Grow Where You Are Planted

A collection of thought-crumbs to help me map my way home.

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I’ll be moderating a really cool panel in French on June 3rd at 15:00 CET.

About the panel:

Quant à votre offre, vous avez soigneusement choisi l'ensemble des fonctionalités qui correspondent au besoins de votre client.  Vous pensez que votre offre est irresistible et differént des autre offres sur le marché. Mais comment obtenir l'écoute du public concerné? Et comment convaincre votre client à payer pour un produit qu'elle n'a jamais utilisé? Rejoignez trois experts entrepreneurs et notre cher professeur Christopher Tucci pour une conference exceptionelle: http://go.epfl.ch/panel1LNV15. Envoyez-nous vos questions , par twitter (#LNV15) ou à travers le platform Coursera (http://go.epfl.ch/ventureMOOC). A mercredi!

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I've posted work from StealLikeanArtist.com once before on @kanthelpme, but need to do so again.

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"Since our digital identity is so freely available, there is no way we can pretend to be someone else in our professional lives.[...] You will succeed at work because of who you are, not who you think you should be."

Krishnan Chatterjee‎, Head, Strategic Marketing, HCL Technologies, in 10 habits of highly successful people in a digital workplace - Quartz

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"This generation just wants to pull the pieces together, build something cool and express themselves."

- Alex Klein, 24, Cofounder, Kano - In Photos: 2015 30 Under 30: Education - Forbes

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"We are in a region where numerous products are being designed and given away for free to people who don’t want them. We run the risk of being priced out of the market by donated low-quality copycats. I think Ehsan Noursalehi says it best: “It is time to put an end to useless products designed for people in crummy situations."

SunCulture Annual Letter 2014

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"Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you. ... You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.”

- John Gardner via The Problem With Meaning - NYTimes.com There is nobody else like you.

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“The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. [...] You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves."

- John Gardner via The Problem With Meaning - NYTimes.com

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"Our business model is designed in a way that enables us to improve lives by focusing on sales – this is the way we like to approach social and economic impact. Each system we sell increases farmer income, saves water, generates renewable energy, and produces highly-nutritious fresh fruits and vegetables. This enables us to operate with purely commercial intentions, while embodying the principles of improving the livelihoods of farmers..."

SunCulture Annual Letter 2014

The kind of business model I like!

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"Piotr Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings."

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm via @mattangriffel

[growthbook]

"I think this industry is packed with highly skilled people, people who are inspirational, talented, equipped with skills. But what's missing for me, and this is after being in the industry for only four years, so I"m not someone who can reflect on two decades, what's missing for me is social entrepreneurship and the feeling that people want to build digital tools that are going to actually improve our world in such a way that we can look back after 100 years and say, 'Holy crap, we have made things better for human lives.' I'm talking about finding technology solutions to end poverty, technology solutions to end human trafficking, to educate, to empower the individuals that are living in this world right now. [...] I'd like to see people step up and build things that will impact them beyond just making a dollar, and beyond just making a successful business. [...] I want to build something meaningful."

- Jessica Erickson at the 42 minute mark

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"I argued not only for the rehumanization of psychotherapy but also for what I called "the degurufication of logotherapy."

- Victor E. Frankl, 1980.

Dogma anywhere is wrong. I'd like to de-guru-ify development economics and entrepreneurial management. I still have much research to do, in that case...

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"Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now."

- Victor E. Frankl

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Privileged to work in an environment that seems to have become so rare in business and academic institutions today

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"However you identify yourself: as child, adolescent, a mother, a father, an older person, healthy person, sick person, a suffering person, or an enlightened person – always, behind all of that, is the truth of yourself. It is not foreign to you. It is so close that you cannot believe it is you."

- Kosi, via awakin.org

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Many popular books have offered memorable and useful entrepreneurial strategies... Here are 10 recommended books from Professor Dr. Marc Gruber and I from Entreprenuership Days at EPFL which you may not have heard of.

[nettra]

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JK Rowling, 2008, Harvard Commencement

One of my favorite speeches. It never gets old.

Some takeaways:

She fears failure, she fears it even when making this speech

Ways to maintain perspective and venture anyways: - We won’t remember - Failure for some resembles other’s ideas of success

We all experience hardship, heartache, failure — and if we are too cautious, we “fail by default”

Rock bottom reveals essential dreams and relationships - freeing you to focus on what matters to you

We must imagine a better world for those outside our world

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"J’ai décidé très tôt d’être une héroïne. L’important était que ce fût difficile, grand, excitant !"

- Niki de Saint-Phalle