For years Marc Andreessen–the entrepreneur best known for launching Mosaic and later Netscape–ran a popular blog called “Pmarca” (apparently short for “Private Marc Andreessen”) where he dispensed wisdom on startups, business, investing and beyond. If you’ve worked in startups, especially in Silicon Valley, you probably followed “Pmarca” fairly religiously.
Like so many others, Andreessen eventually took down his blog and began “tweetstorming” on Twitter–all while serving on the boards of Facebook,eBay, and HP, and running his now influential VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Before “Pmarca” could fade completely into oblivion, fans asked Andreessen to preserve the blog for posterity. And that he did. You can now download an archive of “Pmarca” as a free ebook. Available in three formats (ePub, Mobi, and PDF), the archived version can be read in pretty much the blog’s original format. Start your downloads here.
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In his essay “The Relativity of Wrong,” Isaac Asimov argues persuasively against the common belief that “’right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” Instead, he says, “it seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts,” and that certain ideas can be true in a sense, but still in need of further correction with new information. I can’t testify as to the strength of his argument when it comes to theoretical physics, but as far as basic inductive reasoning goes it seems perfectly sound to me, and a point worth making frequently. We don’t experience a world of binaries, but one full of “fuzziness” and near misses of all kinds.
As in science—argues former Monty Python member, comedy writer, and intellectual gadfly John Cleese—so in business. Cleese gave a motivational speech called “The Importance of Mistakes” in 1988 to an audience of 500 businessman at the British-American Chamber of Commerce, a demographic he has addressed remotely since 1972 with a series of business training videos made by his company, Video Arts. (“Better job training through entertainment,” as Kate Callen at UPI describes the company’s mission. Videos have titles like “Meetings, Bloody Meetings,” and “If Looks Could Kill.”)
In “The Importance of Mistakes,” Cleese explains that we do not veer wildly off course into total wrongness every time we make an error. Instead, our mistakes provide us with opportunities for feedback, which enables us to make course corrections, where we will inevitably make another mistake, receive more feedback, etc., until we hit the mark. These metaphors are not mine; Cleese uses a story called Gordon the Guided Missile as his primary example—which he dubiously claims was “the first nursery story I ever remember my mother reading to me”:
Gordon the guided missile sets off in pursuit of its target. It immediately sends out signals to discover if it is on the right course to hit that target. Signals come back: “No, you are not on course. So change it. Up a bit and slightly to the left.” And Gordon changes course as instructed and then, rational little fellow that he is, sends out another signal. “Am I on course now?” Back comes the answer, “No, but if you adjust your present course a bit further up and a bit further to the left, you will be.” He adjusts his course again and sends out another request for information. Back comes the answer, “No, Gordon, you’ve still got it wrong. Now you must come down a bit and a foot to the right.” And the guided missile goes on and on making mistakes, and on and on listening to feedback and on and on correcting its behavior until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. And we applaud the missile for its skill. If, however some critic says, “Well, it certainly made a lot of mistakes on the way”, we reply, “Yes, but that didn’t matter, did it? It got there in the end.” All its mistakes were little ones, in the sense that they could be immediately corrected. And as a results of making many hundreds of mistakes, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake which really would have mattered: missing the target.
The story illustrates, Cleese says, the importance of a “tolerant attitude towards mistakes”—even, a “positive attitude.” To take any other view would be to behave “irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully.” Cleese more or less recommends his audience adopt Asimov’s scientific perspective on error: mistakes are not disastrously irrecoverable missteps, but ways of learning how to get things “less wrong.”
Some clarification: Cleese means to validate only “those mistakes which, at the time they were committed, did have a chance.” A reasonably good try, in other words. There are some absolutes in the world, after all, and there are “true copper bottomed mistakes, like spelling the word ‘rabbit with three m’s or … starting a land war in Asia.” But the point stands. We’re usually in the realm of in-between, and instead of letting the anxiety of indeterminacy overwhelm us, Cleese recommends we take risks and “gain the confidence to contribute spontaneously to what’s happening,” thus overcoming inhibitions and the fear of looking ridiculous.
