2013 3
Social car movers
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
We have a car in NYC and one in Miami. But it is useless to have a car in Manhattan this time of the year and very useful to have 2 in Miami. So we decided to bring the Q7 to Miami and I had this crazy idea to ask somebody to do it over social media. I posted it on Twitter and Facebook, said that if anyone wanted to drive our car we would pay for gas and $250. This was intended for somebody who wanted to enjoy driving down the East Coast and get to know this part of America. I told them they could take up to a week although the trip itself according to Google Maps is 19 hours of driving. Friends told me that I could get a crook or somebody who could destroy our car but I thought it highly unlikely.
And it totally worked! Many people volunteered and I chose this computer programmer who inspired confidence in me over email and via his LinkedIn profile. It all went great and the car just made it to our garage in Miami.
It is not that we saved much money, there are professional services that do this work, ship your car on a train or truck. But I like the sharing economy. That’s what Fon is. For Randall who brought the car it was a great trip he said. He stopped along the way to visit friends and relatives. He loved the Q7. And for us it was so much easier than dealing with a company, filling out the paperwork and legal stuff that normally accompanies all these things. Pick up, drop off.
Is there a business here of moving cars instead of renting cars for those who want to drop a car far from where they rented it? For car rental companies it’s all about drop off charges. Maybe that’s the next, albeit smaller AirBnB, or ZipCar.
After writing this post I came across Spanish company Amovens, founded by Diego Hidalgo, what they do is not exactly shipping your cars through social means but car pooling. Also Socialcar which is like a car rental company among individuals.
2012 19
Warriors vs. Worriers
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So you are worried about something. You are frequently worried about something. But whatever worries you changes from day to day. Well, here is a post about worrying, worrying as an activity, about what’s good and bad about worrying.
As negative as it sounds, worrying itself is not negative. Being worried can make us better off. When we are worried our intellect sharpens, worries make us focus on problems, confront issues, win battles and move on with life. As an entrepreneur who over the course of 25 years founded four startups worth over half a billion and blew up one, I was never worry free. Indeed my start ups always felt to me as a string of endless worries, of failures, that somehow miraculously one day, were highly valuable. In all of them I had near death experiences. In all of them, thanks to worrying, I found ways out of them. Because worrying as in “I have identified a problem” is a positive trait. Worrying as in “I am deciding on the best strategy to cope with adversity” is a positive trait. But many times we worry about issues in life that truly don’t deserve our focus, that are not real problems we should worry about. That are not true challenges. That are bogus.
That is why some people are more “worriers” than “warriors”. And indeed there is medical evidence for this, genetic evidence. Research shows that some genes code for worrying behaviors (worriers) while others for learning from adversity (warriors). Warriors see challenges as learning opportunities. Worriers on the other hand don’t fight true problems– they lie in the battlefield of their mind, waiting for an enemy who doesn’t show up. And instead of rejoicing when real evidence shows them that they are trouble free, on they go, to find something else to worry about. They are the hypochondriacs of life. And they exist. On a good day they become lawyers and turn their handicap into income, billing others by the hour for their worries. But most are not that lucky, and worry in vain. And we understand them because even the most optimistic among us has something in common with those “worriers”. We have all worried about issues that just did not deserve our attention. The key question is how frequently does this happen to us.
So how can we distinguish the worrier in us from the warrior in us? Here’s an idea. Start a diary of your worries. Every day write a note to self in some type of social media, about “the worry of the day”. Write it in a circle with only one member: yourself. Tell yourself what upsets you that day. Something like: today I am worried about… blank. And build a collection of worries. A timeline of worries.
And then, at some point in the future, go back to these worries. And see what you were worried about last month, or last year. By then you will be able to judge if worrying made sense. If it helped you. If you worried about something worthy of your angst. If you had a fear or a phobia. If you were a warrior, or a worrier. And if you were a worrier, use this diary to learn to fine tune your worries to their likelihood of true damage to your life in the future. Learn to pick opponents who deserve your anxiety.
I know, I fight ghosts sometimes, we all do. And we will go on worrying about some harmless issues. Still, it would be good to have a “worries tag cloud” after a year. To be able to study what made us lose sleep, and use that cloud to avoid sleepless nights in the future.
This article was also published in LinkedIn. You can follow Martin by clicking below
2012 20
Tweetphorisms 3.0
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- Knowledge and conviction seem to be inversely correlated in most people
- Silicon Valley vs San Francisco: the choice is great weather and boredom or bad weather and fun.
