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How do you know? Are you keeping an eye on the others in your category, comparing to see how you measure up to your peers? Is it more important for a man to be tall, or to have good hair? This is, of course, the path of insanity, and not the good kind of insanity. What will you do if you're too tough to be a good woman, too sensitive to be a good man, too selfish to be a good husband, too lazy to be a good employee, too shy to be a good friend, too caring to be rational, too fat to be pretty, too effeminate to be straight, too introverted to be a good leader, too smart to be kind, too young to be taken seriously, too old to make a difference, or too far behind to even get in the race? These are all false standards and false dichotomies, but they are so common and so ingrained that we sometimes believe in them without even realizing it. And this leads to a mountain of insecurities, because nobody measures up to these crazy standards (and nobody should). But even if we don't believe in these things, it still matters what other people think, right? What will the neighbors think? Or how about our co-workers, or the people at church? And so everyone works to hide their insecurities, and they look around at their peers for comparison, and maybe they feel bad because everyone else seems to have it easy, to have it all figured out. The truth is, nobody can see the truth anymore. They are all working to hide the truth, because the truth is that they are afraid of who or what they really are. So they all put on a show, and they pretend to be a good whatever. Or maybe they rebel, and make a point of being a bad whatever, but then they are still under the control of that false standard, and they are still not being themselves. That is all so exhausting.  I am nothing. It's simple. If I were smart, I might be afraid of looking stupid. If I were successful, I might be afraid of failure. If I were a man, I might be afraid of being weak. If I were a Christian, I might be afraid of losing faith. If I were an atheist, I might be afraid of believing. If I were rational, I might be afraid of my emotions. If I were introverted, I might be afraid of meeting new people. If I were respectable, I might be afraid of looking foolish. If I were an expert, I might be afraid of being wrong. But I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.

This isn't license to stagnate. Change is inevitable. Change is part of who we are, but if we aren't changing for the better, then we are just slowly decaying.  By returning to zero expectations, by accepting that I am nothing, it is easier to see the truth. Fear, jealousy, insecurity, unfairness, embarrassment -- these feelings cloud our ability to see what is. The truth is often threatening, and once our defenses are up, it's difficult to be completely honest with anyone, even ourselves. But when I am nothing, when I have no image or identity or ego to protect, I can begin to see and accept things as they really are. That is the beginning of positive change, because we can not change what we do not accept and do not understand. But with understanding, we can finally see the difference between fixing problems, and hiding them, the difference between genuine improvement, and faking it. We discover that many of our weaknesses are actually strengths once we learn how to use them, and that our greatest gifts are often buried beneath our greatest insecurities

Letting go of your identity can be difficult and takes time, possibly forever, but as with any change, moving in the right direction is all that really matters

use these emotions as a cue to remember, "I am nothing"

Here's the part of the article that interests me: What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something -- whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet -- he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more. She has two main points here: 1) Learning is not fun and 2) It's important to make kids dependent on praise and admiration.

One of the problems I've faced throughout life is that I'm kind of lazy, or maybe I lack will power or discipline or something. Either way, it's very difficult for me to do anything that I don't feel like doing. If I try to force it, my energy disappears, and I hate life. Furthermore, not only were my parents not Chinese, but they had five kids, so there wasn't time for Amy Chua's style of parenting. I kind of had to figure it out on my own. My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.

For example, I didn't really like school, and I especially hated homework, so I turned it into a game to see how little time and effort I could possibly waste on it while still getting "good enough" grades. I barely made it into the top 10% of my public high school class, so I probably wouldn't be accepted into whatever college Amy Chua has picked out for her kids, but I find that I really don't care. Instead, I went to a "good enough" college, slept through most of my classes, then got a "good enough" job after graduation. Meanwhile, I taught myself how to program and build all kinds of things, which to me was much more fun than school. I'm not going to claim that my approach is superior to Amy Chua's, or that it will work for everyone, but I do think it provides an interesting contrast.Amy Chua's approach is based on extrinsic motivation. Children must do exactly what they are told to do, and they must not be happy unless an external authority gives them praise and admiration. They must learn that their own internal motivations and judgement are worthless and not to be trusted. They are successful when an external authority, such as an Ivy League school, tells them that they are successful. The extrinsic path to success is to focus on being the person you are told to be

The approach I stumbled into is based on intrinsic motivation. To the greatest extent possible, do whatever is most fun, interesting, and personally rewarding (and not evil). External constraints, such as the need to go to school or make money are simply obstacles to be hacked. Be skeptical of external authorities, as they are often manipulating you for their own benefit, or for the benefit of the institutions they represent (often unknowingly, as they were already captured by the same systems which are attempted to ensnare you). Your identity comes from within -- external recognition such as degrees and awards are only of tactical importance -- don't allow them to define who you are. The intrinsic path to success is to focus on being the person that you are

