet a woman who enjoys, say, having semen squirted into her eyes, or having sex on camera with five strangers in the back of a decorated van. What we’re saying is that just about everything you see in those videos—including the ones that claim to be hidden camera or “reality” porn—is there specifically because real women are not like that. These videos fill a gap between fantasy and reality.

So how do you figure out what to do when you’re finally alone with a lady? Well, we can give you the basics, but the rest will be up to you.

Chapters Include:

I. It’s a Vagina, Not a Slab of Meat You’re Trying to Tenderize;
II. Your Penis Size is Probably Perfectly Fine;
III. Why Your First Time is Going to be a Humiliating Disaster, No Matter What You Do;
IV. Most Women Are Not Sexually Stimulated by Spanking;
V. Every Woman is Different and You Will Only Learn What She Likes Via Practice;
VI. That’s OK, Because the Practice is Awesome.

#8 Practical self-defense

We’re calling this course “Practical Self-Defense” but a more accurate title would be, “How To Get Away From Somebody Who is Trying to Mug or Rape You.” Yes, “Get Away.” Some of you guys who grew up on The Matrix still fantasize about beating the shit out of a street full of thugs in a fight that looks like a choreographed dance. This class will not teach you how to do that. No class will teach you how to do that.

Oh, there are guys out there capable of kicking ass. They’re called criminals. They’re good at fighting because they have poor impulse control and anger management, and thus are constantly getting into fights. If you, on the other hand, are going to be civilized and successful parents and homeowners and taxpayers, the odds are overwhelming you will not ever be good at fighting. This fact is thus reflected in our curriculum. 

Chapters Include:

I. Why Your Wallet is Not Worth Dying For;
II. Why Guns and Knives Are Not Awesome (Includes Visual Aids Depicting Wounds of Gnarled Strips of Exposed Fat, Tendons and Skin, Plus Graphic Descriptions of Life in a Wheelchair);
III. How to Break Off an Argument With a Hobo Before He Stabs You;
IV. Why You Can’t Reason With a Screaming Drunk;
V. Why Believing Action Movies Are Real Will Get You Killed;
VI. How to Tell When That Guy Walking Toward You is Concealing a Weapon.

#7 Emergency repairs

This does not require a great deal of elaboration. Quite simply, there are certain things a person who is about to be living on their own needs to know how to do.

Building a goddamned birdhouse is not one of them.

Chapters Include:

I. How to Patch and Paint a Wall So You Can Get Your Deposit Back From Your Landlord;
II. Identifying Which Wires in Your House Will Kill You if You Touch Them;
III. What to do When You Wake Up to Find Your Toilet/Refrigerator/Hot Water Heater/Air Conditioner/Sink is Puking Water Onto Your Floor;
IV. When to Call the Repair Guy;
V. How to Figure Out if the Repair Guy is Screwing You;
VI. Foreign Objects You’re Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let’s Just Get it Out of Your System Now.

#6 Success = meeting the right people

All of those successful people you see around town, with their convertibles and huge televisions? Approximately 100 percent of them got where they are because they had three things. All three are absolutely essential, but one of them is almost never mentioned. They are:

* Talent
* Hard Work
* Randomly Meeting the Right People and Not Pissing Them Off

The autobiographies of famous people will do everything they can to downplay that third part, because it has the element of sheer luck. People get offended when you mention it, because they think it somehow undermines the first two. But remember, we said you need all three.

For instance, let’s take maybe the most successful movie actor of all time, Harrison Ford. He farted around Hollywood for nine years, taking bit parts without anything major ever coming his way. Clearly talented, very hard-working. Yet not once did anybody look at him and say, “This guy will sell several billion dollars’ worth of tickets and action figures some day!” He was just another ambitious, pretty face, in a city full of them. He got so fed up, he quit acting and became a carpenter. Then one day he got hired to install cabinets in the home of a guy named George Lucas. They became friends. That got him the role of Han Solo a few years later. Click the link; that’s a true story.

Decades earlier another Ford, Henry, was just one of many engineers screwing around with early car engine designs until he became friends with a wealthy businessman named Alexander Malcomson who forked over the money to get Ford Motor Company started. This also works for guys not named Ford; Justin Bieber was one of several hundred thousand teenagers singing on YouTube videos beforea former record exec named Scooter Braun clicked on one of his videos by accident and got him a record deal.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have guys like Edgar Allan Poe, whose legendary poem “The Raven” earned him… nine dollars. He burned so many bridges he wound up basically begging the public for money before dying at 40. At some point Poe probably met his George Lucas, but made such a horrible impression on him the guy wouldn’t return his calls.

