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orbemnews · 3 years ago

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Exclusive: The 27-year-old behind ethereum isn't surprised by the crypto crash He stressed, however, that it’s “notoriously hard to predict” when bubbles will pop. “It could have ended already,” Buterin said. “It could end months from now.” By Wednesday morning, ether, the in-house currency on the network Buterin invented, crashed below $1,900 — a staggering drop of more than 40% from Tuesday night, according to Coinbase. Ether rebounded to around $2,700 Thursday morning, but that’s still down sharply from the record high of $4,384 on May 11. The nosedive may have cost Buterin, a Russian-Canadian programmer who dropped out of college, his newfound status as a crypto billionaire. The value of ether in Buterin’s closely watched public wallet stood at approximately $870 million Thursday morning, down from around $1.1 billion the morning before. Even though he’s just 27, Buterin is a veteran of these crypto boom-bust cycles, at least as much as anyone can be. “We’ve had at least three of these big crypto bubbles so far,” said Buterin, who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2012. “And often enough, the reason the bubbles end up stopping is because some event happens that just makes it clear that the technology isn’t there yet.” ‘Crypto isn’t just a toy anymore’ Buterin laid out his vision for ethereum in a 2013 white paper, and ethereum launched two years later. Today it’s the second-largest cryptocurrency, behind only bitcoin. Unlike bitcoin, which is viewed as “digital gold,” ethereum is a blockchain-based platform for developers to build and operate apps. It’s like the Android or iOS of the crypto space. In late 2017, Buterin published a tweet storm that questioned whether the crypto space had really earned its market valuation, which at the time had just surpassed half a trillion dollars. He noted how little had actually been accomplished and crypto prices soon tanked. Unlike then, Buterin is encouraged by the “huge” progress the technology and applications have made in recent years. For example, ethereum activity has skyrocketed in recent months because it is the network that backs the sale of many non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. “It feels like crypto is close to ready for the mainstream in a way that it wasn’t even four years ago,” Buterin said. “Crypto isn’t just a toy anymore.” Buterin added that although he’s not sure, there is a “possibility” that ethereum eventually catches up and surpasses bitcoin in market value. The Elon factor Yet ethereum, and cryptocurrencies broadly, still have problems. One, they remain extremely volatile, especially for retail investors used to tamer moves in the stock market. And some billionaires appear to be treating crypto as playthings. Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again love affair with various coins have sent shockwaves through the entire space. Crypto sentiment took a turn after Musk tweeted on May 12 that Tesla (TSLA) would stop accepting bitcoin as payment because of concerns about the cryptocurrency’s environmental footprint. (The complex bitcoin mining process requires vast amounts of computer power and electricity.) A stunning $365 billion vanished from the crypto space that day, according to CNBC. Buterin acknowledged that crypto markets tend to be “vulnerable” to disruptive events before they “build up an immune system over time.” “Elon Musk tweeting is something that the crypto space has only been introduced to for the first time literally last year and this year,” Buterin said. “I think it’s reasonable to expect a bit of craziness. But I do think that the markets will learn. Elon is not going to have this influence forever.” Buterin chalked up Musk’s dogecoin fascination to an innocent interest. “The fact that he is a 100-plus billionaire and he runs Tesla and SpaceX and all these things doesn’t change the fact that ultimately he’s a human — and humans get excited about dog coins. That’s just a thing that humans get excited about,” Buterin said. “I don’t think that Elon has a kind of malevolent intent in any of this.” Buterin: Please stop gifting me random coins Another dog coin that humans get excited about is Shiba Inu, which was started as a joke that plays off dogecoin (yes, a parody of a parody). Shiba