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A friend and I are launching a business. We were having trouble thinking of a name—I’ve never been good at naming things.

So we decided to approach the local student advertising association. We are utilizing the most valuable resource of our university: The students.

There are so many students around.

Some of these students have talent. Others have acquired skills. All of them have knowledge about something.

But all this human capital is usually left dormant. It’s like periodically stuffing your mattress with cash, and promising to invest when you’ve saved “enough”. The problem is that this “enough” is usually an arbitrary amount.

The idea that a diploma marks the amount of education necessary to start doing real things is just as ridiculous. The 4 years of education is just as arbitrary.

Why not start investing that human capital now? And give yourself a chance to earn interest?

4.5 billion years until the sun burns out
1 billions years until life on earth becomes impossible
80 years until I die
1 month until warm weather
2 weeks until summer vacation
1 day until the weekend
1 hour until the assignment is due
20 minutes until this blog post i finished.

We’re always looking to the end of something. Of anything. Of everything. What’s on the other side?

20 minutes more to work on this blog post.
1 hour more to work on this assignment
1 day more make use of open offices and work hours
2 weeks more to ask my professor questions
1 month more to enjoy spring
80 years to live
1 billion years to accomplish
4.5 billion years to exist

I think we should figure out what’s on this side, first.

They’re contradictory.

Definitions are a premise for logical debate. Perspective is like a spoke in that “If-Then” causality wheel.

For a logical debate to ensue, a premise must be clearly defined. A premise is a set of indisputable and immovable assumptions that one must adhere to in one’s arguments.

In theory, a debate with such a premise can never reach a false conclusion. If there is a conclusion, the logic will find it.

In practice, such a premise cannot exist. Because any premise is infinitely arguable and infinitely interpretable depending on perspective. And therefore, debate can never reach a conclusion that is true.

So we settle. We settle for satisfactory. We reach satisfactory conclusions and make satisfactory decisions and live satisfactory lives.

It’s as my calculus teacher in high school used to say:

The difference between a mathematician and an engineer is that when each is continuously halving the distance between himself and a pretty girl, the mathematician will say he will never reach the girl. The engineer will say that he’ll get close enough.

What is close enough and good enough? What is enough? 

At what point do we stop reaching up for the maximums and start searching for the minimums instead?

I teach tennis at Hogwarts.

I wish I taught Quidditch, but then I run the risk of being bewitched. Ok, it’s not Hogwarts, but Oaklawn Academy is a little bit magical.

I teach 13-14 year old kids from Latin America. Bisante is ranked #13 in Chile. Mauricio is better than Bisante. Eduardo and Marcos and Oliver and Jose and Usbaldo and Alberto and Alberto all follow suit. And they can all hit the ball hard.

Today, there were only three of them. So I stepped in for a game of doubles. And I was a good match for them. 6 years older and stronger, I could hold my own. Marcos and I lost to Mauricio and Bisante in a match tiebreak.

I hate losing when I’m not playing well. Actually, I don’t enjoy winning when I’m not playing well either. It’s just not satisfying.

But I don’t mind losing when I’m playing well. I actually enjoy it. It means that I haven’t reached perfection yet. It means that there is still work to be done. It means that I still have a reason to keep going.

I teach my students to fist pump every time they hit a ball in the net, or when they don’t finish their swing and the ball hits the fence. They look at me strangely. Maybe because they don’t know what a fist pump is, or maybe because no one’s ever told them to be happy for making mistakes.

At the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board meeting yesterday, one of committee members spotted a typo on the UWW CEO website. The website said that entrepreneurial spirit is the “refusal of failure”. The board member asked cutely:

Shouldn’t it be ‘the embrace of failure?’

Art used to be about expression. Expressing beauty, expressing God, expressing creativity, expressing revelation, expressing emotion, and any number of other things. There were some people who were better at it than others. And those people became lauded with virtue and affection. Obviously, the “artist” was given high stature (at least in the emotional or spiritual realms).

And that was the downfall of conventional art.

Today, music and painting and sculpture are about talent. Talent that is wrought from painstaking study and scientific analysis. It’s about “perfecting” styles of expression that used to be about individual freedom. It is no longer expression.

But there is a new form of art.

Seth Godin says “Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.” In another Mixergy interview, he says:

Pablo Picasso was an artist but so was Bill Shakespeare. But so was that guy, Goldman Sachs, who figured out that speadsheets, that when used a certain way, created a billion dollars in value by combining certain kinds of securities in a certain way. Never been done before, changed things. What artists do is not paint. What artists do is put together things, see the world as it is and make change happen.

 Slight sidestep from the flow of thought:

I sat in on the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board meeting today. Just to listen. And to gauge the committee members’ definition of entrepreneurship. All the board members are successful business people. But entrepreneurship is not the same as business.

Entrepreneurship is about changing the game. It’s about doing things better. It’s about creating value. Actually, forget value (that’s about profits),entrepreneurship is about creation. And creation is about expression.