Chapters include:

I. First Impressions are Really Important;
II. Subsequent Impressions Are Also Important;
III. No, You’re Not Terrell Owens (aka Why Acting Like a Douchebag is a Bad Investment).

#5 Stop throwing away your money on snake-oil

Go to the drug aisle in your grocery store. In between the pills and the vitamins will be a huge shelf full of herbal supplements that promise to do everything from helping you lose weight to easing joint pain to making your brain work better.

And it’s all bullshit. All of it.

Worse, it’s bullshit that we spend $34 billion a year on, almost a third as much as we spend on prescription drugs that actually do something. Just to be clear: Scientists have spent billions in government money carefully testing the effectiveness of this stuff. Their results? No, echinacea can’t cure your cold. Gingko doesn’t do anything for your brain, glucosamine and chondroitin won’t fix your arthritis. Hoodia gordonii won’t help you lose weight.

Don’t get us wrong; we completely realize that lots of the drugs we have now were once naturally occurring in plants and that it is therefore possible that out there, somewhere, is a leaf yet undiscovered by science that will cure your diabetes. But if so, these jerkoffs in the grocery aisle aren’t going to be the ones who find it.

They’re scam artists.

They’re so sure their supplements don’t do anything they don’t do any actual quality control to track how much of the supplement is in each pill. They just throw a little bit in there and shrug. Aren’t they worried about people accidentally overdosing? No, they’re not. They know you can’t overdose on a placebo.

All they’re doing is “curing” ailments that either naturally go away on their own (colds, joint pain) so you wind up falsely attributing the relief to the supplement, or they’re claiming to cure conditions that are hard to quantify (see supplements for “alertness” or “stress relief”). Snake oil salesmen have been getting away with that technique for thousands of generations.

Students, we’re counting on you to make sure that ours is the last.

Chapters Include:

I. Pharmaceutical Companies Are Dicks, But at Least They Use Scientists;
II. Why Hippies Have Never Discovered a Single Disease Cure;
III. “Homeopathic” is Another Word for Voodoo Bullshit;
IV. Just Go See a Doctor You Big Baby.

NOTE: Weight Loss supplements will be explored in-depth in…

#4 Why weight-loss requires some sort of suffering

First of all, know that some people are naturally thin. They often skip meals just because they forgot to eat, and/or enjoy hobbies that involve burning calories as a byproduct—basketball, cycling, whatever. They’ll never be fat and they’ll never have to think about it. They’re excused from this class.

This course is for the rest of you, who will spend your life fatter than what our society considers ideal, and who will forever be uncomfortable in your own skin as a result. You’ll spend many dollars on bullshit exercise equipment that promises to make working out “easy.” You’ll jump on diet fads, eating a bunless hamburger with a knife and fork one week, eating nothing but cabbage soup the next.

Each and every one of these will fail (the success rate for dieters over the long term is close to 0 percent) because they’re all based on the utterly false premise that you can lose weight without ever feeling sore or hungry or some other negative sensation. It is not possible.

Students, imagine that in front of you is a castle. That’s where you want to be. But surrounding that castle is a moat, full of piranha. The only way to get into Sexy Abs Castle is to swim across the moat and let the little fish painfully chew off hunks of fat. The real situation is exactly like that, only the swim will take years.

Your body will get really mad at you when you try to lose weight, because it thinks you’re starving to death. You have to go into any weight loss plan knowing that you will suffer, and just have to man up in preparation for it. Otherwise, just live with it. Being fat isn’t the end of the goddamned world.

Chapters Include:

I. Hunger is Fat Leaving the Body;
II. Eating Three Square Meals a Day Will Absolutely Make You Fat if You Sit in a Chair All Day;
III. Have You Considered Walking Instead of Driving;
IV. How to Dress in Ways That De-Emphasize Your Fatness.

