You start slowly losing altitude, with no landing spot in sight and a mountain in the distance you know you are destined to crash. You have three options:

• Carry on as before, break out the champagne and try enjoy the last few hours of life.
• Eject.
• Put the plane into a nosedive to pick-up speed, back yourself to kickstart the engines and pull up before you end up in a ball of flames and twisted metal.

No difference to a business that has stalled.

Having lived life, they will know the only way to avoid pain is to avoid taking risk.

That’s why your parents will always give you bad advice.

Taking risk is the only path to growth. Personal, social and financial growth. Your growth is a function of Darwinian evolution.

Without taking risks you cannot grow.

Your parents know this, but their love for you forces them to ignore reality and push you down the path of no risk.

From the age of 25, always consider doing the opposite of what your parents advise.

Unless your parents don’t love you. In which case you have bigger problems.

An extreme thinker is like a guy who is so busy planning his wee[1], that he forgets to unzip and instead wets his pants. The satisfaction of having designed the perfect wee is besmirched by the realization that his wardrobe must now be replaced.

An extreme doer is like a guy who is so intent on working hard that instead of thinking things through, he wees on his hands (and pants and sometimes his shirt). The warming sensation on his hands gives the misguided perception of progress, whereas in fact he is making more work for himself.

Keep a safe distance from extreme thinkers. Be careful of shaking hands with extreme doers.

Or, walk down that crevice and you’ll find Petra. 2,000 years old, just a couple of giant tombs carved out with bare hands.

Or, check out that rock, it’s Lot’s wife (see Genesis 19), turned to a pillar of salt when she ignored God and looked back to Sodom.

Or, have a glass of holy water from the river Jordan on the spot where John

baptized Jesus. As you do.

Combined with the spectacle of the Dead Sea (whatever you do, don’t get your eyes wet), and you’re left with a feeling of epic history. No matter how many buildings and fortunes are built in the rest of the world, there is no way we can catch up with the history of the Middle East.

PS: According to the Jordanians I met, the Syrian war ain’t ending anytime soon. 27 months in, and no end in sight.

Its  true, too many people, especially unemployed & young people, are the cause of many problems, including resource depletion and revolution. What the population control advocates forget to mention is the alternative to young populations.

Old populations. When you realise that in the absence of the young there is no one to support the elderly, except government, you quickly realise down that path lies economic ruin.

So we can choose. Babies and revolution, or no babies and economic collapse.

The Stormers are like Facebook. Lots of promise, no delivery.

The Bulls are like apple. A religion. You don’t like it, go somewhere else.

The Cheetahs are like DropBox. Everyone’s second favourite team.

The Southern Kings are like Zynga. No one likes the chief.

The Lions are like Instagram. Too busy thinking about money to play a full 90 minutes.

The Crusaders are like Google. Vaguely disliked because they always win. Mostly loved, because they always win.

The Brumbies are like Salesforce.com. Average players. Great coach.

The Reds are like Business Insider. Winning, but you can’t help but notice the star player is or should be a former convict.

The Blues are like Amazon. Champs in the 90’s. Since then they’ve showed epic promise but haven’t won anything (or shown profit).

The Chiefs are like Twitter. No one knows if they have substance, but man on man can they play a beautiful game.

The rest are too boring to describe.

1. The USA economy is due to crash. If it goes, we all go. Great Depression 2.0 here we come, for real.
2. The EU is going to break up. Aside from triggering chaos in global markets, Europe is SA’s biggest trade partner. This won’t be good for us.
3. North Korea is going to nuke South Korea. Seoul may have Samsung, but it can’t be fun having a psycho inbred dictator with 24million people and nuclear missiles 190km away.
4. Afghanistan will collapse once the USA pulls out. The British pulled out yesterday. The American forces are the only obstacle between the Taliban and government (again).
5. Pakistan will collapse if Afghanistan collapses. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The Taliban can then shoot missiles at the infidel. Awesome.
6. The earth is warming. The fish are dying. The glaciers are disappearing. Extreme weather is ravaging the planet. No one wants to buy beachfront property.
7. China is taking over the world. If you don’t believe me, read the InterWeb.