collapsed by about a third last week after Buterin donated what was at the time worth a billion dollars to a Covid-19 relief fund in India. The selloff underscored the lack of liquidity in some of these alt coins. “The challenge with these dog coins is that the markets for them are still fairly thin,” Buterin said. “There is not actually a way to sell a billion dollars of Shiba coin and get more than a couple of million dollars out of hit.” Buterin also recently announced plans to burn, or remove from circulation, 90% of his Shiba holdings, which had been gifted to him. In the transaction hash, Buterin said he didn’t want to be a “locus of power of that kind.” During the interview, Buterin stressed he doesn’t want “random people” who create coins to give him coins for “marketing” purposes. “First of all, I don’t really know or understand many of these projects well. So, I can’t endorse them,” he said. “I see in my wallet that I have like a few thousand dollars of something called free coin. I don’t know what free coin is.” Buterin urged people who want to “do something warm and fluffy” with coin supply to donate it to charity directly. Governments can make life difficult for crypto The latest crypto crash was triggered in part by concerns about a crackdown in China. A trio of Chinese finance and banking watchdogs said Tuesday that financial institutions and payment companies should not participate in any transactions related to cryptocurrency, nor should they provide crypto-related services to clients. Speaking before the China news, Buterin acknowledged that regulation “is always a concern,” though fears of outright bans have faded. “It just seems much harder and much less realistic to do anything like that,” Buterin said. “At the same time, governments do have a lot of power to make it more painful to participate in the crypto sector.” Even though the blockchain is decentralized and “governments can’t completely take them down,” Buterin said government can block or limit access. “It’s important to listen to regulators to try to do our best to address concerns,” Buterin said, adding that the risk is the relationship between crypto and regulators becomes “more confrontational than it needs to be.” Buterin is ‘very confident’ ethereum fees will tumble Billionaire Mark Cuban complained to The Defiant in February that ethereum is being limited by “ridiculous” transaction costs, a problem that is inhibiting its growth. Buterin acknowledged transaction fees are “very high right now” and that the ethereum blockchain can only process between 20 and 50 transactions per second despite very high demand. But the ethereum inventor said he’s “very confident” costs will come down because of a major technical makeover underway that will allow it to rapidly scale up. Ethereum is moving away from Proof of Work, the original algorithm in blockchain technology, toward a newer concept called Proof of Stake. In short, the upgrade will mean that participants are incentivized with a reward, paid in ether, to remain online and keep the network in check. This will do away with the energy-consuming race that comes with proof-of-work. The climate problem At the same time, the switch to proof of stake will allow ethereum to cut its energy usage by between 1,000 and 10,000 times, Buterin said. “We go from consuming the same energy as a medium-sized country to consuming the same energy as a village,” he said. Bitcoin, on the other hand, runs on proof of work — a key difference that Buterin argues legitimizes the environmental worries around bitcoin. “I definitely think [those concerns] are real,” he said. “The resource consumption is definitely huge. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to break the world by itself, but it’s definitely a significant downside.” Buterin added that it’s not just the power consumption of bitcoin miners, but the hardware required to do the mining. That’s why Buterin said there will be more calls within the bitcoin community to either switch to proof of stake, or move towards a hybrid, as it evolves and adapts to technological progress. “If bitcoin sticks with its technology exactly as it is today,” he said, “there’s a big risk it will get left behind.” Source link Orbem News #27yearold #Crash #crypto #ethereum #Exclusive #investing #isnt #surprised #VitalikButerin:The27-year-oldbehindethereumisn'tsurprisedbythecryptocrash-CNN