Cleese delivered this speech to a body of people not typically known for acting spontaneously. And while it seems to me that these days top executives can make egregious errors (or commit egregious fraud) and land squarely on their feet, I wonder if those on the tiers below have the privilege of daring to make errors in most industries. In any case, whether an assembly of corporate managers can afford to loosen up, the rest of us probably can, if we’re willing to adopt a “positive attitude” toward mistakes and consistently—scientifically, even—view them as opportunities to learn.
All of this requires a fine balance of the confidence to screw up and the humility to take constructive feedback when you do. “Healthy behavior actually arises out of confidence,” Cleese observed in an interview after his speech, and yet, “the worst problem in management—in fact, the worst problem in life—is the ego.”
In a perfect world, I could write this post for free. Alas, the rigors of the modern economy demand that I pay regular and sometimes high prices for food, shelter, books, and the other necessities of life. And so if I spend time working on something — and in my case, that usually means writing something — I’d better ask for money in exchange, or I’ll find myself out on the street before long. Nobody understands this better than Harlan Ellison, the hugely prolific author of novels, stories, essays screenplays, comic books, usually in, or dealing with, the genre of science fiction.
Ellison also starred in Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a documentary about his colorful life and all the work he’s written during it, a clip of which you can see at the top of the post. In it, he describes receiving a call just the day before from “a little film company” seeking permission to include an interview clip with him previously shot about the making of Babylon 5, a series on which he worked as creative consultant. “Absolutely,” Ellison said to the company’s representative. “All you’ve got to do is pay me.”
This simple request seemed to take the representative—who went on to insist that “everyone else is just doing it for nothing” and that “it would be good publicity”—quite by surprise. “Do you get a paycheck?” Ellison then asked. “Does your boss get a paycheck? Do you pay the telecine guy? Do you pay the cameraman? Do you pay the cutters? Do you pay the Teamsters when they schlep your stuff on the trucks? Would you go to the gas station and ask them to give you free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have them take out our spleen for nothing?”
This line of questioning has come up again and again since Ellison told this story, as when the journalist Nate Thayer, or more recently Wil Wheaton, spoke out against the expectation that writers would hand out the rights to their work “for exposure.” The pragmatic Ellison frames the matter as follows: “Cross my palm with silver, and you can use my interview.” But do financially-oriented attitudes such as his (“I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it”) taint the art and craft of writing? He doesn’t think so: “I sell my soul,” he admits, “but at the highest rates.”
If there is any contemporary figure out there that resembles Charles Foster Kane, it is that real estate mogul and unlikely GOP front runner, Donald Trump. Like Kane, Trump was educated in, and thrown out of, some of the most elite private schools out there. Both have huge, larger-than-life personalities that readily turned them into media icons. Both had tumultuous relationships with women that ended up tabloid fodder. Both ostentatiously flaunted their wealth. And both have grandiose political ambitions.
Above you can watch The Donald expound on Orson Welles’s masterpiece in a clip directed by none other than master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Trump is remarkably thoughtful in this piece compared to the campaign trail where he often sounds like a WWE barker channeling Mussolini. He comes to the movie from a vantage point that most of us just don’t have; namely, he knows what it’s like being obscenely wealthy.
Citizen Kane is really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive. I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. He had the wealth; he just didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger and larger and larger with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier, perhaps I can understand that…. Wealth isolates you from other people.
At the end of the piece, Morris asks Trump to give Kane some advice. His response, delivered with a smirk, is pure Trump – i.e. bombastic and misogynist. “Get yourself a different woman.”
The segment comes from an aborted project by Morris called Movie Movie, where he envisioned putting modern figures into the films they most admire. So imagine Trump actually in a re-enactment of Kane. Or, as also almost happened, imagine Mikhail Gorbachev starring in a reenactment of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a damned shame that Movie Movie never got made.
Below you can see more of Trump along with Gorbachev, Lou Reed, Walter Cronkite and others talking about their favorite movies in a video made for the 2002 Academy Awards.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
At Creative Commons, a lot of the work we do to support the commons is in the background. We write and steward copyright licenses that help fuel the open web. We help push through open policies at the government, university, and foundation level to increase access to academic, scientific, cultural and other types of content. We fight for sensible copyright reform. All of this work is important, and we’re going to continue to do it.