But I’m still not panicking. Call it irrational optimism, but here are 7 counter-arguments to the 7 reasons to panic:

1. The USA always survives. Too many people. Too much money. It always proves the naysayers wrong, including Dr Doom. Will it thrive? Probably not for the next decade, especially for the middle class and the poor. But it ain’t crashing anytime soon.
2. The only way the EU will break up is if Germany says, “Zat is enough”. The last time they were bad sports we had the Nuremburg Trials. Not gonna happen, not now, not ever (I hope!).
3. The nutty Kim’s have been threatening nuclear Armageddon for decades. Why is today any different? The safety net is China. Japan, USA, South Korea may have no influence in the bubble of North Korea, but China is heard. And those guys don’t want a radiation cloud floating over Beijing (which is 956km due west of Seoul).
4. Its not just America that doesn’t want the Taliban running the show. Russia, China, India, in fact everyone other than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE[1] are opposed to oppression of women, human trafficking and terrorism.
5. See point 4.
6. I remember watching a documentary on the hole in the Ozone layer in the 80’s. And I remember panicking, flooded with visions of wearing blue paint-like cream to ward off the UV rays of the sun. Today, the hole is gone. Honestly, I don’t know how we’re going to save the environment, but somehow things always work out ok in the end. Me, I try not to litter.
7. We will never know the truth about China until it stops censoring and suppressing information. Until that day happens, ignore the papers. Nothing is sustainable unless it has survived being exposed to the light.

Of course, the greatest reason to have hope for the future is that coffee is getting better.

The latter leads to greatness.

The secret to being on the right side of the equation is self-awareness. “Know thyself” and you can’t be overconfident.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The infamous plague of those with a “sense of entitlement”.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, pointed out that one of the biggest factors in success was a person’s sense of entitlement. He compared Chris Langan, the person with the highest IQ in the USA, against Robert Oppenheimer, chief of the Manhattan Project. His conclusion was the difference between their career trajectories (mediocre vs spectacular, respectively) was attributable to the fact that Chris blamed the world for his lack of success, whilst Robert felt the world owed him success.

Yes, contrary to popular belief, a sense of entitlement is not always bad. But this is predicated on you knowing what you can do (and what you can’t do), and therefore what you’re entitled to.

Apparently both the brain of a chimpanzee and the human brain have the same number of cells. However, a human brain has many more connections between the cells. Man’s advantage is attributable to the speed at which his brain moves information around, rather than the size of his brain.

In other words, the greater your ability to connect the dots, the greater your chances of success.

Furthermore, the quality of the connection is inversely proportional to the capacity of the sender & receiver.

So in the absence of perfection on the part of each sender and receiver, emphasis should be placed on designing the highest quality system of interconnection.

A company is made up of many individuals, each of whom is a node. One of the jobs of the boss is to maximize the interconnection of the nodes.

Do not force the nodes to communicate. Ordering people to have meetings does not work.

The secret is:

1. Facilitate frequent interconnections between all nodes.

2. Create a space that keeps existing nodes happy and attracts new nodes.

3. Filter the quality of the new nodes. Bad nodes destroy a system.

Have they not seen the Yahoo movie? Thanks to @downtempo for these flashbacks from the past:

2008

“On the heels of Yahoo!’s better than expected earning after thee bell Tuesday, the web giant will announce a partnership later today that represents a new focus on original content.”

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33413397

2005

“The third category is where Yahoo is drawing attention lately. Semel said he is plowing into original content, such as Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, because he doesn’t want to wait ten years until others (traditional media) figure it out. He’s going to give the content development experiment 18 months before he gets really concerned about having a hit show.”

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/yahoo-2-0-time-spent-more-money/1983

The likes of Spotify and Netflix are on the wrong side of history. Where is the money in being the UI? Content is king, with the only exceptions being where there is a distribution monopoly.

Spotify and Netflix have no content (House of Cards notwithstanding, does anyone else see the irony in that name?)

They are predicated on using the Web as a distribution network, and you can’t monopolise the Web.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with Spotify or Netflix per se; the flaws are more in the revenue expectations. These are nice little businesses, but nice big business? I think not.