What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 Read Online Free PDF Page A

got to know each other a little better, Sandra wrote a business plan for the center and was eventually asked to serve on the organization’s board of directors. She is now co-president of the board and spends most of her time building awareness of and raising money for this organization. Besides her official duties, Sandra also takes on grassroots projects in Afghanistan, such as distributing pomegranate trees throughout the city of Kabul. She personally purchased twenty thousand bare-root trees and handed them out to families so they could start replacing trees destroyed during the war.
    Most people do not leave comfortable lives to tackle enormous problems in far-flung lands. But, in many cases, much smaller challenges seem just as daunting. For many, changing jobs or moving across town feels just as risky as traveling to an exotic location to perform relief work. It is much more comfortable to stay locked in a role that’s “good enough” than to reach for an alternative that has a higher degree of uncertainty. Most of us are content taking small, reliable steps. We don’t get very far, but we don’t rock the boat either.
     

    Venture capital firms that invest in early stage businesses pride themselves on identifying big problems and taking significant risks with the goal of tackling them. They are always scanning the horizon for the next big opportunity, as opposed to looking for small problems with incremental solutions. They attempt to look into the future for challenges that are just beyond the next hill so they can invest in radically innovative approaches to meeting them head-on. A great example is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a firm with a remarkable track record for predicting future challenges and investing in their solutions. They invested in biotechnology, Internet commerce, and alternative energy long before these were household topics, and they anticipated the future impact of businesses such as Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Google, Netscape, Intuit, and Electronic Arts. As Randy Komisar, a partner at KPCB, notes, being entrepreneurial means seeing the world as opportunity rich. He and his colleagues have found that identifying and solving big problems leads to significant rewards for everyone involved.
    Despite the fact that one can make a profit by solving big problems, Randy stresses in his book, The Monk and the Riddle, the importance of having the zeal to solve a grand problem, as opposed to being motivated to make money. 4 To explain the difference, he compares a missionary who passionately pursues an important cause to a mercenary whose drive is only to serve his or her own interests. By focusing on finding solutions to significant challenges with missionary-like energy, successful companies are born. This message is echoed by author Guy Kawasaki, who says it is better to “make meaning than to make money.” 5 If your goal is to make meaning by trying to solve a big problem in innovative ways, you are more likely to make money than if you start with the goal of making money, in which case you will probably not make money or meaning.
     

    What do the entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and inventors described above have to do with the students who started with five dollars, paper clips, or water bottles and were challenged to create as much value as possible? A tremendous amount. All of these examples reinforce the idea that there is great benefit to identifying problems in your midst and then relentlessly working to solve them by challenging traditional assumptions. Problems are abundant, just waiting for those willing to find inventive solutions. This takes acute observation, coordinated teamwork, the ability to execute a plan, a willingness to learn from failure, and creative problem solving. But the first requirement is having the attitude that the problem can be solved. I have found, for myself and my students, that the more experience you have tackling problems, the more