I met up with some architects from Georgia Tech that were just starting an exchange program here in Paris as well as a handful of guys from Georgia Tech Lorraine. It made for a pretty big group: around 10 people in all. They were all still starry-eyed.

I was expecting to bump into installations splayed onto the street while moving through the part of town where the event was centered. However, it turned out that it was very much more organized that that: you had to wait in queues to get into places with art. Almost every one of them we found took about half an hour. This was sort of disappointing, but not at all surprising: remember that we’re in France.

Les Oeuvres

One exhibit we saw was a ring of speakers in church. Each of the speakers played the part of one singer in a choir. You stood in the middle of the ring. Cathedrals render me cynical. I can’t help but think of the hunger and sweat that went into their construction: a construction at the whims of a priestly ruling class. I found myself thinking of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations:

“To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you.

The same with dancing: individual movement and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.

And with everything—except virtue and what springs from it. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

Apply this to life as a whole.”

Another piece we saw was a laser bouncing off of a mirror. The laser started from the top of a clock tower, slid just past the wall of the open roof of the mosque we were in, and rebounded into the night sky. A voice track was playing in the background. I picked out most of the words, but I couldn’t come up with a cohesive theme. “Il y a trois cent quatre…Il y a trois mille ans…J’étais le boi…J’étais le fer…Je suis mort en Egypte.”

The most fun work of the night was a giant disco ball. That’s it really. We guesstimated that is was forty feet in diameter. Here is Quinn describing what it would be like if such an installation took place in Atlanta, Georgia: (click the link to watch it)

Interview with Quinn at Nuit Blanche

Transcript: “Whar my damn tax dollers goin to a friggin gah darn disco ball-I mean-I could just go out there with my gosh darn truck and turn on my high beams and get the same damn effect.”
(Not to poke too much fun at the South: I really do miss Southern hospitality, fried chicken, and ACC football.)

An ode to Vélib

Vélib: a municipal bike-sharing program. Automated stands are found throughout the city and anyone with the right kind of card can rent one of the bikes.

Vélib: how you get home from anywhere in the city after midnight.

Two of the architects from Georgia Tech (Rex and Quinn) and I live in the same part of town. Neither Rex nor Quinn had had the pleasure of taking Vélib back home after a late night. It turned out to be difficult to find bikes since everyone else in the city had left from where we were. We eventually found a stand with three bikes left. We mounted our steeds and pedaled into the night, only to realize that all three of our bikes were broken. Quinn’s couldn’t get out of first gear. My chain would pop on and off at random. Rex’s brakes were always on. We made it back eventually, orienting ourselves each time we passed one of the glowing maps on the street. At one point Rex almost swerved into some girls passing on a narrow street, they proceeded to make fun of us from riding Vélibs.

Of course, Vélib is one of my favorite parts of life in Paris.

—Écoutez », dit Granger, et il le prit par le bras, écartant les branches de sa main libre pour le laisser passer. « Je n’étais encore qu’un gamin quand mon grand-père est mort. Il était sculpteur. C’était aussi un très brave homme qui avait une masse d’amour à donner au monde. Il a contribué à supprimer les taudis dans notre ville ; il nous fabriquait des jouets, et il a fait un million de choses au cours de son existence ; ses mains étaient toujours occupées. Et quand il est mort, je me suis aperçu que ce n’était pas lui que je pleurais, mais les choses qu’il faisait. J’ai pleuré parce qu’il ne les referait jamais ; jamais plus il ne sculpterait de morceaux de bois, ni ne nous aiderait à élever des tourterelles et des pigeons dans l’arrière-cour, ni nous raconterait des blagues. Il faisait partie de nous, et quand il est mort, tout ça est mort avec lui sans qu’il y ait personne pour le remplacer. C’était un être à part. Un homme important. Je ne me suis jamais remis de sa mort. Souvent je me dis : Quelle merveilleuses sculptures n’ont jamais vu le jour parce qu’il est mort ! De combien de bonnes blagues le monde est privé, et combien de pigeons voyageurs ne connaîtront jamais le contact de ses mains ! Il façonnait le monde. Il le modifiait. Le monde a été refait de dix millions de belles actions la nuit où il est mort. »

can you find me? hint: front row

I was doing research for the Wiser Tuesday event that I am helping organize (I mentioned it before on this blog) a few weeks ago, and I reached out to an entrepreneur in Paris that has organized a similar event in the past. That event was an Ignite conference—a series of talks given by local geeks about anything that they find to be thought provoking. The gimmick of Ignite conferences is that presentations are exactly 20 slides long and the slides are auto-advanced every 15 seconds. I asked Phil Jeudy on Twitter what had happened to Ignite events in Paris since it looked like there hadn’t been one in a while. He responded,

Next one is September 29th. wanna do a prez?!