Of course this leads to the question, "What is success?" Someone who spent his life working 80 hour weeks, living in hotels, and fighting his way up the corporate ladder to become VP of toilet paper marketing would probably consider himself more successful than a sandwich shop owner who spends his nights and weekends playing with his kids and working on hobby projects, but maybe the sandwich shop owner would be happier and healthier. Ultimately, it is up to each person to decide what success means to them, but I think it's important that everyone be mindful of the decision they are making.  It's often said that people become entrepreneurs because they can't handle a regular job. Perhaps these people are simply too "defective" to fit into any mold, or maybe they lack the extrinsic motivation necessary to care about bosses, performance reviews, and other things which are so important for success in the corporate environment. However, what they do have is the creativity and natural sense of direction necessary to run their own business. I doubt that this is a coincidence. As explained in this TED talk by Dan Pink, extrinsic motivation is a great way to get people to do boring and repetitive tasks, but it actually harms performance on more creative tasks. Creativity is a surprisingly fragile thing. It comes from deep inside, and external concerns (most especially, "What will people think?") seem to scare it away. But that's a topic for another time. Of course, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation isn't a completely black and white distinction, and we probably can't survive entirely on one or the other (I aim for 90% intrinsic). I also doubt it's possible to simply "switch" from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. It's a skill like anything else. It takes time to find your internal voice, learn when to trust it, and stop fearing outside opinion (closely related: ego-fear). Amy Chua's book was about parenting. Her style is based on extrinsic motivation. How do we raise successful, intrinsically motivated children? I'm sure someone will leave book recommendations in the comments -- Alfie Kohn comes to mind. However, I suspect that one of the most important factors is how we live our own lives. If we demonstrate that work and creativity can actually be fun and enjoyable, that at least sets an example. If we first solve the puzzle for ourselves, we have a better chance of helping others to find their answer.

I've definitely learned a lot, but the recent Heroku acquisition (for a reported $212 million) made me wonder if I've also reached the point of "not losing too much money", so I did the math. From 2006 (when I started investing) through 2008, I invested about $1.21 million in 32 different companies. About half of those companies were either acquired or are dead/mostly-dead. The other half are still alive and seem to be doing well. The current acquisitions total about $1.34 million, only about a 10% gain, which isn't great, but at least I'm not losing too much. Fortunately, the "still alive" category includes a number of very promising investments, such as Meraki, Weebly, and Wufoo, so I expect the final return will be much better than 10% (which is all gravy anyway, since my primary goal was to learn more and be helpful). Of the current acquisitions, only two have yielded a greater than 10x return: Heroku and Mint. Unfortunately they were also two of the smaller investments, proving that I don't know what I'm doing, or at least showing that I need to make a point of investing more money into the best companies (Mint was oversubscribed, but I don't remember why I didn't put more into Heroku -- edit: apparently it was also oversubscribed). It's worth noting that the highest return was from a Y Combinator company (Heroku, winter 2008). I've been investing in the YC companies almost from the start (Wufoo was winter 2006), and they keep getting better. YC is attracting the best founders, and Heroku is just the tip of the iceberg. The more great YC companies there are, the more reasons there are for other smart founders to join YC, and I find myself asking non-YC companies why they aren't yet in YC. This trend definitely contributed to my decision to join YC as a partner. There were also a couple of medium-sized acquisitions (AppJet/Etherpad and 280North) and several smaller but still nice (2x-3x) exits such as Auctomatic, Parakey, and Zenter. Sometimes people complain about these deals, but as much as I'd like to get a nice 10,000x exit, I'm certainly not going to complain when someone doubles my money! A few companies (such as ScanScout) were acquired by other private companies, so I include those in the "still alive and doing well" category, since it was not an exit from the investor perspective (no liquidity). Only two companies are officially dead, but there are at least four "zombies" that still exist, but in a minimal form and are almost certainly worthless. The two bits of advice that I always give to people looking to get started with angel investing are: 1) Assume you'll lose your money