- As a parent I rarely punish bad behavior. I reward good behavior to the point that opportunity cost of bad behavior is too high 🙂
- He who never arrived at school afraid of being beaten up was… a bully.
- A way to understand how developed a nation is is watching how drivers treat pedestrians.
- When government policies fail, many think that whoever implemented them was evil. Why is it so hard to think they were just wrong?
- One of the benefits of doing well is be able to say what you believe is true. Also one of the benefits of not running for office.
- Some have a hard time changing their mind because they think that when they change their mind they change their values.
- In life you should aim very high. Because, if you miss, you may still end up high enough.
- In my world everything is possible, some things are probable, few are likely and nothing is certain
- One of the reason that such few people are successful in business is because few understand the concept of probability tied to risk
- Two benefits of the crisis, less pollution, less money for corruption.
- The ego concept has evolved over time to only mean big ego. But having the right amount of ego is essential to do well in life.
- Being Jewish is a culture that sometimes comes accompanied by a religion.
- Americans think Europe has a lot of crazy laws. Europeans think America has a lot of crazy lawyers.
- I think all languages should start calling countries by the name they chose for themselves. We would all learn more about the world.
- Shaving used to be the only activity that felt like it would last for weeks but only lasted a day. Now it’s shaving and updating apps.
- The problem with generalizations is bad generalizations, others are extremely useful, in business and in life.
- You are only as happy as your saddest child
- In German the word for blame and debt is the same: schuld
- A company stops being a start up when it becomes self sufficient, profitable, sustainable.
- International security worries nowadays are not about tanks, but about banks.
- Knowing how to explain yourself is almost more important than having something to say.
- Hedge funds exist because even though information is widely distributed intelligence is not.
- Copyright holders make a mistake calling file sharers Pirates. Pirates are likable characters for kids.
- Holding yourself to a high standard is great. But for happiness sake, better set somewhat lower standards and overachieve.
- Many think there’s a lot of value in secrecy. But in start ups there is a lot more value in sharing!
- I would love to see a calendar that is made of days of the year from 1 to 365 without regard to weeks of months.
- People think that an IPO makes people rich when what it does, is it makes them liquid.
- I wonder what the world would be like if transplanting a brain was as easy as transplanting a kidney
- Universities make a mistake funding research through teaching. Being good at research does not mean being a great teacher.
- What works best in the world is capitalism moderated by a welfare state.
- One positive aspect of Twitter is that it encourages people to disclose things that otherwise they would keep to themselves.
- During the last decades, we have gone from wanting to know to wanting to believe. Last time we did that we got the Middle Ages.
- Maybe Catholic countries have more problems in becoming democratic because catholicism isn’t.
- When dressing formally men are supposed to look all alike and women to make sure that none of them look alike.
- Entrepreneurs are smart people with a compass for opportunity
- 10 years later: the Internet Bubble was not Internet destroying the financial sector but the financial sector destroying Internet.
- Considering how unAmerican Jesus was in his thinking it is surprising how much he is followed in USA
- Some say there are too many people in the planet but I think that there are more people to come up with solutions to our problems.
- I wonder how many products we use regularly would improve if there were no patents.
- Complacency: if you repeatedly tell people how great they are they may not be so for much longer.
- The problem with experience is that it makes you apply old solutions to new problems
2012 16
Sports at conferences: bonding is stronger than networking
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Sun Valley is the only conference that really trains both: your mind and your body. The schedule allows it. There is content in the morning and sports in the afternoon. It is interesting to see that many of the most successful people in the world are also the fittest. While over half of America is overweight or obese I would say that only 20% of Sun Valley attendees are (this is a personal guess).
In my case I confess that I train hard before attending Sun Valley. I am probably not the only one. To me Sun Valley is both a conference and a sports event. During the conference which ended yesterday I was mountain biking 2 to 3 hours a day and did so in the company of amazingly smart and fun cycling buddies.
Allen and Co has found a great formula that trains the mind and body. To practice sports at conferences makes sense. And it is not only to be fitter. When you meet people practicing tough sports you bond, and bonding is stronger than networking.