Yes!

To top it off, there would be a group of American entrepreneurs there from the Geeks on a Plane trip.

The setting

The talks were scheduled to start at 9:45pm, so I grabbed an apéro at a next door café, while I finished Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. I ended up helping an Australian couple sitting next to me order wine (they couldn’t get the waiter to understand the word “dry”). At 9:30, I stepped into the Hard Rock Café, where the event was being held. I looked around, didn’t see any geeks, and asked a woman standing in front of some roped off stairs,

Je suis ici pour un truc qui s’appelle Ignite
(I’m here for a thing called Ignite)

She gave me a curt nod and ushered me up the stairs.

Wide-eyed

At the top of the stairs was a bar, a projector/chair setup, and a few dozen French folk. The geeks gave themselves away: while some were dressed well (remember that we’re in Paris), there was a good smattering of t-shirts and iPhones. I recognize Phil Jeudy. I shake his hand. I order a beer. I mill about. I pop in a few conversations in English, a few others in French. Phil Jeudy ushers the presenters to get ready.

And it’s real. There are about a hundred people here by now. Rock music is blaring underneath us. Brady Forrest, the global organizer for Ignite talks, takes the mic.

And the fun begins

Brady introduces Ignite to the audience. He launches into a talk about Burning Man. Here, I think is a good time to break from the narrative and point out some of the most interesting talks I heard.

(Note: If you know the names of who I forgot, let me know in the comments. Also, if you want me to link your name to something, let me know.)

Brady Forrest // Burning Man: Burning Man is a yearly, week-long event that loosely revolves around the construction and demolition of a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. It’s about a lot more than that, though: survival, art, geek culture, anti-culture, the list goes on. The most interesting thing to me is that people will demo technologies there that are not possible to demo in existing cities (think of things like ad-hoc cell phone networks).

// HADOPI: This talk was brilliant. HADOPI is a French copyright law that risks imposing seriously misguided restrictions on Internet use. The story around it involves bumbling ministers of technology, huge online backlash, and all kinds of French stereotypes. I don’t think that I’ve ever laughed so hard at a story about legislation.

Benjamin Joffe // Myths of Innovation: The presenter was returning from 10 years in Asia, learning about business innovation. He had some substantial insight into the difference between ideas, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The gist of it: there are way more ideas out there than we think; innovation comes from being able to pull them off. Reminds me of the 99 percent

Mike Butcher // European Startups: Just an all around fun talk from a passionate presenter. I asked him more about his talk later, and he regaled me with tales of wonderfully quirky startups: “Oh German startups are so organized. And the Dutch _never _talk. They’re, like, psychic.”

Dave McClure // StartUps 2.0: The Internet has changed thinking about business models. Dave ran through some his on ways to model business interactions to complement the Internet medium. Basically, in the software sphere, it has become viable to try a lot of ideas on a small scale, allowing investors to micro-fund a lot of ventures, only needing a few of them to make it big.

// Geeks in Africa: This speaker’s talk was drowned out by some mic trouble, but his slides were actually really thought provoking. He took us through some ideas for using technology successfully in Africa. He asked the crowd, what would it take to get technology “Made in Africa” recognized on a global scale? That is, what would it take to turn Africa into a viable contributor to the technology ecosystem, rather than just a consumer.

// Using WoW to find leaders: High level World of Warcraft requires some serious leadership to organize raids and deal with team conflicts. Recruiters might consider using it as a tool to find people suited to leadership. A lot has been written about this already, and it was kind of interesting to see a proponent in person. I was skeptical, though (especially considering that I played WoW for a while a few years ago), so I asked the presenter about it at dinner. He mentioned that he used is especially to connect with remote teammates. That was kind of cool (kind of like playing paintball from 1000 miles away), but it also reminds me of The Office episode about Call of Duty.