NOTE: The above class is a prerequisite for…

#3 How to cook cheap food that won´t kill you

Most of you will gain weight in college. You’ll be poor, and cheap food makes you fat, as adding salt and fat is the easiest way to make poor quality food taste good. Ramen noodles, Taco Bell burritos, six-dollar pizzas from Papa John’s… all of it is dirt cheap, and all contains way more calories than you’re going to burn while sleeping through classes and playing Guitar Hero.

Fortunately, there are ways around this if you’re willing to put in a little time. As it turns out, spices are also cheap, as are some meats, and dried pasta, and vegetables. You just have to combine them the right way. But no matter what you come up with, it would be extremely difficult to cook something as unhealthy as a Quarter-Pounder Value Meal.

Chapters Include:

I. Pay Attention to Serving Sizes on the Label, They’re Laughably Small;
II. Fat Free Versions of Fat Foods Are Terrible, Don’t Bother;
III. Seriously, Fat Free Cheese Doesn’t Melt;
IV. It’s Hard to Screw Up Spaghetti;
V. Why if You Eat Fruity Pebbles for Dinner, You’ll be Hungry Again 30 Minutes Later;
VI. If You Make a Pot of Chili and Freeze Bowls of It You’ll Totally Have Like Two Months’ Worth of Meals There.

#1 Life is hard and you will die - get over it!

We’re not foolish enough to think one semester of this course can deprogram years of Hollywood bullshit. That’s why we make this a daily class, that continues from K through 12.

Many of you will get very depressed in your 20s, and some of you will stay that way the rest of your lives. Over the years your garage band will break up, you career dream will fall through, a girl will break your heart, you’ll be unhappy with your body, you’ll lose your parents, your favorite pet will die, you will endure at least one very terrible injury that requires hospitalization and breaks new boundaries for what kind of pain you thought was possible.

The reason why this will lead to depression, where it may not have done so for an equivalent person 200 years ago, is because you were raised on illogical stories where things always work out for the main character for utterly arbitrary reasons. Han Solo can shoot straight, but none of the bad guys can—even though they train more. John McClane beats the terrorists because he has toughness and perseverance—something the bad guys lack, even though they should be equally desperate. If a guy and a girl are right for each other, they always wind up together, careers and geography and personal hang-ups be damned.

Here’s the problem: these fantasies were created by adults, as a means of escape from the real world. You, however, have been watching them since you were five—for most of us these were our first impressions of how the adult world works, even if on a subconscious level. You had no context to realize they were bullshit. It sounds frivolous, but that doesn’t change the fact that some of you reading this will not survive the long process of learning how different the real world is.

If it helps, try to remember that you’re still one of the one percent of humanity that was born in a time and place where there is such a thing as anesthesia.

Chapters Include:

I. You Can Die at Any Moment, Get Over It;
II. Required Reading: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
III. Roleplay Exercise: Various Scenes from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
IV. Yes, It Takes 10,000 Hours to Get Really Good at Something, But At Least You’re Not Scavenging Through a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland.

14 reasons to start you own “thing”

This post is based on a post from Jason Baptiste 15.11.2010)

Consider this the uplifting post to counter last week’s “The 11 Harsh Realities Of Entrepreneurship”. Just because it’s a harsh reality, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. The best time to start a startup is not tomorrow, not next week, and certainly not next year. The time is right now, at this very second.  Here’s why:

You Will Have The Time Of Your Life

I put this first, because it’s the reason that will motivate you the most to start a startup. Doing this may be hell at times, but boy is it fun. It’s an adventure that you will remember for the rest of your life whether things go very well or things go poorly. They used to say that everyone should try to be a rockstar at least once in their lifetime. I’m going to add to that and say that in-between being a rockstar and something else, you should be an entrepreneur at some point just for the adventure. Writing this article makes me realize how much I truly love doing this - the uncertainty, the victory, the failure, the connections with customers, the press,etc. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else and if this is truly for you, you will eventually feel the same.

You Have The Power To Create Something From Nothing

Few professions have the power to create something from absolutely nothing whatsoever. Right now, you may have some crazy idea in your head to bring into the world. It exists on some napkins, photoshop files, etc. right now, but eventually it will become reality. There’s a good chance it’s something that will have an impact on a large number of people… millions of people around the world. That wasn’t something many could achieve, even 20 years ago. Now, it’s possible for anyone, anywhere. I rarely use absolutes, since I know what that means, but I truly believe the ability to start a startup can happen anywhere. It’s certainly more difficult in poor countries, but it’s still possible. Look at Kiva.org or posts like this on HN.

