Who is Farhan Lalji?

I started this blog as I finished the MBA to document my transition from a graduate to a professional. Professional what? I’m not sure. Right now it’s a marketer working for Yahoo! Allow me to think out loud for a couple of minutes.

Last week I was listening to a great podcast from Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. The particular podcast was on angel investing and had Ron Conway and Mike Maples discussing their experience. Something Mike Maples said really stuck with me, he basically said that we’re lucky enough to have a tremendous education behind us (he was talking about Stanford, but could equally apply to London Business School) so we have no excuse for not doing something your passionate about. I couldn’t agree more.

We had some close friends over for lunch the other day and amongst the great conversation we were discussing our jobs and what we’re doing. Some of us were still trying to figure out what we’re passionate about and some of us know what we’re passionate about and are working in those fields.

Either way, there’s no excuse for not being passionate about what you do. Because if you’re not it’s easy to do something else.

It might seem difficult, but as someone who fell in love with the internet (as sad as it might sound its true) and moved from studying health to doing web development to studying at LBS to working for Yahoo! I have to believe, with passion and commitment, that anything is possible.

A lot of the world doesn’t have that kind of flexibility. Most of the people of the world grow up not being able to make more then a dollar a day. As someone who has access to capital, education, and information I feel blessed and I totally agree with Mick Maples, there is no excuse for not doing what I’m passionate about.

Will I always be this passionate about online? Who knows, I’m not sure. But whatever I decide I’m passionate about I’m lucky enough to know that I have the education and the experience to transition into something else.

Some University professor down in Brighton wants to ban using search engines and Wikipedia from her corner of Academia. Personally, I think it’s a rotten idea. In this age of information overload you need to be able to cut through and get a good understanding of an issue, event or person as easily as possible. Not to mention I have no idea how you enforce such a ban. After doing some searching I found out that the University professor is peddling a book called, get this “the University of Google”– surprise, surprise, this whole things smells of propaganda to me.

Personally I think access to information by searching and using tools like Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we gather information. Very quickly we can find out basic levels of information on a wider variety of topics.

Use Wikipedia a lot? Do this test, type in en on your browser, click the down arrow and check out the things you’ve looked up recently. My list includes Tao, Albert Einstein, Pete Newell, Petra and Ubuntu, that’s a eastern philosophy, and African philosophy, a genius in physics and a genius in basketball and a location I visited on holiday recently.

The web, and in particular helped me get a basic understanding of these diverse subjects and that’s not a bad thing.  Had I been doing an academic paper on Taoism, or the theory of relativity or whatever else, Wikipedia and search engines would be a starting point not a reference at the end.  After a superficial understanding I can ask the right questions and dig deeper into a subject - that’s what I believe any sensible student of the world would do.

Society and information in society have changed as a result of the internet, as a result of having so much information at our fingertips. What students really need is more courses on how to differentiate the signal from the noise and where to go to get deeper understandings of the subjects they are researching.