// Choice: Vietnamese Restaurants vs. Chinese Restaurants: I wish I remembered the details of this talk. I involved something about egg rolls and the long tail.

My talk (back to the narrative)

I was about the seventh talk up. Most people had had trouble being loud enough with the music in the background and an underpowered mic. I was scared because I’m not that great at being loud. Phil Jeudy hands me the microphone. I take of my jacket, taking one last moment before facing the crowd, then I turn around. A hundred faces look back at me.

Can you all hear me in the back?
No!

HOW ABOUT NOW? and so it started.

I gave a talk about pen spinning—the wonderful geek hobby that I was introduced to on my high school debate team. I started by asking the audience to get a pen, for those that didn’t have one, I threw some from a box that I had brought. I taught two tricks, and introduced the spinning community. I closed it up with some thoughts on the international, cross-cultural connections that pen spinning encourages.

I had a lot fun with the talk. I walked into the audience and gave quick pointers. One guy spun a pen and it flew out of his hand and landed on somebody’s table on the level below us. I knew the timing of my slides really well, so I was able to ad-lib some of them based on the reactions of the audience. At one point I was planning to say,

Spinners from around the world compete against one another in the World Cup of Pen Spinning. This is a picture of its most recent champion.

Instead, I think I said,

And this spinnerpeem, the best fuckin spinner in the world. (people cheered)

I heard there’s about a 10 second clip of my presentation floating around somewhere…I really that I can find it.

The Parc

I was expecting a bunch of tree and benches at Parc de la Villette. Instead, I found a huge kid’s playground, an arts and science center, and dozens of strange red sculptures that I would find out are called “follies”.

Also surprising were the people at Parc de la Villette. I have noticed incredible ethnic diversity in Paris before, and here was a particularly telling scene. I saw cricket games as well as capoeira practices. There was an African tribal band playing to the delight of the crowd.

As the sun went down, a giant inflatable screen took shape. People crammed onto the lawn in front of it to see the screening of the film. An announcer started with an explanation that it was difficult to find copies of Fitzcarraldo, and the version that we were watching was in bad shape—what a privilege. I was in the mood for a slow, artistic film, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Well Confused

A recurring theme in being an exchange student is confusion and feeling out of place. As I walked past red metal edifices and watched traditional South American martial arts being practiced at Parc de la Villette, I couldn’t help but feel those feelings. At first, I was scared of them: shouldn’t being confused be a sign that you are doing something that doesn’t fit you? But, no, that isn’t the case.

You start everything as a beginner. You can try to game that by sticking to things that you know, but then you’re stuck in a tiny subset of reality because you’re too scared to be lost and embarrassed while you find your footing in a new place. So, it seems to me that the key to being competent isn’t to look for opportunities to be an expert, but it is to jump head first into the unfamiliar. That must mean that in order to be interesting and successful, you should spend most of your time feeling exactly the opposite.

“We’re a group that wants to use technology for social change”

That was the description that I read on meetup.com for a newly formed group. I signed up right away.

With my Imagine Cup project winding down after the world finals, I was wondering where to take my interest in using the web for social good. There were certainly a lot of directions in which it could go, from social media campaigns to building platforms for NGOs. To be honest, though, nothing really compelling caught my eye. Even after a week in Cairo seeing the projects from some of the brightest students in world, I still wasn’t convinced that the web was as powerful of a platform for change as I had hoped. Or rather, I have become more aware of just how challenging changing the world really is.

Changing the world is hard (no kidding)

Vaguely, the Internet is about connecting and spreading information quickly. From that perspective, the possibilities for doing good seem endless: helping coordinate search and rescue efforts, getting crop disease information in the hands of 3rd world farmers, or microfinancing entrepreneurs from halfway across the world. Twitter saw some really interesting activity during the recent Iranian elections and subsequent protests. Despite this smattering of success stories, I still feel that there is a lot more power to be tapped from the Internet medium.

I should back these next thoughts with some evidence, but unfortunately I haven’t done the hard research to back them up. They are general observations as I have explored the medium of the Internet as a device for social change in the last year.