In other words, entrepreneurship is art. It is beautiful and it is creative and it is freedom and it is virtuous. Beethoven was an entrepreneur. Pablo Picasso was an entrepreneur. Plato and Aristotle were entrepreneurs. They were entrepreneurs because they created.

At the meeting, when the discussion turned to course revision and speculation on what kinds of courses should be required of entrepreneurship majors, I was really interested to hear what they said. Some said more emphasis should be placed on sales or cash flow or marketing. One said “adaptive planning,” or, how to deal with unexpected situations. But all these are courses to educate future business owners. (There’s nothing wrong with being a business owner, but I would never mistake it with entrepreneurship.)

To learn entrepreneurship, I would engage in thought processes that make my brain explode. Follow a passion into realms of crazy until I get so excited that I start talking faster and breathing faster and there is no such thing as hunger or pain. Until the world of possibility looms ahead and I can’t stop smiling. And you’d say that universities have no time for fantasies. That such creativity is an idiot’s pipe dream.

And I’d say: that pipe dream? That’s entrepreneurship.

I am naive and inexperienced. I am not a business owner. I have no experience in business.

But I am an entrepreneur. I am an artist.

My roommate and I were apartment hunting and we were thinking of our criteria for the best place to live. Proximity to campus, price, number of bedrooms (2), utilities included, etc. These were the obvious things to look for.

But I wasn’t satisfied. My evaluation was based on the following (or at least should have been)

• Niceness of carpet
• Size of kitchen counters
• Water pressure in the shower (we weren’t able to test this unfortunately
• Ability of water sources to gain temperature fast, and then maintain it for long period
• Size of bathroom
• And so on..

My roommate makes fun of me for putting carpet texture at the top of the list, but who doesn’t like a nice carpet to walk on and sit on??

So many times we get sidetracked by the conventional scales and methods of evaluation that we lose sight of what is really important to us. And the fact that what is important is subjective. And that it’s not a sin to have a different perspective on what is important.

We Love Underdogs

Why is the underdog story so important? So romantic? So heart warming? Why does it feel so good when the scrappy rag-tag kid stands up to the bully? Or when average Joe’s hoist a trophy in the air? What about love stories? I’m going to skip the scientific stuff and just say that underdog stories are naturally appealing.

We need to find more underdogs

We love winners. When the game ends, we always cheer the winner. We’re naturally focused on the people who allow us to experience the win.

Today, I umpired for the Badger Women’s tennis match against Michigan. My first tip from a seasoned umpire was: at the end of the point, always look at the loser. For two reasons: (1) to watch for bad sportsmanship and (2) to respond to appeals on line calls.

Watching the loser is an amazing practice. The loser is…

• Almost always more honest with their emotions.
• Almost always more revealing of their personality.
• And almost always more sensitive to….well, everything.

Hunting down the underdog

A high percentage of the time, if you bet on the winner, you’ll come out on top. The problem is, a winner will never show you what they’re made of. Another problem is, the stakes are lower, and so are the rewards.

Instead, look for the losers.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather work with a loser who can hold his/her head up high and smile than a winner who does the same.

On of my professors is young and intelligent and fairly high on the corporate ladder. He’s the kind of guy who was probably one of the most popular in school and is used to being charismatic and twinkly-eyed and charming. He plays basketball with the guys every Wednesday. He commutes to Whitewater once a week to teach us young, bonnie-eyed lads and lasses what’s real in Corporate America. He gives out his cell phone number on the first day and says we are free to use it. Whatever his age, this professor seems to easily relate to his students, or at least, has pulled off the farce impressively for the past 2 months and some. All in all, he should be a great professor.

But I have very little respect for him.

After every class, he’ll apologize (in some way or another) for boring us with text book material. He’ll say something like:

Next week we’ll talk about Chapter 12? It’s just as exciting as Chapter 11.

Then he’ll grin impishly

heesh..I mean..I was bored teaching this stuff guys!

Another grin.

Maybe next week we’ll stay awake ehh?

And I start to get annoyed and slightly disgusted by this attitude.

And I learn to never to downplay myself. Others will judge me by how I judge myself. If I portray myself and what I do in a positive manner, people will fold to that paradigm. I could be spraying disinfectants on a bar of soap with the same conviction and passion as if I was curing cancer, and I would get the same respect.

See that’s the thing with people. Confidence and self belief are magnetic. People who carry these qualities are indisputable.  Especially for people whodon’t carry the same qualities.

But when two indisputable people meet, a very counterintuitive thing happens. One would expect that they would meet in headlock and achieve a stale stalemate. But instead, they move forward together. As if they never met head on, but at an angle (imagine a car collision at a 90 degree angle). The resistance only takes them in a different direction (remember vector additions from physics class?), into new, unexplored territories.

And that, folks, is successful collaboration.