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fapangel · 7 years ago

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What are your thoughts regarding Elon Musk?

A great question. Long story short, I alternate between wanting to love Elon Musk as one of the few venture capitalists on Earth with a fucking brain, and wanting to drown him in a scummy pond for being such a fucking West-coast weenie retard.

Elon’s Genius

Waitbutwhy.com got a series of exclusive interviews with Elon, and while the star-struck explorations of the author might be of questionable objectivity, he did a great job of summarizing how Elon thinks. And the single most important thing about Elon was expressed in a verbatim quote from the man himself:

Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

Yeah. You’re sitting there saying “no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t understand that?” But the shit some journalists say will just blow your fucking mind. Yes, this is an actual journalist, in one of the few semi-respectable, mostly-sane publications left on earth (by dint of catering to people who have to make sums add up at the end of the day,) saying that Trump should make space-based solar power satellites a priority. Not talking it up as a nice theoretical tech, not wondering about it, but pushing this as a serious short-term policy priority.

Incidentally, this is how Elon Musk feels about that bullshit. Yes. Being a sane, intelligent human fucking being, he’s capable of understanding basic opportunity costs, and since he’s aware that hair-brained pie-in-the-literal-sky schemes must be constrained by the actual ability to fucking build this shit (i.e. engineering,) he’s capable of stopping long enough to realize that building and orbiting a vast fleet of satellites designed to blast the Earth with microwave lasers is fucking retarded compared to just building more solar panels right here on Earth.

This ties into the second massive, massive thing that makes Elon Musk unique - he’s a venture capitalist that knows what the fuck a BUSINESS CASE is. Despite being a save-the-world-I-want-to-build-unicorns idealist, he actually understands the basic principles of economics and markets. To wit, nobody’s going to give him eleventy trillion dollars for free to do decades of R&D to realize his Big Dream, so it has to fund itself, and furthermore, major advances in technology and the human condition don’t spring from individual genius companies, but from entire industries. This nice diagram produced by Waitbutwhy’s eloquently fawning author expresses the same with more colored boxes and less exasperated fucking invective, if that’s your thing.

What you’re looking at - especially the box at the very bottom that says SUSTAINABLE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL - is the concept that any gormless asshole on the street can grasp (business gotta make money) but the multi-millionaire masters of the universe that gave Juicero ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A WI-FI ENABLED JUICER COULDN’T FIGURE OUT.

Yeah. Some of his businesses don’t make money, like Tesla. They release glowing reports that retards eat up, while anyone who worked in the actual 100+ year old auto industry look at these sillicon valley nerds who think they know fucking everything after a few years of research and just wait for the inevitable explosion. (Despite their cheery PR, people who know what they’re looking at see nothing but trouble in their business. To say nothing of how the Ultimate Dream of Everyone Driving Electric is flawed by the basic resource limitations of PLANET FUCKING EARTH. And then there’s shady shit. When they discovered that the established automakers have hundreds of acres and tens of millions of dollars worth of suspension torture-testing facilities for a goddamn reason, instead of repairing their janky suspensions under warranty, they offered to pay half the repair cost if the customer would sign a fucking nondisclosure agreement. Tucker Torpedo this motherfucker ain’t, is all I’m saying.)

But ya know what? I can forgive that, because SpaceX. SpaceX forgives a lot. And there is a business case there - there’s enough rich virtue signalling fuckheads to support a small car company, at the very least - so the premise itself isn’t just pissing up a suspension bridge cable on a bridge to nowhere, like most venture capital bullshit. Even the Hyperloop isn’t that bad, because even though it’s fucking retarded, Elon’s probably only looking at it because of his “Boring Company” project. He looked at the ongoing clusterfucked abortion of a high-speed rail line that California’s doggedly carrying to term, and correctly surmised that digging fucking tunnels the length of a huge earthquake zone would be cheaper, in the long run, than trying to navigate the political clusterfuck of buying contiguous right-of-way for the whole damn length. A tunnel is a tube, and as long as it’s a tube, you may as well use the damn Hyperloop thingy, right? There is thinking, there. A brain, is working. And hey, at one point SpaceX was an idea just like this - the Great Ones of industry often leave a trail of dead and dying projects behind them while the One Great Success just climbs higher and higher. It’s worth it, and it’s why Trump’s “six bankruptcies” don’t mean jack shit compared to his dozens and dozens of successful businesses.

And yet - despite that amazing presence of a god damned brain in his skull - he still manages to go full fucking retard sometimes to a degree that makes me want to catch his tongue with a vise-grip to make the stupid noises stop.

Elon’s dumb-fuck bullshit

This slashdot article neatly sums up the problem. The short version is that lots of very rich people in Sillicon Valley were going around acting very serious about the possibility that our entire world and universe is just a huge computer simulation and we gotta try to break out of it somehow.

