Entreprenurship: One of the things that entrepreneurs don’t talk a lot about is failure. But it happens. I know. Failure is the toughest thing in the world to go through, but probably the best learning experience. I know that I learned more from failures than from success, although success was much sweeter. Here is a story of failure in entrepreneurship.
Economy: Warren Buffett writes the best shareholder letter in the industry. He has just released the 2008 version. Besides his recollection of “We trust in God, all others pay cash”, he recounts the good and bad (unforced errors?) that made 2008 for Berkshire-Hathaway.
Writing: I pointed last week to Paul Graham‘s article on Startups in 13 Sentences. The folks at EtherPad, a developer of tools for collaborative editing, posted a demo of a future feature of their program that allows one to see the writing process in real time. The sample article that they used was the Paul Graham article. I was mesmerized.
Business: Alex Krupp writes in the SixMonthMBA blog about why entrepreneurs should get paid more than engineers. What do you think?
The EtherPad demo is fascinating, and it makes me respect all the more authors like David McCullough – he writes his books on an old Royal typewriter. It also leads me to question our thought processes these days, and how often we take the time for well-constructed critical thoughts. In college I used to write papers in pencil. Today, I can’t compose a brief e-mail without the use of the backspace.
I recently wrote an essay on this very topic. There are many things we humans used to be capable of that are now becoming lost arts, such as spelling, reading a map, remembering phone numbers, balancing a checkbook, writing letters and conducting research without the aid of Wikipedia.
As an editor, that demo drove me crazy! I certainly hope there’s one qualified editor who reviews the final document.