When Spanair flight 5022 had its fatal accident in which most passengers died I said in my blog that most likely the accident was caused by the pilots who made the tragic error of forgetting to take off with flaps. I mentioned that I was a pilot myself and could see how the pilots paid for these horrible mistake with their lives and that of most passengers. As you can see then some people criticized me with comments like this which argue that I had no business commenting on this tragedy before the official investigation.
Apreciado Martin,
me defraudas con este post. Con opiniones como la tuya nos evitariamos investigaciones de accidentes tan tediosas y ..sin importancia.
Te crei con algo de “sentido comun”, pero ya sabes lo que dicen, que “el sentido”por ser “comun”, nos toca a muy poco a cada uno.
Un poco de rigor y respeto; y no subir el trafico de tu blog a costa de desgracias de este tipo.
But after a long investigation I was right. The pilots took off without flaps which is an incredible mistake to make, but humans are humans and we make mistakes. Planes should simply not take off without flaps and many don’t. I don’t blame the pilots fully in my post because I think engineering should have prevented this.
Well the same is true with cruise ships. Engineering should have and could have averted this tragedy by not allowing ships to come close to coast lines without warnings. Ships should also have ways to turn themselves when they are in collision course with land.
Before the investigation this is what I think happened (and of course I may be wrong). I believe that the captain of Costa Concordia steered into the Island of Giglio. You can see this from Marine Traffic. I think the captain lies when he says he hit an uncharted rock while he was at a safe distance from the coast. Instead he collided with the coastline either because he was just not at the helm or else because he was at the helm and wanted to show off his steering skills by going very close to the island of Giglio, but he then came too close and ran aground. You can see the coastline in detail if you download a software called Navionics Mediterranean in your iPhone, Android or iPad. I have it because I sail and I am the skipper of my own sailboat. That Island is not like the nearby coast between Corsica and Sardinia near the Island of Cavallo which is full of rocks and you can very well have an uncharted rock and collide against it as the skipper says. The Giglio coast line instead goes down very quickly, to 100 meters or more. The island of Giglio is like the top of a hill or mountain and most likely Francesco Schettino the skipper just drove into it either because he was “asleep at the wheel” or because he was trying on purpose to sail so close to the coast that he hit it in this tragic incident.
Added later: I read this article about Showboating and it corroborates that the theory that the captain steered the ship into the coastline.
Here’s Evo Morales taxing all of his citizens and then using their money to give out laptops to teachers for free with his image.
Picture via huffingtonpost.com
2011 23
Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace
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I just had breakfast at our NYC home with Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace. I have known Kumi for 11 years. First I would like to remark what a great person he is and how important the work he does at Greenpeace is. Kumi does not just do office activism, read his bio and you will find out more about his life.
During our breakfast we spoke a great deal about what are the most important environmental challenges of the decade and how Greenpeace can focus on addressing them. An idea I gave him was to work more on public shame. I reminded Kumi Naidoo on how it became socially unacceptable to wear fur for women after wearing furs went from being a fashion symbol to almost a criminal act. Especially fur from animals facing extinction. I said that if the same social stigma could be attached to cars with engines over 3 litres or rooms with AC under a certain temperature, or heated over a certain temperature more could be done for the environment and climate change than with many trips on the Rainbow Warrior.
We also spoke about how I could help Greenpeace and we decided that I could get involved in the online activism part of the organization. I am supposed to meet with a fellow Argentine, Martin Prieto who does a great job at that. I was also invited to the inauguration of the new Rainbow Warrior built in Gdansk. Sounds like an amazing ship.
2011 19
Marc Anthony from the second row
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I don’t really like Marc Anthony, the salsa I can take, but those romantic songs are too much for me. But not for my wife Nina and therefore I accepted the kind invitation of Emilio Azcarraga to go and see him and worked on these pictures taken from the second row on a Canon S95. Working on the photos and the video I had a good time anyway. And afterwards we all went for a great dinner. I was married twice before being with Nina, once for 12 years, once for one year. If the last 4 years with Nina have been the best married years of my life is because of her and how much in love I am with this amazing woman. But it’s also because I have learned to be more patient and try to make the best out of situations, case in point the Marc Anthony concert.
2011 7
Wikileaks should be more transparent
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I was looking at the financial statements of Wikileaks online and could not find them. Greenpeace, Oxfam, Wikipedia and other NGOs that solicit money are very transparent about their financial situation. To me Wikileaks becomes much less credible if they do not have that level of transparency but yet they claim to bring transparency to the world.