Billionaires. These people are fucking billionaires. And this is how they spend their time. This quote from Business Insider sums up the reason why:

The piece doesn’t give any clue as to who those two billionaires are – although it’s easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman’s friend Peter Thiel – but it’s fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it’s the most popular topic of conversation right now.

“The most popular topic of conversation right now.” If ever you doubted that there’s a vast wealth discrepency in the United States, look no further - not only is the West Coast rolling in economic opportunity for the right people - especially with the right connections - but there’s so many multi-zillionares out there that their entire social circle can consist of nothing but. This is some zany philosophical fad that caught on and percolated around, like memes and fads do, via usual social interaction - except for these people, their friends consist mainly or only of multimillionare tech CEOs.

And that, in a nutshell, is why obviously intelligent people who’s words can make stock prices in multiple huge companies employing many thousands of people do a damn jig feel no reservations at all about saying things in public that make them sound like fucking idiots. When you contemplate the sheer distance between the world of us ordinary humans and these privileged Coastal Gods, it’s enough to fill you with an almost instinctive rage. As a good seal-clubbing communist-hating rabid frothing conservative bigot bastard from Soviet Mordor, I wouldn’t give a shit if these Masters of Industry at least bore passing resemblance to the Randian ideal. I’d be down with that. Even if their huge underwater cities did spring a leak and a massacre or two, that’s life, you know?

But this shit? This!? No. I draw the fucking line here, pal. There’s some floof-ass hair-brained bullshit I’m not going to stomach.

But entirely aside from my impassioned-downtrodden-country-boy-rage-at-the-coasties-grapes-of-ree, there is the simple fact that people idolize, hero-worship and generally LISTEN to this man, and that imparts some level of responsibility on him to not say fucking stupid shit. The reason I’ve resisted making a Paetron for so long (aside from my crippling depression, self-doubt and general talent for self-sabotage) is that it’d impinge, ever so slightly, on my total freedom to say any stupid shit I want, because I’m not beholden to anyone, at all, to sound sane or coherent. (My fiction writing is a testament to this.) So I’m keenly aware of the decorum and care a public speaker ought to have - it relates directly to how big an impact his words are liable to have on people, and for Musk, that’s a lot.

Elon’s latest shtick - which is also popular with all his millionaire friends - is screaming and crying about how AI is going to replace all of us. Well, no, that’s just the luddite screeching of Sillicon Valley in general now, Musk is actually claiming that AI will rise up and fucking kill us or some bullshit. His newest company, OpenAI, has a great business model and all - developing mind-machine interfaces, which is a thing and will be a much bigger thing in short order - but he’s still going around telling everyone that AI is some evil terrible scary thing, and that’s causing actual goddamn harm. It’s all fine and good to loathe “science deniers” if they’re arguing against climate change, food pasteurization, the Health Dangers of GMO Crops and childhood vaccinations, but when it’s bullshit like the health effects of radio waves and the coming AI apocalypse, suddenly these fucking geeks are all ears. And here they have a successful CEO who’s Made Science Things Fly and has half the world sucking him off repeating this chicken-little fear-mongering bullshit. In ten to twenty years the anti-vaccers are gonna be screaming NO AI NO DRIVERLESS WHATEVERS REEEEE AND IT’S GOING TO BE THE FAULT OF PEOPLE LIKE ELON FUCKING MUSK.

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alltimebestbooks · 4 years ago

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In this phenomenal bestseller, “written with the sole objective of helping the reader achieve a happy, satisfying, and worthwhile life,” Dr. Peale demonstrates the power of faith in action. With the practical techniques outlined in this book, you can energize your life—and give yourself the initiative needed to carry out your ambitions and hopes

18. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Stress is a lot like love - hard to define, but you know it when you feel it. In this classic work, 'How to Stop Worrying and Start Living', Carnegie offers a set of practical formulas that you can put to work today. It is a book packed with lessons that will last a lifetime and make that lifetime happier! This book will explore the nature of stress and how it infiltrates every level of your life, including the physical, emotional, cognitive, relational and even spiritual. Through techniques that get to the heart of your unique stress response, and an exploration of how stress can affect your relationships, you'll discover how to control stress instead of letting it control you. This book shows you how. Using the power of habit and several techniques for smoothing out the stressful wrinkles in our day-to-day lives, we'll move towards a real-world solution to living with less stress, more confidence and a deep spiritual resilience that will insulate you from the inevitable pressures of life. The target of the book is to help readers understand what suits their respective lives best to help them reframe it in a constructive manner, subtracting worry from it and how they could focus on living each day with joy and contentment. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills. He was born in an impoverished family in Maryville, Missouri. Carnegie harboured a strong love and passion for public speaking from a very early age and was very proactive in debate in high school. During the early 1930's, he was renowned and very famous for his books and a radio program. 'When How to Win Friends and Influence People' was published in 1930, it became an instant success and subsequently became one of the biggest bestsellers of all time. Carnegie loved teaching others to climb the pillars of success. His valuable and tested advice was used in many domains and has been the inspiration of many famous people's success. One of the core ideas in his books is that it is possible to change other people's behavior by changing one's reaction to them.

19. The Atomic Habit by James Clear

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving - every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, listeners will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field

20. Sapiens - A Brief History Of Humankind

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution - a number one international best seller - that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human".

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one - Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because, over the last few decades, humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

This provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

#allyimebestbooks #bestbooks

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makeitwithmike · 7 years ago

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7 Inspiring Books You Must Read

By Jeff Bullas

She told me to turn off the light.

It was 8pm and it was time to sleep according to the adult’s house rules. These were non-negotiable. My desire and passion for reading that I had discovered after mastering “the cat sat on the mat” sentence at the age of five, made this a cruel and arbitrary time.

And a seven year old’s passionate response…

…”But I want to keep reading“.

Despite protestations and mumblings, the light switch was flicked to the off position. First battle lost. The adults (sometimes referred to as my parents) had all the fun. But they didn’t count on my patience that was driven by an inherited trait of passionate persistence.

As the house went silent I grabbed my bedside lamp and positioned it under the bedcovers so that an orbiting spy satellite would have trouble knowing what I was doing. Parents score zero and child chalks up a win.

This was the start of a reading habit that has sometimes bordered on obsessive.

Glimpses of genius

Inspirational books are your access to the best minds in the world. From creativity, to business and marketing and beyond. They distill the essence of what often is a life of learning into a few pages. It is where you will discover ideas, tactics and habits that are the seeds to success.

A great book is one that reveals the ideas with clarity. They expose the genius but don’t hide it in dross and words that don’t matter. Often the best books are the short books.

It’s also what you do with those concepts that will define you.

Self publishing doesn’t need permission

Some of us may want to not just read but write. Today you do not need to beg for permission to publish a book. You can write it in a word document, send it to your designer (that you found on Freelancer) to create a great looking cover and then upload it to Amazon.

You are now an author!

New age writers and authors are taking advantage of that and building a lifestyle and businesses based on their creative output.

But you must keep in mind that becoming a good or even a great writer requires practice and also that means reading and more reading. Steven King said that “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Great ideas do not emerge from a vacuum.

It’s a new age and you need to reinvent yourself

In an age of video, multimedia and digital innovation the book and the business landscape has evolved. You can read books on tablets, book readers and even your smart phone. You can gain ideas that were made public just a few seconds after the author hit the publish button on their blog.

In a digital age that changes every day, the role of books, blog posts and self-education are more vital than ever. We cannot rely on just the wisdom of the last century or even a decade that has just passed. We need to continue to hunt down the new ideas and innovations that are driving an ever changing world.

Here are some inspiring books to read that are woven into my creativity, business and marketing habits.

1. Elon Musk: Tesla SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In this book, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance provides the first inside look into the extraordinary life and times of Silicon Valley’s most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family and friends, the book traces the entrepreneur’s journey from a rough upbringing in South Africa to the pinnacle of the global business world.