A World Of Knowledge Is Available

It used to be a very old boys club or dark art, when it came to entrepreneurship. It used to cost a ton of money to go to seminars and buy books full of snake oil. It still exists, but people are starting to learn better. The experiences of previously successful and/or failed entrepreneurs are everywhere. They are on this very site, they are posted hourly on hacker news, daily on Mixergy, and found through smart people on Twitter. The blueprint to go from zero to paying customers and all the knowledge in between to guide you is out there in the open… for free.

Cloud Computing And Web Apps Make It Cheap To Start

Ten years ago it used to cost a lot to get started in terms of software+hardware. If you planned on doing anything with scale, you needed what equated to a front loaded CapEX of 500k to buy the equipment YOU might need. Software for internal collaboration costed a lot, with very few choices available. Software for actual development was even more costly. Now we have mature open source frameworks/databases and cloud apps. Startup Weekends occur every weekend and are possible due to this advancement in software. I almost feel weird writing this because we’ve taken what’s in front of us for granted. Amazon EC2 scales well, but now it’s even free to test out initially for your project. Of course, your time isn’t free, but even that is reduced with libraries+frameworks like JQuery and Ruby On Rails. Odds are, if there is something you need, it’s out there and available for free. If it’s not, there is probably someone to talk to.

Location Isn’t Important At First

I still think certain geographical areas have their place once you reach certain scale along with what type of business you are building (lifestyle vs. venture backed). In today’s day and age, you can START your company anywhere in the world and get great visibility. I’m seeing more and more companies come from random spots in the US along with international waters. Take a look at Balsamiq, WooThemes, or where Backupify originted (Kentucky!). The ability to access customers is available globally and you can run a distributed team due to the previous point listed above (cloud apps). Face to face time is always a good thing, but it’s a whole lot easier to book a flight once every 8 weeks than to pick up and move to 94306 right out the gate. If location is a worry for you, then don’t worry anymore. Don’t be pressured to race to the valley right away. If another geography makes sense, you will know in due time. You can start getting the most important thing right now, where you are… NOT funding… CUSTOMERS.

You Can Get Press And Attention Overnight

Getting press used to require an overpriced PR firm to the tune of $10,000 a month when getting started. Now a great product with a well crafted story can blow up overnight and get the attention of mainstream media+the tech elite. Take a look at Chat Roulette. Though it’s not a shining example of a great business, it is a shining example of the attention that a company can get press overnight.

There Are More Customer Acquisition Channels Than Ever Before

Getting customers used to be a really hard thing. It used to take a lot of money to make money. At scale, it certainly takes a lot of money to optimize an efficient sales machine with CAC, LTV,etc., but to get started, you can use a variety of customer acquisition channels. Public relations, inbound marketing, search engine marketing, in person events, platform distribution, direct sales, affiliate programs, and a ton more currently exist. They can be strategically used with little capital. Why does this matter? It’s like having more lives in a video game. Many of the channels won’t work out, that’s just life. If there are more channels, then you have more opportunities for success.

It’s Possible To Make A Living From A Startup Fairly Fast

It used to be that businesses would take years and years of losses to get to the point of making enough money to pay for you to live. If you wanted to do one, you had to raise a significant amount of capital up front, usually in the form of credit cards + savings from your job. In today’s day and age, it’s just completely different. You can start charging for software, increase your customers with a certain level of profitable scale, and get to the point that your barebones living is paid for. We also live in a subscription economy, where revenues are recurring. With things like churn aside, customers are now that gift that keep on giving. It won’t bring you riches right away, but it’s fairly reasonable for a team to create software and make a living within a 6 months period. Building a venture backed company is usually different, but lifestyle ISVs can sometimes morph into one. 37 Signals chose to stay independent, but if they wanted to do the raise money + grow fast show, they could have quite a while ago.