2) Plan on investing in a large number of companies

First, what is a "cloud OS" and why should I want one? Actually, I don't even know if anyone calls it a "cloud OS", but I couldn't find a better generic term for something like ChromeOS. The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet, which is has been renamed "The Cloud" since that sounds cooler, and your laptop or whatever is basically just a window into that cloud. If your laptop is stolen or catches fire or something, it's not a big deal, because you can just buy another one and nothing has been lost (except your money). Many people characterize this approach as using a "dumb terminal", but that's wrong. Your local computer can still do all kinds of smart computation and data manipulation -- it's just no longer the single point of failure. To me, the defining characteristic of cloud based apps is "information without location". For example, in the bad old days, you would install a copy Outlook or other email software on your PC, it would download all of your email to your computer, and then the email would live on that computer until Outlook corrupted its PST file and everything was lost. If you accidentally left your computer at home, or it was stolen, then you simply couldn't get to your email. Information behaved much like a physical object -- it was always in one place. That's an unnecessary and annoying limitation. By moving my email into "the cloud", I can escape the limitations of physical location and am able to reach it from any number of computers, phones, televisions, or whatever else connects to the Internet. For performance and coverage reasons, those devices will usually cache some of my email, but the canonical version always lives online. The Gmail client on Android phones provides a great example of this. It stores copies of recent messages so that I can access them even when there is no Internet access, and also saves any recent changes (such as new messages or changes to read state), but as soon as possible it sends those changes to the Gmail servers so that they can be reflected everywhere else (such as my home computer). To the greatest extent possible, the information all "lives" in the cloud, and all other copies are simply caches which may be discarded at any time. (BTW, Apple is lame for not allowing a native Gmail app on the iPhone -- email is the one place where Android really outshines the iPhone for me) Continuing with the Gmail example, it's not just your data that resides in the cloud -- the entire application lives there. This is the part that causes people to erroneously describe cloud based apps as a "return to dumb terminals". Just because an application "lives" in the cloud doesn't mean that your local computer isn't still doing work. When you use Gmail from your web browser, it downloads large chunks of Javascript code to run on your computer doing things such as rendering your inbox, handling keyboard and mouse events, pre-fetching messages, etc. The advantage of having this code run on your computer is that it can respond to your actions within a few milliseconds instead of the hundreds of milliseconds it could take to reach Google's servers (thanks to the relatively low speed of light). Which parts of the application run on your computer and which run on Google's computers? Ultimately, it does not matter, and can change over time (and in fact the split is different for different interfaces -- the basic html interface does not need any Javascript) As an end-user, you simply use the app, and let Google worry about making it all work, keeping it up to date, etc. Because we're now treating the executable code and system configuration as data that lives in the cloud and is only cached locally, it also makes sense to do away with the old notions of installing and administering applications on your computer. And of course we also need a security and sandboxing system that prevents the code from breaking your computer (as is so common in the Windows world). In the web/Javascript world, this happened somewhat automatically because web apps evolved from simple web pages, and obviously you don't have to install or uninstall web pages -- your browser simply fetches what it needs to display, optionally caches parts of it for improved performance, and discards resources that it no longer needs (since it can always re-fetch them later on). Cloud-based apps don't necessarily have to be written in Javascript and run in your web browser however. iPhone and Android apps behave in much the same way. Although they can be "installed" or "uninstalled", from a user perspective, that process isn't substantially different from adding or removing a bookmark, and in fact many of those apps are little more than a thin wrapper around an embedded web browser. A combination of technical and review policies prevent those apps from doing anything dangerous to your computer (unlike a Windows app, which could install a new device driver, replace a core system library, install a root-kit, etc).  One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it's spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user. For example, interacting with my FriendFeed page involves the coordination of thousands of individual processors and disks owned by a dozen different entities, including you, Facebook, Amazon, Google, your ISP, and many intermediate ISPs. The same is true of the services provided by thousands of other web apps. This global super-computer enables us to do things that would have been impossible not long ago, such as instantly search billions of documents, access our email and other info from almost anywhere, easily share ideas with thousands or millions of people, collaboratively edit documents with people spread around the world, leak embarrassing diplomatic cables, etc. It also makes it easy to launch new services and applications with almost zero money, which has created a new generation of low-budget startups and expanded the world of high-tech entrepreneurship to many more people. Inevitable, some curmudgeonly types will say this is all bad, and indeed it is not without some downsides and complications, but overall I believe the development of this global super-computer is one of the most important technological advances in history. And what about ChromeOS? If my laptop is just one part of a much larger computer, what is the ideal design for my local node? It should be relatively cheap and reliable, secure (no viruses or anything), zero-administration (I don't want to be a sys-admin), easy to use, and fast. I believe this is roughly the design target of ChromeOS. They are building laptops that run the Chrome web browser and approximately nothing else. I actually like the idea of ChromeOS, so why did I predict its demise? The answer is that we already have millions of devices that almost meet the same ideal, and they are running iOS and Android.