Vance spent over 40 hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to 300 people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk’s world-changing companies: PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, and to characterize a man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovation while making plenty of enemies along the way.

My key lessons from this book are the three vital ingredients that all successful people have. An appetite for hard work, passion and a higher purpose that is not about money. It’s what you need if you want to change to world or make a dent in the universe.

Sorry…I forgot one other lesson. Dare to dream big.

2. The One Thing

This inspirational book by Gary Keller reveals the power of focusing on your “one thing”. His New York Times bestselling books have sold more than 2 million copies.

He also reveals the “One” thing that made Keller Williams Realty, Inc., one of the largest real estate companies in the world. What was that? It was writing a book that positioned him and his company as the authority in real estate in the USA.

In The ONE Thing, you’ll also learn productivity tips such as:

Cut through the clutter

Achieve better results in less time

Build momentum toward your goal

Dial down the stress

3. Steal like an an Artist

Creativity and genius is sometimes thought of as being that one insight or flash of inspiration that appears from nowhere. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In this this very insightful book by Austin Kleon explains that you don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself.

That’s the message from Austin, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone. A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side.

4. Now, Discover Your Strengths

The biggest challenge for all of us is discovering what your mission on this planet is. That is often the journey of a lifetime.

It also means working on your strengths but many of us don’t know what they are.

Or how to find them.

Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.

Marcus Buckingham, (who was also coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules), and Donald O. Clifton, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths.

This book comes with free access to the web based “Strength Finder Test” that you will find very revealing. I know I did.

5. The Lean Startup: How Relentless Change Creates Radically Successful Businesses

The digital age has turned almost every aspect of our world on its head. This extends to our personal lives and how we do business.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. The author Eric Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in an age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

I found this a great book to challenge my thinking and grow my business.

6. Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success

This book by Ken Seagall caught my attention after reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson while travelling by train through Italy. After that 630 page exposure to the mind of a genius, I became a bit of a Steve Jobs fanboy. So finding out more about the person that has redefined our world was tempting.

To Steve Jobs, simplicity was a religion. It was also a weapon. Simplicity isn’t just a design principle at Apple—it’s a value that permeates every level of the organization. The obsession with simplicity is what separates Apple from other technology companies. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on Earth in 2011.

What does this book cover?

Think Minimal: Distilling choices to a minimum brings clarity to a company and its customers—as Jobs proved when he replaced over twenty product models with a lineup of four.

Think Small: Swearing allegiance to the concept of “small groups of smart people” raises both morale and productivity.

Think Motion: Keeping project teams in constant motion focuses creative thinking on well-defined goals and minimizes distractions.

Think Iconic: Using a simple, powerful image to symbolize the benefit of a product or idea creates a deeper impression in the minds of customers.

Put it on your reading list!

7. Do the Work

This short but powerful and inspiring book by Steven Pressfield was revealing about a problem that many of us have. Having a lot of great ideas but not doing the work. This book led to me adopting the Mantra “Done is better than perfect”.

It also helps answer questions such as:

Could you be getting in your way of producing great work?

Have you started a project but never finished?

Would you like to do work that matters, but don’t know where to start?

So the answer is Do the Work, a manifesto by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work. Do the Work is a weapon against Resistance – a tool that will help you take action and successfully ship projects out the door.

Over to you

Books are great and reading them is fun. You can gain many great ideas that are inspiring, motivating and lead to many conversations.

But if you don’t take the key lessons and start the work then nothing happens. I hope this list of the best inspirational books will help you get started.

Over to you.

The post 7 Inspiring Books You Must Read appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

The post 7 Inspiring Books You Must Read appeared first on Make It With Michael.

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

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Kimbal Musk takes the tech entrepreneur ethos and applies it to food

The younger brother of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, shares his same entrepreneurial spirit, but with a family of restaurants and a nonprofit to bring learning gardens to schools around the country

It can be tricky for anyone being the younger sibling, but imagine what it must be like to be the younger brother of Elon Musk, a businessman habitually referred to as a real life Tony Stark.