Technology isn’t the challenge using it well is. Reading Steven Levy’s Hackers convinced me of this point. In it, the MIT model railroad club, who would later become the worlds first hardcore programmers, were writing code in the 60s to do things that I didn’t even think were possible with today’s hardware. Cleverness goes a long way, and I don’t think sufficient energy has been put in tailoring solutions to the problems that change makers face. Rather, most efforts that I have encountered seem to consist of throwing up a database behind some dataset, hoping that magic will happen simply because data is catalogued. I have also noticed the disappointing trend of mediocre social networks cropping up with little more inspiration than the vague desire to do “good”.

Going hand in hand with that point is this: we need more people that understand the world’s problems. We geeks need to start embracing our social side and start talking to people on the front lines of the battle against malaria, hunger, and AIDs. It’s easy to get caught up in the technology. For instance, I got called out by a Microsoft ADE at Imagine Cup, trying to impress him with the code underlying our application. He told me, “look, the judges aren’t going to care about the complexity of your code. They’re only going to care if it works.” To make real impact, it is going to take a deep marriage between engineering competence and startling insight. Interestingly, though, that might mean that the solutions are neither elegant nor complex, but instead slightly ugly, like IDEO’s MoneyMaker Deep Lift Pump, a micro-irrigation pump that helps boost the profits of 3rd world farmers.

Stepping into the beehive

All that being said, I am very excited the chance to meet groups in Paris that are working for social good and that are interested in incorporating technology to serve their goals. I sat down with WiserTuesday’s organizer–Camilla Burg–a few Fridays ago and discussed the direction for the event over some sushi. She had great insight into the ecosystem of groups in Paris doing charitable work right now. I was able to offer some perspective from the technical perspective on the issues these groups faced. Now, I am an assistant organizer for the event.

The next step is an informal meetup, which will take place in a cool space called La Ruche. The name is French for “beehive,” since it is a space dedicated to providing resources and networking for aspiring social entrepreneurs.

There’s no telling who will show up to Wiser Tuesday–entrepreneurs, programmers, engineers, or artists. I can’t wait to see what problems can be solved with smart application of technology. This, I think, is the start of an answer to the misgivings I voiced earlier. Technology, especially web technology, brings something to the table, but it requires insight and competence to use it successfully. The words “conversation”, “engagement”, and “discussion” don’t really mean much unless they’re placed in the context of a meaningful problem. Perhaps at the global crossroads that is Paris, we’ll find that context.

Fun plan, but it kind of sucked not have a chair to sit in.

Karma came to my rescue. Five friends from Georgia Tech were in town for the Tour de France, and they met me outside my apartment on the Sunday of the Tour. I was walking with one of them from the door of my building to the nearby metro stop and he told me, “the other guys are waiting on a sofa at a bus stop.”

“Wait, what?”

“You’ll see,” he replied. Sure enough, there were the other four sitting nonchalantly on a sofa dropped right next to a bus stop. With no hesitation I said,

“Let’s carry this up to my room.” You might be surprised to hear that they accepted without any hesitation. However, you sort of have to understand the mindset of traveling in foreign countries: you get a taste for slightly ridiculous situations. This was definitely one of those.

We hauled the sofa across the street and up the alley to my building’s door. A woman snickered on the way out as we sized up the best way to maneuver the couch up the three flights of twisting, narrow stairs. The process was actually pretty easy until we got to my apartment’s door. We were stumped for a moment until Aaron came to the rescue with some spatial reasoning brilliance to get the unwieldy beast through the frame of my door.

Success.

The only problem left to solve is what to do with it when I move out…

Paris has been an adjustment. The feel of living here couldn’t be any more different than the feeling of just visiting.

There is some unique opportunity here that I am looking forward to. Creativity and design are playing increasingly more important roles in my life, and this city is an incredible playground. I saw Kandinsky at 11pm last Saturday during a late night exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Earlier today, I sketched outside of Sacré Coeur until the sun went down. I look closely at clothes, architecture, and signs to pick apart the intentions of creators and to learn to discern quality. On Sunday, I tried on shirts at Loft Design By… in order to figure out just what could make a thin grey cotton shirt worth 70 euro. There are two screenings for a film festival that I want to catch later this week.