Internal freedom is also very important, though often less obvious. If we are always held back by our own fears and self-limiting beliefs, then we aren't really free. That is why my previous post on serendipity is largely about escaping ego-fear and other negative limitations. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Philosophically, I agree with that. However, if we don't feel safe, if we can't go out in public without fearing for our lives and the lives of our family, then we aren't really free. Since becoming a parent, I've come to understand why parents often seem especially fearful. Our children are so precious to us, and we must keep them safe. I can understand the impulse to simply make more rules, to build taller walls, and to lockup anyone who seems scary. I think the real point of Benjamin Franklin's quote is that when we destroy freedom, we are ultimately destroying safety as well

Not only is prohibition an attack on our basic right to control our own bodies and minds (a philosophical point which most people probably don't care about), but prohibition also provides a multi-billion dollar subsidy to violent criminal organizations that threaten our physical safety and security

The drug cartels have already overrun much of Mexico, and that violence will inevitably spill over in to the United States if we continue subsidising them with one of the world's most lucrative monopolies. The alternative path is to begin restoring individual freedom and responsibility, defund the drug cartels, and instead shift those dollars towards roads, parks, public safety, and other beneficial causes. This is the solution offered by California's proposition 19, the "Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010". Some politicians have argued that proposition 19 is "flawed". To me, this seems like a weak defense of the status quo from politicians afraid to stand out on a controversial issue. Of course it's not perfect -- no law is perfect. However, the current system of drug prohibition is much, much worse. "Perfect" is not one of the options offered on Tuesday's ballot. We can either choose "much better" (Yes on 19), or "keep the current, disastrously bad, system" (No on 19).  If proposition 19 passes, the immediate effect may not be that significant due to federal challenges and such. However, I believe the long-term effects will be enormous. Prohibition is a disaster. Many politicians will admit to this fact, however most of them have been too timid to actually do anything about it, to lead the country towards safer, saner policies. In this case, the voters must lead, and the politicians will follow

Similar thing happened to me in 1999. I realized Google was way cooler than alta vista and better at finding unknown things rather than Yahoo's directory. Truly the future, I thought. I sent in a resume to do some kind of work not development related; data center & sys admin stuff. They called me twice but I convinced myself that they would not have hired me anyways so I never called back. Whether or not ignoring Google's calls was the right decision for him, his reason for not taking the call (fear of rejection) isn't great.I don't have many positive memories from high school, but the one that has stayed with me more than any other comes from the first day of my 11th grade English class. My teacher (I believe his name was "Mr. May") shared a brief anecdote from the prior evening. He was driving home in the rain, and noticed two people on bicycles along the side of the road. He stopped to ask if they needed any help, and ended up driving them back to his house, where they dried off and had dinner with him and his wife. During dinner, the couple shared the stories from their ongoing bike ride across the country. It's not a very dramatic story, but I loved the serendipitous nature of it, both on the part of the couple having adventures biking across the country, and my teacher who saw people along the road and invited them into his home. None of it was planned -- they simply allowed it to happen. It was inspirational to me because it felt like the right way to live, the fun

My own story of how I ended up at Google in 1999 is rather boring. I was interested both in startups, and Linux (which was still somewhat fringe at the time), so I sent my resume to a few companies that I had seen mentioned on Slashdot (a rather lazy job search, in hindsight). Fortunately, most of them never even responded, and only one actually offered me a job, Google. I was skeptical of their business and didn't expect it to last long, but it seemed like it could be fun and educational, so I accepted. Obviously that's an example of rather extreme luck, but I've noticed that most of the good things that happen to me follow that general pattern, and aren't part of any "plan". The story of how I met my wife is remarkably similar. Shortly after moving to California, I signed up for match.com, read a bunch of profiles, emailed three of them, and only one responded. I was very much not

My plans rarely work (unless they are boringly simple), but serendipity has been good to me, so over time I've tried to make the most of that. My theory of serendipity is still evolving, but from what I've seen, it's better to think in terms of "allowing" serendipity rather than "seeking" it or "creating" it. Opportunity is all around us, but we have beliefs and habits that block it

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edit: apparently it was also oversubscribed

Edit: Many people have incorrectly interpreted my advice as, "don't hire a financial advisor". My actual advice is, "don't rush to hire a financial advisor -- just keep things very simple and take time to decide what is right for you." I personally have a bunch of advisors.

(edit, since people are getting offended: there are, as always, exceptions, but the point is that actually doing stuff is about a million times harder than just dreaming about it, which is why 99% of people wouldn't actually do it even if money weren't an issue)

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