Threatening to piss off overseas is not a solution to any problem.
I strongly recommend you go, for a few years at least, but good luck finding somewhere that is better than this. Remember when a British Pound was worth 3 NZ Dollars – not anymore.
You’ll find that there are too many old people just about everywhere (apart from in the third-world)!
I don’t have an easy answer to this, sadly. But, let’s agree to stop moaning, and get on with trying to find a solution.
Regards,
Generation X, Y & Z
You need to understand that a cozy retirement is not an entitlement for you, any more than free education or affordable housing (you will remember both of those, I’m sure).
Here is the problem in very plain language: there are too many of you and not enough of us.
Please sort your own shit out.
Regards,
Generation X, Y & Z
Here is some unusual advice for people working on a start-up, or thinking about it: swim.
Most people think they can swim, because they had some lessons when they were a kid and perhaps spend time at the beach every summer.
But, I’m not talking about a cheeky length of the hotel pool before a session in the spa or a refreshing dip off the side of a yacht.
Swim a long distance in open water. Say a kilometer or two.
(e.g. if you’re in Wellington, imagine starting at Freyberg beach and swimming around the lighthouse at the point – that’s 2.4km).
It will teach you a lot about your venture and about yourself.
Swimming for any length of time requires technique. You can have all the strength and fitness in the world, but without good technique most of your exertion is going to be completely wasted. The best swimmers are the ones who get the most forward motion out of each stroke. But, even then, a world-class swimmer is only about 9% mechanically efficient (that is, 9 out of 100 calories expended produce forward motion). For somebody like you or me it’s probably more like 3%. So, small improvements in technique can produce significant improvements in performance.
You also need to stay calm. The combination of getting physically tired and needing to spend the majority of time holding your breath with your head under water can quickly cause swimmers to panic and lose their form. This is accentuated when your swimming in close quarters with others (what triathletes call “the washing machine”).
To swim a long distance you need to relax and take the time to breath properly. Unlike swimming in a pool there is no black line to follow. You need to set your own course, and that means you need to stick your head up on a regular basis and some fixed landmarks to aim at.
Last but not least, it helps if you can swim with the tide rather than against it.
Likewise with your start-up…
You can have a superstar team and a big bank balance, but you still need to work out how to spend your time and money on things that make customers happy and actually grow your sales, otherwise you’ll just be flailing. To start with just about everything you do will be horribly inefficient, so you need to quickly determine what is working and what is wastage and focus your energy where it makes a difference. An empirical and analytical approach to this keeps you humble.
The pressure of working on a start-up can be all encompassing – you’re often pulled in many directions at once, and need to do everything yourself. In those situations it’s even more important that you stay calm and keep focussed on the things that you have decided help you, rather than getting distracted by the noise all around you. The winners are often not those who make the biggest splash.
Take time to think about what you’re doing, what you’re not doing and what you could do differently. Be honest about what’s working and what’s not. Consciously choose a direction and go at it. Be careful that you’re not just blindly following somebody else, who may or may not be heading most directly to where you want to be.
And, remember, a positive industry or technology shift to push you along, such as the move towards mobile or software-as-a-service, can help accelerate your venture just as much, if not more, than any of the things you do yourself.
Keep your arms turning over and keep breathing.
And enjoy it!
“Your mission statement should be nine words or less: verb, target, outcome.”
If you’re working on a venture – either non-profit or for-profit – I strongly recommend you invest 25 minutes of your time and watch this.
Kevin is an amazing guy. I was lucky enough to travel with him and his team in Africa last year, and it was great to spend a bit of time with them and learn a bit from some of the ventures and people they are funding there (my post about that trip: Muzungu). I’m looking forward to future adventures with them.
As he describes it, Mulago is an “investor in impact” – meaning, unlike many donors, he’s not investing money in order to just feel good, he’s looking for the change that results from the money they put in.
This is his list of the full chain needed to get from an initial idea or invention to real impact:
This logic applies just as much to for-profit ventures. If you omit any of the links in that chain then your idea is not going to have the impact that you intend. If you’re not making something that people really want; if you can’t take your concept and turn it into a real product that you can build; if you don’t have any way to get your product to customers and make them want it; if you can’t convince enough of them to actually use it (and pay for it) … then your idea is just not going to work, simple as that.