The Capital To Grow Is Widely Available If You Need It

The capital raising world is going through an interesting transitionary period. Since entrepreneurs need less to get to certain milestones, a new class of investors have sprung up, leading smaller and smaller deals. It used to be do a larger angel round or Series A, after having a lot of traction to get started. Deals took a while and the terms varied a lot. Now the spectrum varies heavily. You can get funding from YCombinator or TechStars at a ~18k level for just the idea+being a smart team, a $250-500k seed round in multiple flavors, a traditional larger angel round of $1,000,000, or the full Series A. I actually haven’t seen the full Series A as the first round of financing in a while, now that I come to think of it. A word of caution: many people think they should raise money, just because they see it in the press. That’s the wrong way to go about. You should raise money for a specific reason. In the case of the small ~18k YC round, it usually entails getting the first working version of the product out to get initial customer validation. Anything above that should be strategic to hit certain customer + traction milestones. If you don’t know what those are, don’t raise money yet.

You Will Make Friends And Connections That Will Last A Lifetime

This is one of my top three reasons on the entire list on why to start a startup. The friends you will make, just stay with you forever. There is a certain bond that connects you. It takes an entrepreneur to understand what another entrepreneur goes through. We tend to all stick together and the bond that is formed is very very deep. I’ve been at this for about 5 years, since I was 19 going on 20. Many of the friends I have today were there with me when I first got started. It’s also a very very small world when it comes to the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem. Everyone is at most 3 degrees of separation away, but it often seems to be something closer to 2 degrees. A lot of people will give up along the way and find out entrepreneurship isn’t for them. If you stick around long enough, the pool shrinks, and the people who began their career around the same time as you have advanced far along too. For example, when I first met Noah, he had just started at Facebook. Now he’s done great things through Facebook, Mint, started Get Gambit, and is killing it with AppSumo. I can point out the same for a dozen other people. It’s great to see your friends that have stuck it out start to succeed.

The Amount Of New Platforms And Technologies Is Staggering

Most of the platforms that exist today weren’t around 36-48 months ago. Mobile was owned by the carriers and MySpace was still fairly dominant. The tools now available to build new companies upon is truly remarkable. It’s certainly very difficult to have a lack of problems to solve in unique ways. The more new technologies and platforms that become available, the more companies that can be built over time. Without Facebook we wouldn’t have Zynga and without the iPhone we wouldn’t have companies like Square. Without the advancements in SaaS/Cloud computing, we wouldn’t have companies like HubSpot or ZenDesk.

Finding Out Whether You Are Right Takes Far Less Risk

It used to take many many months and lots of capital to find out whether you were on to something. That just isn’t true anymore. You can find out if you’re right in some time period that is under 60 days. If you’re right keep peeling away more layers. If you’re wrong, pivot a bit, and move on to the next thing. It’s not a zero sum game. You shouldn’t fear failure, but embrace the process that comes with it. Test your ideas via Amazon Mechanical Turk, talk to customers, buy some basic keyword tests on Amazon, and find out whether you are right. You can do this with close to no capital and get over one of the biggest humps a startup faces in its first 6 months: Knowing whether you are building something people want.

A Traditional “Job” Isn’t Much More Secure In The Long Run

Oh sure, you’re a great engineer or marketer. You could get a high paying, possibly even six figure job right now. Add in some benefits and things sound great. Here’s the truth: no job is safe in this world. Wall Street practically collapsed overnight and larger companies do “layoff roulette”. At least doing a startup is some function of having survival that is within your control. When you’re fired, that is usually it. When you go through the equivalent of “being fired” in the startup world, you can fight back. You can persevere and stay determined.

The Worst That Can Happen, Isn’t Really That Bad

It seems a lot worse when you think about it now, but it really isn’t that bad. If your startup fails you will hurt afterwards for a decent while physically, emotionally, and financially. People have been in far worse positions and triumphed. If things fail you either a) try something new startup wise b) join another company whose mission you believe in c) take a new direction in life. Failure at a startup, DOES NOT mean failure at life. I’m not trying to play down the horrible reality that comes with failure. I’m just trying to say this: “You will bounce back and you will live to fight another day”.

Bottom line: If your gut tells you to go for it and there’s something you really believe in, then go for it. We need more startups, as they are the change agents that can save the world. Why do you think now is the best time ever to start a startup? What made you take the entrepreneurial plunge?

I love meeting fellow entrepreneurs.  Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jasonlbaptiste, Friend me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jasonlbaptiste, Email Me:jbaptiste@onstartups.com,

What are you still doing here!?

