But having lunch in Covent Garden inspired me today.  While out there I watched a group of three people taking on pledges/donations for the NSPCC.  I watched person after person turn them away, say they were too busy or do what I did (avoid, duck and swerve).  Don’t get me wrong, I think the NSPCC is a great cause and should be supported, I just hate having to discuss my charitable giving with a stranger on the street.  This brought back memories of my days doing telemarketing, I lasted a week, but I do believe everyone should spend some time doing a job like this.

Not because jobs like this are bad, which they are, but I truly believe jobs like this build resilience.  They help individuals not take no for an answer, or to not take rejection personal.  I was terrible at telemarketing, I’m okay with that, but hearing no so much has definitely made me stronger to when things aren’t go absolutely swimmingly.  This is a skill you definitely need in a start up, doing sales for an unknown product or the gajillion other tasks you have to do as an entrepreneur.  So you’ll excuse me as I put my shoulder back to the grindstone.

Two bloggers/business folks I trust, were on either side of this issue last week
First, I came across a tweet by Umair Haque last week which said:

“every great company reaches a transition point: founders must cede to professional ceo’s. that’s facebook’s real problem. google did it.”

I don’t agree. We had a bit of friendly back and forth on twitter which ended with a great analogy of comparing Zuckerberg to Jobs as being like comparing NWA to T-Pain.

Another blogger/entrepreneur/investor writing about a similar problem was Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) who wrote a blog post about how worrying that whether an executive’s ability to scale is can be corruptive.

Let’s look at this specifically (in the case of facebook and Zuckerberg) and philosophically.
In the case of Facebook – Zuckerberg might not be Steve Jobs and he might not be Gates or any other founder-turned-exec who managed a company that he founded and turned it into a multi billion-dollar company. Doesn’t matter, what matter’s is that he has a solid advisory group around him as he learns. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) is pretty frakin smart, as is Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and the folks at Accel and Greylock who are either investors or advisors in the company. Not to mention the numerous managers and leaders that Facebook has brought on board from Google and other large well established players.

To say that Zuckerberg is running the ship on his own is like saying that Jobs didn’t get any assists from the likes of Jonathan Ive or the other designers/engineers/leaders within Apple, not true.

Philosophically speaking, people learn throughout their whole life, as young people we learn with mentors and structures to help us learn the lessons others have learnt before us. Or we learn through experience. The first time entrepreneur or the executive learning to lead. And we continue learning throughout our lives, whether as a pensioner learning how to put videos on YouTube, or a grandparent figuring out Skype.

It’s not always easy or intuitive but that doesn’t mean that skills can’t be learnt. What people need are people to mentor them and the structure to learn effectively.

In high school I thought I would end up in New York in my 20s, I ended up in London. Not such a big shift. I realised I just loved a buzzing metropolis that was a true centre of creativity in the world. I wanted to be in a city that everyone knew and where lots of people visited, and I ended up in one. Just not the one I originally intended.

I was happy living the single life, and I ended up meeting my wife. Having fun was the goal and meeting the Bee, moving in together, getting married, and the last 6+ years have been, if nothing else, fun.

We were then thinking of Africa or India, and we ended up in Switzerland. I think we just needed a break from London. We needed to figure out if London was indeed a city we truly loved or a place where we had become comfortable.

So when I saw the John Lennon quote “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, followed by the proverb “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday” in a fortune cookie on Flickr, I couldn’t help but be a bit reflective.

I’ve always set out with big ambitious goals, and then let whichever road takes me there take me there. I think it’s a decent way to live life. Have some targets but be flexible in how you get there.

Flexibility in living life seems to be a pattern, whether it’s personal or professional, salary or position, debt or savings, whatever, have a target and then let the universe show you how you get there.

With the new first puppy;

There’s a ton of others, Obama with a basketball tossing a football in the oval office etc. Lots of great pictures. I love this for two reasons:

One – the access that we have to this White House is unreal, unmatched and really unbelievable.

Two – it reminds me of a great TED video on play by Stuart Brown (below) discussing the impact of play on cognitive development.

I love the thought that play contributes to development and progress. People need to be imaginative and playful to be able to think laterally and develop new ways of doing things. Which is why I’m really looking forward to being a dad, think it will give me an excuse to play more. Not that I need one, but at least when I play with my child the Bee won’t look at me strangely for being stupidly playful.

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.

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.