Technical people often jump straight from “interesting idea” to “can I build it?” without any regard for whether it meets a need or how it can be distributed. Non-technical people seem to start with the product and how they will generate demand, overlooking the challenge of finding a technical co-founder to work with who can actually make it a reality.
So, think about your venture.
Which of these steps are you skipping or doing poorly? Start there.
As Kevin says, “have at it”.
So, 4 weeks and 40 games later we’re left with the quarter finalists that were pretty easily predicted nearly three years ago when the draw was made. All that’s left are the 7 games that matter (+ the 3rd/4th play-off).
The top 20 ranked teams qualified for the tournament, and the top 8 ranked teams have made the quarter finals. Scotland (ranked 9) and Italy (ranked 11) are gone as are Tonga (ranked 13) who, like Samoa and Fiji in previous World Cups, managed to beat one of the top-ranked teams but unfortunately miss out after losing to Canada (ranked 12).
However, the 8 teams that progress are not in the order that we all expected. Thanks to the Ireland vs Australia result, the All Blacks (ranked 1) vs Argentina (ranked 8) match is the only quarter final game where there is a clear favourite. The other three could all go either way. History would suggest that the semi-finals will be All Blacks vs South Africa and England vs Ireland (no team who has lost a match in pool play has ever won the World Cup).
But, rather than try and predict the result of this weekend’s games I thought it would be interesting to look a couple of weeks ahead and anticipate some potential final match-ups:
All Blacks vs France
This would be a repeat of the 1987 final, also played at Eden Park.
We all thought we’d seen off the French threat after beating them earlier in the tournament, but as the 1999 All Blacks discovered the French are not beaten at a World Cup until the whistle has blown (and their fans are whistling their disapproval at the team as they walk off).
It’s not right, somehow, that France has not yet won a World Cup (especially since they’ve twice knocked us out). But I don’t think this French team is the one to change that. Indeed, were it not for the bonus point system they’d already be home and we’d be contemplating an England vs Tonga quarter final in Auckland on Saturday night (how good would that have been!)
Still, should they make it that far themselves, I think the All Blacks would probably choose the French last of the four possible opponents for the final.
- or -
Australia vs England
The worst of all possible combinations and painful to even contemplate.
I was living in the UK during the 2003 Rugby World Cup, and controversially chose to support England in the final after Australia knocked out the All Blacks in the semi-final. An old friend from New Zealand, who was staying with us at the time and watched the game with me that Sunday morning local time, struggled to understand my logic. But my preference then was that I’d rather England win their first World Cup than have Australia win their third.
If they were to meet again this time around, I don’t know that I could even bring myself to watch.
So … vive la France and go Bokke!
- or -
South Africa vs Wales
The pool match between these two teams was one of the games of the tournament so far for me. The atmosphere at the game was great – two passionate and vocal groups of supporters. To be honest, I don’t even think the Welsh in attendance expected their team to compete, but in the end they could have … should have … won.
And the Wayne Barnes fan club grows ever bigger.
The Welsh are under-rated by just about everybody – neutrals will no doubt end up supporting the Irish this weekend even though they won’t be the underdogs this time around. But, all of a sudden they find themselves in the quarter-finals, on the easy side of the draw and they might just sneak under the radar all the way to the final, where anything can happen.
- or -
All Blacks vs Ireland
I’d love to see this. I think we all would … for several reasons. Not the least because the Irish have never beaten the All Blacks!
We were in the crowd on 17 November 2001 when one Richard McCaw made his international debut vs Ireland at Lansdowne Road in Dublin. He was the man of the match. I can’t think of a more appropriate opponent for him to face in what would be the biggest game, and (hopefully) pinnacle of his career.
Hopefully he can hang in there over the next couple of weeks. It will either be a great night for us all to celebrate, or as George Greegan so eloquently put it in the closing minutes of the 2003 semi-final “four more years, boys!”.
I thought I’d had a pretty good week … mostly keeping on top of my inbox, meeting interesting people, getting lots done.
Until I look back at my Top Three history:
Two out of three ain’t bad, apparently, but in terms of the three things I considered most important at the start of each day I only managed half that!
Today I have just one thing on the list. Sadly, it’s not writing a blog post.
