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Powerful post. As a freshman at MIT, the first thing I heard (at the freshman picnic on the first day) was "50% of you will be in the bottom half of the class." That set the tone at MIT.
About a month into things I had my first Physics test. Every freshman takes Physics - at the time it was 8.01 or 8.02 (if you placed out of Physics on the AP Physics test, which I didn't - I think you needed a 5 to place out and I got a 3 or a 4). I thought I was pretty good at Physics and I liked it a lot.
I got a 20 on that first test. When I took the test, I knew I wasn't doing very well, but when I got my grade (a 20 - seriously - a 20 out of 100) I didn't know what to do. I went back to my room, locked my door, and cried for an hour.
Once I got that out of my system I went for a long run. I remember the run well - I just kept playing over and over in my mind that I had just gotten a 20 on my first Physics test. It was at that moment that I realized I wasn't the smartest person in the room anymore and I needed to figure out my special magic.
It turned out that class average was a 32 (I remember this like it was yesterday) so I didn't actually do that horrible relative to everyone else (probably a "C"). But it shook me to my core, and had a profound impact on everything from that moment forward.
"I'm Not as Smart as I Thought I Was"
How do you deal with feelings of intellectual inadequacy? A high school student applying to MIT is struggling with these feelings. Here's one reply on this Reddit thread via Cal Newport: The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than...
Outstanding blog post dad. And I think your punchline is completely correct - the healthcare software innovators should focus 100% of their energy on the patient and the physician (their customer). That would quickly transform everything in the healthcare supply chain.
Can you imagine what would happen if the government subsidized Borders and Barnes & Noble? Yup - pretty easy to see that they'd be doing fine and "bookstores would be classified as a public good." What nonsense.
It Is All About Patients and Physicians
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP, MACE Society is in the midst of an electronic revolution. Innovations in hardware and software have created greater shifts in our economy than the assembly line, mass transportation and electricity. We ain’t seen nothing yet. The potential for economic growth as of result...
Added another one to my book list. I'm going to get this for my dad also - he'll love it.
Book Review: The Art of Fielding
How many debut novels get sold to a publisher for reportedly almost $700,000, stay on the bestseller list for weeks, receive lengthy blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and James Patterson, are the subject of a lengthy Vanity Fair piece describing how the book got written, have its film rights optione...
Chewy. Just grabbed it on my kindle.
Book Review: The Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley's latest book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, is a dense but fascinating argument for why life is going to get better and better. Ridley's optimism has to do with specialization, trade, globalization, networks, cooperation, exchange--there'll be more of it, all, he s...
Your comment about other VCs reactions to you when you started blogging rings very true. You were treated nicely (or you were just being nice) - I would have said something like "when I first started blogging, I was mocked by a bunch of other VCs - both to my face and behind my back (the harshest of which got to me.) I was amused by this, and even more amused when some of these folks subsequently started blogging several years later. And then I got another chance to be amused when they stopped after a few posts.
Your four reasons for blogging are dynamite. I love your writing and am excited about both your short form work (e.g. the blog) and longer form work (your upcoming book). It's a great overall contribution to entrepreneurship in general and - well - keep it up!
Why Do VCs Blog (and Tweet)?
For decades, the venture capital industry was like a Yale Secret Society - very clubby, discrete and opaque. VCs had all the power in the VC-entrepreneur equation, and entrepreneurs had to work hard to decode the mysterious VC process to obtain funding. My how the world has changed in a few sho...
Beautiful. That's all that needs to be said.
3,286 Thank Yous.
Five weeks ago, I finished the most difficult journey of my life. When I agreed to ride my bike across the country, as with probably too many of my commitments, I didn't spend that much time weighing the pros and cons of such an undertaking. I just knew that I adore the American landscape, the ...
Fantastic story - Bradlina totally rocks - give her a giant hug for me. This is such a fantastic lesson to teach young and you've interpreted it brilliantly.
Lessons from selling "hot botties" -- what's that? Well, read this post...
My daughter made her first hot water bottle cover over a year ago. She got into sewing and decided to make 2 of these covers for her teachers as a Christmas gift last year. The teachers loved them. She was inspired to make more. The idea evolved into making a bunch of these "hot botties" (tha...
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Dec 6, 2009
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