Some days, I just walk around my part of town, trying to get a feel for the shops and the people. A few nights ago I did this at midnight, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that a handful of restaurants were still open, and people were chatting under the street lights. I pointed a pair of American tourists to Moulin Rouge on my way home.

Other days, I aim for places. I dug through stuff posted online, and I found a Qigong group that was introducing beginners to the art in a park. Why not? It turned into a great evening after we decided to have a beer afterward. The group that ended up at the bar was great: the girls were French, Romanian, American and the guys were British, French, and Canadian (that was me). A memorable quote—“the second beer is all about the cheeks.”

I have noticed an odd loneliness to the metro: everyone is so used to cramming next to each other in the morning that they stop seeing one another.

This is my third major adjustment of context in a row. Two semesters ago, I was doing intense traveling as well as research at Georgia Tech Lorraine. The semester afterward, I studied engineering in French in the tiny town of Compiègne. I have learned some patterns that help in making the adjustment. I find that I have to avoid over planning and over commitment while simultaneously not being scared to just jump in and do things. Being familiar with the Buddhist concept of Beginner’s Mind makes moments of total confusion an opportunity instead of a burden. I feel pressure to get as much out of the city as possible, but I know that stamping it down is key to actually appreciating my time here. Even though the patterns are familiar, the process is never quite easy.

Bring it on.

It’s odd to see your thoughts transform as they make the leap from the front of your head to the tip of your pen. I started the page below with an idle sketch of my phone, just playing with proportions while on a train. I hope you enjoy what it transformed into…

The entry is sort of a preview for a longer one that I’m have been struggling with for a few days. Hopefully it will see the light of day later this week.

The Setting

Cairo is huge. And dirty. Almost everything is the color of sand. Buildings have unfinished tops so that levels can be added in the future. It doesn’t rain in Cairo, so there’s little danger in leaving roofs open.

I have spent the last eight months exploring European cities. The contrast in the feeling of Cairo was immediate. To me, old European architecture is solemn, conjuring imagines of monks shuffling slowly during masses. The mosque and park we visited during my stay in North Africa felt mystical. Bells chimed from odd directions and lanterns lit dusty halls. I sat and sketched as much as I could because it was such an exciting setting.

Western Influence

Most of my Egyptian experience was observing how the local culture interpreted, embellished, and adapted to the influx of Western influence. Of course, our Microsoft guides only took us to touristic destinations. It was interesting, nonetheless, because it wasn’t hard to observe local people making their way catering to, ripping of, or being entertained by Western tourists.

One night, a group of ten other Americans and I found ourselves at a bazaar. Imagine a tight alley lined with stalls full of every Egyptian artifact you can imagine: lanterns, beetles carved from stone, and Anubis statues. The merchants here know what you have imagined about Egypt, and they ordered the souvenirs to help you remember it straight from China. They also know that shouting “half price day” in your direction will turn your head. It was amazing, really, to see how someone who couldn’t speak English could both make a native speaker feel uncomfortable enough to let their guard down and guilty enough to fork over cash for essentially worthless trinkets.

“Where are you from?” We heard at one point.
“New York,” someone responded
“Oh! It’s very expensive there.”
Later, we here again, “Where are you from?”
“San Francisco,” another teammate responds.
“Oh! It’s very expensive there.”

I didn’t buy anything at the bazaar. Instead, I found a spot to sit and drink some tea. It turned out to be Lipton tea, which was underwhelming, but it turns out that that’s what all the merchants were drinking, too. It must just be the cheapest option. There wasn’t any need to walk through the bazaar, because the river of people and merchants surged quicker than I could have moved anyway. Sitting and soaking up the setting was a satisfying setup.

Scenes

The pyramids of Giza as well as the Sphinx weren’t very different than the pictures. My favorite part was hearing the story of a friend getting 50 euro swiped from him for a short camel ride.

I had a great conversation with E McNeill on the fourth (or fifth?) floor of the mall connected to our resort. I think the picture above illustrates what the experience of that mall was like.

Being constantly afraid that the food you’re eating might make you deathly ill turns out to be sort of fun. You really have no control over whether your food has been handled appropriately. So, you cross your fingers, load your plate with exotic vegetables, and make sure you know where the nearest bathrooms are.