His reputation seems to get more outsized with each fresh headline. Just this week, the elder Musks company SpaceX filed paperwork asking for permission to use satellites to beam down Internet service from space. Meanwhile, his other high-profile company, Tesla, continues to make advances toward its ambition to make electric cars more ubiquitous. Then there is the fascination with colonizing Mars.

Kimbal Musk, 42, is a year younger than Elon and a very successful businessman and entrepreneur in his own right. But he admits the pair, who grew up in Pretoria, South Africa before moving to Canada to study and then the US, have a slightly different take on the world of business: We have similar views [though] his are stratospheric, while mine are more in the ground.

Food is a dominant theme in Kimbal Musks personal and business interests. He is a health-conscious chef, restaurant owner with his own sense of mission about subjects close to his heart: linking peoples food to their communities and tackling childhood obesity.

In an interview with the Guardian he speaks about his hopes for his food projects – and the inspiration he gets from his brother. The younger Musk, in addition to his work as a philanthropist, investor and entrepreneur, is a board member at Tesla, SpaceX, the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Ive always loved food, said Kimbal Musk, a co-founder of The Kitchen family of restaurants in Colorado and elsewhere, which make a point of sourcing from local farmers. Growing up, I cooked in the house, and when I cooked everyone would sit down and eat, and it was just kind of the way I connected with my family. I used to throw cooking parties in university. Everyone would come over sometimes youd just do a mac and cheese, but if you do that better than everyone else you can get people to come to you.

Kimbal Musk is gregarious and charming; his brother is intense and technical. Kimbal made millions working at a startup with Elon, and invested in his brothers biggest dreams along the way – and he is no less dogged about chasing a few of his own.

The differences between the things that give the brothers purpose are striking one Musk works to change the world through high-tech inventions, the other is most passionate about food, about teaching people to grow things and preparing meals that help people find a sense of community. Still, the younger Musk turns to a sports metaphor to explain how, different as they are, hes still learned plenty from his brother, whose business interests at times read like the pursuit of turning science fiction into reality.

When you think about basketball, and you watch someone like Michael Jordan play basketball even if youre a baseball player, theres still a lot to learn from there, Musk said. I really think about him more as my brother, to be quite honest. Its kind of a tough question to answer, because hes been so core to my life that its hard to describe specific things.

Elon clearly trusts his instincts, though, in light of the fact that, should he ever become incapacitated in some way, Kimbal is the SpaceX and Tesla trustee whod lead the task of figuring out what should happen with both companies.

Meanwhile, Kimbal has plenty of his own interests to keep him busy. He co-founded The Kitchen family of restaurants in Boulder in 2004, along with Jen Lewin and Hugo Matheson. It has eight restaurant locations today in Colorado as well as an out-of-town location, in Chicago. In addition to plans to expand in Chicago and Colorado, three new locations are on the drawing board for Memphis over the next couple of years.

The Kitchen actually refers to three related restaurant concepts. Theres The Kitchen, the organizations flagship community bistro, and The Kitchen Upstairs, a cocktail lounge with food prepared in a wood oven and artisan cocktails. Rounding out the list is The Kitchen Next Door, a community pub that serves things like burgers, salads, sandwiches, margaritas and beer.

For its Colorado-area restaurants, The Kitchen claims to source $1 million worth of product from local providers. In the Greater Denver area, The Kitchen serves 17,000 guests per week on average.

In 2011, Musk co-founded The Kitchen Community, a nonprofit that works to bring outdoor gardens Learning Gardens, as theyre called to schools around the country. Three years after its founding, the nonprofit had already built 200 such gardens in Chicago, Los Angeles and Colorado schools, reaching more than 120,000 children.

Its a different world entirely from the more fast-paced tech scene in which he once worked with Elon.

