Lesson six: Steve Jobs Speech at Stanford

Find what you love.
Keep Looking and Don't settle.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish.

If My Space were a country it would rank 11th between Japan and Mexico

Lesson five: Our potential to change

Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.
Chateaubriand.

John Mackey: On Entrepreneurs with transcendent purposes

“Entrepreneurs create their businesses for a diversity of reasons. However, I believe that most of the greatest companies in the world also have great purposes which were discovered and/or created by their original founders and which still remain at the core of their business models. Having a deeper, more transcendent purpose is highly energizing for all of the various interdependent stakeholders, including the customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the larger communities in which the business participates. While these deeper, more transcendent purposes have unique expressions at each business they also can be grouped into certain well known and timeless categories. Philosophy dates back to Plato; the timeless ideals of “The Good”, “The True”, and “The Beautiful” that humanity has been seeking to create, discover, and express for thousands of years. If we add the ideal of “The Heroic” to the above three we have the framework of higher ideals which most great businesses seek to express in some form or fashion.”

Source: Conscious Capitalism: Creating a New Paradigm for Business

Sustainability vs Survivability

I have just discovered a new term in Yvon Chouniard's book "Let my people go surfing".
A concept I had never seen applied before, at least for the human race.

Survivability.

To those that have come to understand the philosophy of sustainability, our greatest fear is that this term, could evolve into a more complex and irreversible situation, much beyond unsustainability.
This more "complex situation" has just been presented to me as: Survivability.

Patagonia's Environmental Essays: Combining Marketing of products with values

The Patagonia Catalog might be the best example of creating environmental awareness while marketing products.

Patagonia's 2006-2007 campaign is devoted to de Ocean, In the catalogs, retail stores and on the Web site, they analyze the” vitality of human life and the marine environment".

The recent spring catalog has two very good stories about the human impact on the ocean's degradation.

This is an excerpt of The eye of the Marlin by Dick Russell.

Not so long ago, the ocean's bounty of seafood was believed limitless. Today, the United Nations reports that 75 percent of the world's fish populations are being overfished. Over 3.5 million fishing vessels scour our oceans, utilizing high-tech gear. "Factory" trawlers ensnare 120,000 pounds of fish in a single scoop of the net. Their impact on the seafloor is like fishing with a bulldozer that tears through fragile coral reefs.

Vessels that set 100,000 miles of longlines – holding nearly 5 million hooks – kill over 90 percent of the billfish. Marlin are considered "bycatch" and thrown back dead into the ocean. Both white and blue marlin will soon be on the endangered species list. The majestic bluefin tuna is on the verge of extinction in the western Atlantic, the victim of seines, harpoons and traps. An estimated thousand dolphins and porpoises a day drown in tuna nets.

Read the whole story.

Want to get involved? Visit OCEANA

See All Patagonia's Environmental Essays

Lesson3: Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable

Lesson 3: Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable. If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail. If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it. If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business. Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.
By Steven Pavlina