Ivan Bercovich Blogs

Note: For some reason, starting essays or blog posts with sentences such as “this is indeed an interesting topic” is considered amateurish. However, I like doing it because it puts me in a conversational mindset, and I rather communicate to others (regardless of being through voice, video, or text) in a casual manner. In this post, I am just going to start with this long unnecessary paragraph in order to achieve the same result. I accept suggestions on other ways to be explicitly informal.

At a Business Today International Conference, I had the pleasure to hear many distinguished keynote speakers. I honestly can’t remember any of the speeches, but there was one that I always think about and quote to other people. The speaker was the CEO of a middle-man-fuel-trading type company—I don’t recall his name. He stood up in the podium and said something like the following:

you guys are young, you have a lot of time and your minds have not yet been polluted by society. You guys should spent much of this time figuring out what your world views are: Do you believe in God? Why? Would you get an abortion? Why? Do you feel you owe to your country? Your family? Why? Don’t just follow a belief just because the people around you follow it. Allow yourself the opportunity to explore ideas and find which world views best match you—a unique individual […]

Note 2: As you can tell from my previous posts, I don’t organize my thoughts before writing them, but I think that is my value proposition: I write just like I would talk.

That speech had a big impact on my life. I was in sophomore year of college, trying to figure out what was my next big thing. There are two ways one could deal with a “figuring out” stage in life:

1. You can be random and adventurous and allow yourself to explore everything around you and beyond.
2. You can plan every remaining minute of your life in order to maximize opportunities and make sure you don’t miss any chances.

My strategy, which is common throughout most successful college students, was to carefully plan my next two years in college and my career beyond that. It made sense, there was little time left and too much to do. I kept hearing this cool keynote speakers talking about their origins (sounds like a mythical tale) and wondering how in heavens (hell) were they able to accomplish all that.

The problem is that in order to plan my life I had to have my world views already figured out. Should I focus on money, happiness, health, or expression (these are not necessarily exclusive) ? Of course, I told myself I could do them all. But this goes against the idea of planning. Let’s think about one of the greatest planners in history, Napoleon. When he went to battle he had one single goal: to defeat the opponent. Anything and everything in his plan was purposed to accomplish this goal. Now if he had wanted to be healthy (sleep well, have a balanced diet, and laugh a lot) he could have not accomplish what he did.

So there is a contradiction between planning and doing many things. Planning for success is not very compatible with trying to find oneself. One cannot explore the world and succeed at everything at the same time—I decided to follow this man’s advice. I would spent the next two years in college exploring and adventuring.

If you know me, you could easily say I actually didn’t explore the world. As a matter of fact I worked really hard to get good grades and finished college with a gold standard. My answer is that exploring and adventuring doesn’t imply to be a slacker who has absolutely no obligations in life. Adventuring is more of a mindset. It means you take more risks, you go to Canada and back in one long ride just because, or you go to watch the Star Wars premiere at 1am before a physics final at 7am. You could go to interesting conferences around the country, even if you miss a homework or a test.

You can coordinate the life of an explorer with a successful college experience—but in order to accomplish this, success cannot be the primary goal. You see, I did well in school in part because I am smart, in part because Jeff Little helped me out in group works, in part because of my personality, and in part because of luck. But I could have never allowed myself to explore the world if my primary goal was to get A’s—that would compromise my plan.

As the semesters went by, I kept falling back into this idea of planning for success. Someone would tell me they worked at an investment bank, and I would feel I should plan for it as well—and for a while I did. But with a lot of self-discipline (this will sound moronic to anybody who slacks by nature and needs discipline to try hard) I was able to switch myself back into adventure mode.

Note 3: by this point, the title of the post has become a poor choice, but I will leave it there because this is a conversation and cannot be retracted.

I decided being an investment banker was a bad idea, but I had read a lot about the stock market and found that interesting, so I signed up for a second degree in financial mathematics—Boom adventure mode at it’s best. I didn’t generally participated in community service activities (it’s not common in Argentina), but then I found out 50 girls from Smith College were going to New Orleans to build houses for Katrina victims and I decided to go—Boom adventure. Then someone told me that you could apply for a thing called 21st Century Leaders Award, which would allow you to walk in a stadium with 40’000 people looking at you, and I decided to apply (and got it)—Adventure!

So yeah, one can have an adventurous personality and an open mind, and still achieve things that people who spend their life planning do. The difference? I never over do it. If I will apply for an award or a conference, I sit down, write what I really feel like writing and send it. I don’t check the email for responses everyday. If I am sending an email to a person I would like to meet, I run the spell checker once and send it. If they are interested in me, the sentence structure and the word choice for salutation won’t make a difference. Furthermore, if things like those make a difference and I don’t get a response (I can NEVER get replies from German professors), then that enriches the adventure in my life. I don’t want detail to rule my life, and I don’t want to be so detailed that I will know exactly what I’ll get. Maybe I will do that later, once I have figured out my world views and I have meaningful goal that I absolutely want to achieve.