Their early partnership followed the younger Musks graduation from high school in Pretoria and decamping to Toronto to reconnect with his brother. Kimbal graduated from Queens College in 1995, the same year the brothers started the Web-based city guide platform Zip2, a venture which Compaq bought in 1999 for $307m. From there, the younger Musk began investing in tech companies, including Elons X.com, a payments venture eventually renamed as PayPal that eBay would snatch up for $1.5bn.

The brothers worlds diverged when Elon decided after some of his early successes to stay in the Golden State, while Kimbal moved to New York City and enrolled at the French Culinary Institute. He was there in 2001 during the terrorist attacks of September 11 and spent six weeks cooking for firefighters at Ground Zero, a formative moment for him.

My intent had been to go back to tech at some point, Musk said. Cooking for the firefighters, it was this just overwhelming sense of community that was created. Its impossible to describe how intense and awesome it was to see everyone doing that. It was simultaneously the best and worst thing that had ever happened to me to see 9/11 and be part of helping bring people together.

Doing that every day for 10-12 hours a day, six days a week, my brain couldnt go back to tech. I determined right there and then to open a restaurant.

He decided that it wouldnt be in New York, turned off somewhat by the intensity of the city. He instead traveled the country with his wife at the time and settled on Boulder, Colorado.

After Musk co-founded The Kitchen, the organization hummed along steadily for a few years. Then came a ski accident in 2010 that Musk calls a near death experience, one that left him hospitalized for months and helped crystallize his thinking about what would come next for him.

A restaurant, hed decided, could indeed be a positive force in its small corner of the world in things like the customers it touches, in the quality of ingredients it uses and in the care of preparation. But it couldnt really scale the ambition that drives so many entrepreneurs like the Musks, who crave big challenges, big wins.

After the accident, Musk said, I sort of got a new lease on life. I said I now have every excuse in the world to do what I want. And you know what? Im going to work on food culture and help food become fun and part of peoples lives again. The traditional restaurant is more commercial-oriented. But I want community through food.

That gave birth to his garden-focused nonprofit, which, when it comes to a new community, looks to plant 100 gardens at a time. The gardens are a combination play space and outdoor classroom that connect children to the process of growing food and give teachers an outlet for hands-on instruction. And The Kitchen Community raises $35,000 for each garden, a cost that includes everything from landscape design to site prep, while the finished garden can include things like internal irrigation, bench seating and curvilinear plant beds.

A mix of foundations and individual donors funds The Kitchen Communitys efforts across the states where its placed gardens. Today The Kitchen Community has more than 225 Learning Gardens in schools across Colorado, Chicago, Los Angeles and Memphis.

Tackling childhood obesity is a big motivation behind the gardens in schools.

When I look at the problem of obesity, its a depressing problem. So how do you create a solution that delights people? We came up with this design – my ex-wife, who Im still friends with, she knows how to create something where you go, Im so glad this is here. I really want to have this in my school. I want to learn here. The gardens, this is a product that really delights people.

In deciding where to take his garden concept next, geographically, Musk says the organization looks for cities that have foundations that can support a concept like this one. His team also looks at schools with districts amenable to the concept.

Not surprisingly, the level of support from one city to the next varies. If youre in a town like Boulder, he points out, theres not much foundation support from a problem like childhood obesity because its not a place where the problem of obesity is especially acute.

Meanwhile, gardens where children grow food while also learning about science, supporting local farmers and vendors, building operations that transform communities through food these are the among the things that occupy Musks mind, the things he wants to spend his money and time on. Innovation and purpose, to entrepreneurs like him, dont always have to involve gadgets and leaps in science sometimes it starts with a thing as mundane as the food we eat.

For me, I like to think in terms of three months out and 50 years out, Musk said. Three months out is what to do now, 50 years out is what Id like to do before Im dead.

If I look back and see specific communities where I made a difference using food, I will pass very peacefully.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/23/kimbal-musk-takes-the-tech-entrepreneur-ethos-and-applies-it-to-food/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/kimbal-musk-takes-the-tech-entrepreneur-ethos-and-applies-it-to-food/

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jimdsmith34 · 7 years ago

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Kimbal Musk takes the tech entrepreneur ethos and applies it to food