Next

I’ve been away from Not Wandering for a few weeks because of a really intense finals week (did I mention that I took all my engineering exams in a foreign language, yet?) and the last month of preparation for Imagine Cup. I felt guilty spending extra time writing in English while tuning my French for finals.

The rest of my 2009 will be spent in Paris at an internship with the nuclear power company AREVA. I have a little studio in the 18me with two really cool landlords. The transition is noteworthy: I’ll be going from the smallest town I’ve ever lived in to the biggest. My French has come a long way from my tentative forays in Metz, and I can’t wait to see how it holds up to snobby girls, French coworkers, and day-to-day life in the City of Lights.

Lots of other people have done it

It doesn’t take much effort to find successful people who dropped out of school. The most intriguing aspect of that list is that it’s not just entertainers that can drop out and become famous, so can physics geniuses and programming wizards. Entrepreneurs seem to admire the moxy required to drop out. Dropbox, a fantastically successful internet startup, was founded by two MIT dropouts: Drew Houston and Arash Ferdouwsi. They used to have a pretty funny description about dropping out being “startup cred” on their About page, but they have since removed it.

What does school teach you about relationships?

Real relationships are incredibly educating things. The amount that you learn from lectures and homework assignment doesn’t even compare to the amount that you can learn from a knowledgeable someone who cares about your future. Part of the problem is logistical: how can a professor genuinely connect with 200 people in a lecture course? Part of the problem is the student/professor relationship: why do we spend so much time in contention with the men and women that are supposed to be helping us realize our dreams?

A boss of mine expressed the opinion that hiring from well-regarded universities usually doesn’t work out. He went on to explain those employees from big name schools were less useful in the group because they tended to be close-minded in a room full of men and women from smaller colleges. The difference in educational background vanished when skills needed to be applied in a team setting. Isn’t that funny? You should be developing open-mindedness rather than squeezing in one extra course on fluid mechanics. Where is that on the syllabus?

Detaching from school

I trained for three years to secure a spot on the three-person team that won a trip to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Championship World Finals last year. I also got my first C in a class. I was surprised to find that it didn’t matter to me; I had found something that was worth more than a 4.0. I have gotten more phone calls from companies because of my involvement in that contest than I have for any grades in my classes. The feeling of freedom and competence knowing that there’s more to achievement than GPA is incredibly motivating.

Vigilance is key

Professors have paid their dues; they know what they’re talking about. And working diligently is an incredibly useful skill. However, how many people have you heard of that just decide to continue to grad school because they don’t know what to do next? Georgia Tech recently introduced an option to get a Master’s degree without writing a thesis. You know, so that you don’t have to come up with anything original to get the “Master’s” stamp on your diploma.

There is an obvious conclusion from these thoughts: class work is not transcendent. If you don’t care about it, then it will be pointless to you in the future. Be more critical of what is taught to you in class. Some teachers have noticed this and ask students to call BS on their history textbooks. Obviously, I don’t think that class work is pointless. I just think it’s pointless if you resolve to forget about it when your finals are over.

Implications

I want to close with two extraordinary messages: one scary and one optimistic. In October of last year, Andrew Lahde dropped out of the hedge fund game with a short letter. Here is an excerpt–

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There is an optimistic interpretation to the dropping out question that I ran into recently. I started writing this entry about a week ago, and since then Clay Burell posted an article on The Wisdom of Dropping out: Steve Jobs’ Must-See Graduation Speech at change.org. Here is the video, and a list of my favorite quotes.
From Steve Jobs–

• “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I had no idea how college would help me find out”
• “[Typography was] artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture”
• “If I would have never dropped out then I would have never dropped in”
• “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. “
• “…the confidence to follow your heart.”
• “the heaviness of being successful was replaced with the lightness of being a beginner again—not being sure of everything It was one of the most creative periods of my life.”
• “You’ve got to find what you love”
• “Remembering that you’re going to die is the cure for thinking that you have something to lose. You are already naked; there is no reason not to follow your heart.”
• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”
• “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

I hope some of you will play the dropping out thought experiment, too. Also, Hearing your results in the comments would make my day.