The following is a post by MArk Stephens. Mark is the founder and CEO of IDR Solutions. Check out his blog at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/ or follow him on twitter at @JavaPDF.

1. Large companies tend to be regarded as dull and unsexy. All the real action and fun is at small startups (preferably Web 2.0 at the moment). Well, I run my own company now and I would never go back. But I am really glad I worked for a large company. Here are my reasons why:
2. You learn an awful lot. You get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. You see lots of very good ideas (like proper source control) and some not so good ideas (like how not to motivate people). While a big company may not seem very exciting, it must have got some things right to be big in the first place. Learn from this. And even the most mediocre organisation has hidden pockets of excellence where people still care and battle stoically to keep things going. They are some of the most resourceful people you will ever meet, combining great technical skills with the ability to manage on no budget and great political acumen.
3. You get to work with lots of clever people. I am a bit of a snob - I like the intellectual buzz of working with smart people. And you can still find a lot of them squeezed into a several departments in large companies. Many smart people stay at large businesses because they enjoy what they do, they have families/responsibilities and cannot take the risk of leaving. You will be taken down a peg or two by the wise, old hacker who was doing this stuff while you were still at school, eats fresh-faced 20 something consultants for breakfast and has some great stories to tell. And you will get a range of ages - let’s face it, most startups reckon you are past it if you are over 23.
4. You become part of a large diaspora/community. I used to work at a big company 12 years ago. I still keep in touch with people there, I bump into former colleagues in lots of unexpected places and people remember me. Such networks are invaluable. Even in the age of social media, it is still often about who knows you, and knows you can do a good job. If your boss did a successful project he will often seek to ‘reunite the band’ for another gig years later. A big company gives you a chance to impress and end up in the address books of lots of future high fliers. And they will take your call when you have something to sell and arrange an introduction for you on the strength of your past performance.
5. They have lots of perks. I do miss the canteen, the sports gym and the other ‘extras’. And that week’s ‘training’ in Amsterdam at the company’s expense. That was a lot of fun! You are not going to be sent on that week-long training course on using Oracle or have your part-time MBA fully-funded while at that boot-strapping startup. They might buy you a book from O’Reilly if you are really lucky. So grab this opportunity to learn some skills, get some qualifications and have a good time at someone else’s expense. Do you really want to work 100 hours a week all your life in pursuit of some dream?
6. You learn the art of politics. For many people a large company is where you realise that it is not just about technology. A large company provides lots of opportunities to acquire diplomacy and political skills. Once you leave a large company you will be able to use these skills because you will want some large companies as customers - they have money to spend (and because it is not theirs they tend to haggle less), they can give you contacts with other potential clients, they buy things and they like to renew their yearly support contracts. So you need to understand how they function.
7. You have time to reflect. At a small company or startup, it can often feel that you squeeze a lifetime into every single day. Large companies do not move at such a reckless pace so you have time to learn and reflect. Large companies tend to move in a slow, consensual way without taking risks. Sometimes this is actually a good thing. I could mention one large media company which avoided wasting millions on a silly strategy in the dotcom boom - it took so long trying to decide what to do that the dotcom bust arrived first… You might also appreciate the relative security, the calm and the chance to get your life in order. Once you join a startup, it is generally going to be permanent ‘seats of you pants’ mode.
8. You get a baseline. Then you go and try to do it better. Make a list and see how many ‘cherished ambitions’ you can stick to or whether you finally succumb and realise that you also need to have ‘middle’ management to make things work. That is why I am very glad I worked at a large company. What about you?

(Source: onstartups.com)

Life lessons

Rumors of her being 90 years old just aren’t true, but that doesn’t make her sound bytes of wisdom any less potent.

You’ve probably seen some of Regina Brett’s “Life Lessons” before, like “When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile,” or “Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger”. They’re from her book God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours. 

Serious Chocolate Steps

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
8. It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

Peace without Comparison and God Never Blinks

11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
16. Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
17. You can get through anything if you stay put in today.
18. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
19. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

Candles, Purple and Sex on the Brain

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over-prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

Change, Miracles and Second Childhoods

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
35. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
36. Growing old beats the alternative – dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.
38. Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.

Is it Useful, Beautiful or Joyful?

41. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
42. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
43. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
44. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
45. The best is yet to come.
46. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
47. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
48. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
49. Yield.
50. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

(Source: finerminds.com)