Balance? You don’t need a balance. That is just a keyword for people who are unhappy and pretend to be mature by ‘balancing’ the elements in their life. Success (whatever that is for you) takes actions, adventure is a mindset. Planning is for projects. Are you a project or are you a unique human being? Measurable results help you keep track of your progress and can be a motivating factor to continue working hard, but again, I think this is just a self imposed gimmick that allows us to be unhappy while trying to achieve our goals. Achieving goals should not make us unhappy! Our ultimate goal should be happiness, and all other goals should be a subset of that.

My final thoughts: In college I came across the modern concept of a hippie. The stereotype depicted people who like to smoke marijuana, have “deep” conversations, skateboard, have long hair, are pro-choice, and pro-Palestinians. What struck me, was that hippie culture affiliates tried really hard to fit this mold. I have always disagreed with society judging a group based on a stereotype, but until that time I never realized how social groups will judge themselves based on such stereotypes. What I am trying to say here is that just because you are pro-choice, doesn’t mean you can’t like George W. Bush, or just because you are Jewish doesn’t mean you have to be pro-Israel. This means that just because you feel identified with part of someone’s life (ie: you’d like to be a rapper), doesn’t mean you should agree with all aspects of this person’s life. So don’t limit yourself based on social stereotypes of success. After all, the biographies and wikipedia articles about your heroes are just a recount of events made look like it was all planned. But the truth is that they didn’t plan it. Historians have a good hypothesis of what triggered the World War II, but any intelligent person would realize that the amount of events involved in this final result is so large that one could only theorize after the fact. In other words, nobody believed World Ward II was about to happen a couple years in advance, even though historians can link events that span decades before the fact. So again, don’t feel compelled to imitate the life of someone you admire. Let yourself find your own path and make your own mistakes. If you had never felt a burn, because your mom always kept you away from fire, wouldn’t you be jealous when someone else talks about their painful burn?—so go ahead and get burn before you heal.

Do it for me.

Cheers

Let’s first start by defining the concept of ‘idea’. Yes, I know this is an amateur way of starting a blog post. But today I am not going to quote Wikipedia or a dictionary definition. Today, I am going to make the definition up (feel free to refute it in the comments). To me, an idea is a type of epiphany that occurs while one is struck with a problem. This epiphany presents a solution to such problem and from the beholder’s perspective, it is very clear that this is the perfect solution.

Powerful ideas have an intuitive name and can be explained to most people in 60 seconds. But contrary to popular belief, I think that a good idea will only be fully appreciated by the epiphaneer. As a matter of fact, I don’t think ideas are worth anything without people with the knowledge, the commitment, and the perseverance to make them happen—this is my assumption. From this, we can derive the following question: If ideas are worthless, then why should anybody see any value in them?

You see, an idea ‘feels’ like the perfect solution to a problem, but the truth is 180° away. An epiphany will be presented in a highly utopian manner (hence, it can be explained in 60 seconds to most people). But in order to develop an implementation, the creators will have to solve a series of complex issues. As a matter of fact, the final result will probably look’n’feel (and function) very different from the original mental blueprint.

This is not just my opinion. Think about the word idealistic. This is the term that we, as a society, use to refer to a person who has a vision of the world (generally positive) that cannot be achieved as a series of practical and realistic steps. An idealistic person will expect too many changes to happen too quickly and to have too many resources to fund this change. An idealistic person is not a doer, but more of a talker (and, of course, a thinker).

Most people who claim to want to be entrepreneurs are actually idealistic. They are always waiting “to have a great idea” before they move on to conquer the world of start-ups. They think and talk big, and they do little. Most people confuse being an entrepreneur with daydreaming. In fact, most people let ideas get in the way of them becoming successful entrepreneurs—this, again, is my assumption. But bear with me.

So if ideas aren’t worth a penny, and if ideas keep getting in the way of success; what is the whole fuzz with them?

Here is what I think: ideas are the light at the end of the tunnel. When undertaking an arduous endeavor, we need to have a clear goal. We need to make this projection and we need it to be simple, beautiful, and utopian. Otherwise, we would not be able to invest months or even years of our lives pursuing this goal. A successful startup requires precise execution, and at no point we are allowed to slow down or have doubts. This is where ideas are great. The idea-maker is committed to his idea, like a sports fan is committed to the Red Sox—commitment will encourage them to stick with a team, even after a bad season (or 70).

I suggest that when you have an epiphany, you let it grow big and beautiful. Don’t be scared of the technical or strategic challenges that this realization might present. Fly with it, share it with people, and use it to get excited enough to go ‘All In’. After this point, grab your idea (a sketch or a paragraph written on a napkin) and put it in the wall—this will be your inspiration. From then on, forget about the bells and whistles and get on to the hard work. Don’t be stubborn, let your idea morph into a complete different being. Look for advice, explore technical challenges, and find a business model. And when you are feeling the battle is being lost, look up to the wall and remember how great you felt the moment it sparked your mind.

Cheers.