Back of Mind

Slippery Slopes

Slippery slopes are scary. They’re moss-covered and moist and lead to darkness. Should we foolishly wander onto one, we’re urged to return quickly to safety (they’re slippery!). But what are slippery slopes but change, and gradual change at that? Slippery slopes are nearing the gravitational pull of other ways of thinking long enough to get a sense of the air. And if the air smells sweet, you may fall, off the slope, into black…but what if you’re falling up, into light?

We all seem to think about the changes in our life as distinct acts, as if they were stage plays. Most of us have bright, distinct lines we use to mark the years - graduations, geographies, professions. End dates and start dates. We even have start dates for our relationships. How absurd is that? Is that how the changes in your relationship felt to you; like bright distinct lines? Big step-function leaps of change?

We do this in our work. I can’t tell you how many MBA students have asked me how to get started with startups and haven’t taken my advice - to wade into it. Intern nights and weekends for a company you like, start a meetup on a topic you care about, shoot, just go to meetups on topics you care about. See what you enjoy doing. Maybe you don’t like startups after all. We don’t want that though. We want something we can announce. We want something that signals what we always knew about ourself, that we’re awesome. That other stuff’s extra work that we’re not getting any social credit for…our Mom is not telling anyone about those, they’re not going in our alumni class notes, we get no degrees from those.

We do this with our health. We’re either on a diet or not. We’re gym rats or we never go. Just go outside. Walk more. Play a sport once a week. Don’t eat meat one day. Have vegetables for lunch. If it feels good, do more, if not, I promise you can go back. No one will stop you. Experiment. You will fall off no poorly-tractioned surface.

We do this with in our politics and our social norms. When did you last genuinely entertain an idea from the opposite end of the political or social spectrum? When did you last reexamine one of your own cherished values?

We do this with how we spend our time, and who we spend it with.

One of my favorite things about working in the New York startup community has been the culture of experimentation and almost academic commitment to going where the “data” leads you. What many of them might call A/B testing their life. With so many ways to live out these minutes we’re given, there are slim odds you or I stumbled onto our best lives first. So go explore the slippery slopes.

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We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts.

As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to…

"

… I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He was a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have paid me to mow his lawn or something.

And one day he said to me, “come on into my garage I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said, “come back tomorrow.”

And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.

And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.

That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

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— Steve Jobs - circa 1995 (via rageinrage)

(Source: CNN)

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There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

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— Elizabeth Warren