But we also want to try our hand at something more visible. Our plan is to spend the next year collaboratively researching and writing a book about business models that involve Creative Commons licensing. Even our funding strategy for this project is public-facing and collaborative. Last week we launched our first-ever Kickstarter to raise money for the project, and we hope you’ll become a part of it all by making a pledge at any amount.
Crowdfunding this project is a way to kick off the project in an open and visible way, and to gather support and excitement for our work. But it is also a way to get first-hand experience with a business model that involves Creative Commons. As we raise funds to support the development of a book we will ultimately give away for free under a CC license, we are a case study for our own book. We’re off to a strong start and we’re learning as we go.
And we’re going to do it entirely in the open. We’ve started a Medium publication called “Made with Creative Commons” to use as our digital whiteboard. Throughout the year, we’ll be writing there about the things we learn, the questions we have, the problems we face. We’re hoping to make the research and writing process as collaborative as possible. Kickstarter backers can also become co-creators of the book to receive early drafts of our writing as we go and provide input to help shape the book.
We’re really excited about this ambitious project. Creating and sharing is what CC is all about, and as we do it, we’re hoping to reveal strategies that other creators and businesses can use for their own work. We hope you’ll join us!
–Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is Senior Counsel at Creative Commons.
From the layman’s perspective, the project above starts with a bit of self-mythologizing.
Bassett & Partners, the “award-winning, disruptive brand and design strategy firm” and maker of the video above, seems not to subscribe to TED-Ed’s practice of educating viewers from the get-go.
A couple of minutes in, I hit pause in order to do a little research on the word “brief.”
I’m familiar with male underpants (though technically those are plural, even if the garment is singular).
I have the average moviegoers handle on the meaning of legal briefs.
And now I know what the noted architects, illustrator, designer, and ad execs are talking about above! If only they’d referred to it as an elevator pitch, I’d have been on board from the start. Of course, why would they? Only those of us who want to sound all Hollywood call it that.
…without (as per ad exec John Boiler) dictating creative terms. Of all the interviewees, the trucker hatted Boiler exudes the schmooziest, most off-putting Hollywood vibe. I’d rather do lunch with Frank Gehry. Does this make me guilty of comparing apples to oranges, when director (and “disruptive brand and design” strategist) Tom Bassett leveled the playing field by giving them equal time?
Perhaps if Boiler had humbled himself by sharing an experience as heartbreaking as Gehry’s ill-fated Eisenhower Memorial. (Skip ahead to the 16:16 mark if you want to hear how outside opinion can pound context, research, poetry, and many months of thoughtful work to a heap of rubble.)
I love Maira Kalman, but remain unclear as to whether she’s fielding or submitting briefs. If the latter, how do those differ from book proposals?
What if the emotion, creativity, and enthusiastic research that went into Nike’s 1996 Olympics ads resulted in an equally fierce campaign to end hunger in a country with no Olympic teams?
What if the client’s problem was cancer? Could the brief demand a cure? That sounds simple.
Let us acknowledge that most grand scale visions require a fleet of underlings to come to fruition. I wonder what plumbers and electricians would make of seeing their contributions described in such poetic terms. Never underestimate the power of a soundtrack.
Peter Thiel has many claims to fame in Silicon Valley. He co-founded PayPal in 1998, before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He later launched various hedge funds, and made early investments in Facebook. He’s an unabashed libertarian, a proponent of Seasteading and Singularity, a critic of the American university system, and the creator of the annual Thiel Fellowship, which pays promising college-age students to “stop out” of school for two years and launch business ventures instead.
Finally, Thiel is also now the bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Published in mid-September, the book received a pretty rave review in The Atlantic, where Derek Johnson calls it “a lucid treatise on capitalism and entrepreneurship” and perhaps “the best business book I’ve read.”
The book itself is actually a distillation of thoughts Thiel presented in a course he taught at Stanford in 2012. And it just so happens that the notes from that course — CS138 Startups — are freely available online. They come courtesy of Blake Masters, a student in Thiel’s class, who later helped the entrepreneur write Zero to One.
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