I’m still in Portugal and luck has shined on me. The weather has been great, the people have been great, and the experience has been new and adventurous. I’ll do a post on my Portuguese incubator, tech transfer, and entrepreneurial experience next but part of that has to do with the culture and possibly the food. In the interest of time, here are some highlights because I don’t have time to make the bullets work with the pictures:
The food is good but not the best in the world. They are known for their salted cod dishes, and I think I tried cod twice. I’m not a big fan of cod. The joke is that they have 1001 cod based dishes. However, the best meal and wine I had was at a restaurant called Fernando in the city of Porto recommended by one of my colleagues and we did have to bust the bank (our per diem for meal reimbursements was long overshot) on this meal but it was worth it. The grilled prawns were probably the best I had ever had. The red wine that another one of my colleagues selected was outstanding. The multiple ways they prepared the huge crab were delicious. I even took a picture of it and it’s the one accompanying this blog post.
The customer service is over the top. We in the US think we have good customer service but outside of maybe Nordstrom’s you don’t see this kind of customer service. They go out of their way to make sure that you have what you want. The best example is that the restaurant I mentioned above gave another of my colleagues a free bottle of the white wine he liked. They also let me try what they called a different kind of shrimp which was really a barnacle (I have pics of that too) despite me making a funny face at how weird they looked. Another example is a shop owner opening up especially for us to look at her knick knacks and port. A third is the Director of the Digital Media incubator spending the late afternoon with me to find some things for my kid’s school and good port! Her name is Fatima which I found a little coincidental because the girl Santiago falls in love with in the desert in The Alchemist (which I just wrote about) is called Fatima. Barely a touch was exchanged between them, yet they both knew. The book ends with Santiago finding his treasure and then going back to be with her. I know it is a fable, unrealistic romance, but us humans (especially us girl humans) fall for that kind of stuff. My whole point is (please excuse that aforementioned little reverie) is that you feel very much included in this culture.
I was disappointed that I never made it to a port/wine cellar in Porto. I hear they are lovely, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get to try several ports and wines. I tried their famous Vinho Verde (green wine) and even though I don’t usually like white wines, I liked it. One of my colleagues recommended a type of white port tonic drink (can’t recall the name) that was really nice and refreshing. I am going to bring some port home!
They love their sports teams (i.e., football/soccer) and the gear is expensive but my son wanted a Portugal team shirt so what is a mom to do but buy one! :-) Their loyalties on the different soccer teams are fierce in different regions in Portugal so be careful what you say.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve traveled for business to Europe and technology has come a long way from internet connection, to Wi-Fi, to Skype. I can use Skype on my iPhone to call my kids for something like 2.1 cents per minute compared to $2 per minute if I used my regular plan. Of course I have to be in a free Wi-Fi spot and it’s not always clear but to me that is amazing. I’m sure I’ll still get phone charges because people have called and texted me and I don’t have a plan (and it wasn’t worth upgrading for the time I’d be here because international plans aren’t cheap). However Wi-Fi is in places I never thought it would be. I find this particularly cool because Wi-Fi Alliance has been headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator for a few years now. The hotel I’m about to check out of has ethernet connection to the Internet but the microphone on my laptop isn’t configured/working so I can call out on Skype but people can’t hear me. Sigh.
The people still smoke a lot here.
They don’t take American Express in most places except for the hotels. Ah well. I guess I could have left home without it.
One of my favorite fables is written by Paulo Coehlo. It’s called The Alchemist (Amazon Link) A Fable about Following Your Dream and it was required reading in my class when I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. It is about a shepherd boy who has a dream one night of finding a chest full of treasure. After meeting a gypsy and a king, he decides to trade in his sheep and follow his dream. Along the way he faces many challenges, gets in a rut, meets interesting people, never gives up, meets the love his life who waits for him, and eventually finds his treasure. When I first read the story the parallels to entrepreneurship struck me. Entrepreneurs often have to blindly follow their vision when others around them think they might be a little off their rocker. Entrepreneurship requires a lot of faith, hard work, and luck.
The reason I’m re-reading and writing about the book now (in an airport; finishing up in a hotel) is because I was on my way to Portugal for a business trip. It happens to be Entrepreneurship week in Portugal this week, and I was selected to go as part of a team to give a workshop on entrepreneurship to Portuguese technology transfer and incubator officers. I have traveled to many places but not Portugal and I’m excited about the opportunity. So far Porto seems to be a very beautiful city. On the way back, I’ll be spending a few days in Spain to visit my cousin Ashan Pillai (wikipedia link), a prominent viola player. Not only does he have his own wikipedia page, he also has a great website. The shepherd boy named Santiago (which also happens to be my son’s middle name) is from Spain and he travels to Egypt to find his treasure and discovers it’s not there!? It’s somewhere else and the book describes his journey where he does eventually find it.
Do you feel like you are on a journey…an impossible one sometimes? I sometimes do….an interesting journey to find my treasure whether it be riches, love, or the tangible/intangible impact I can leave on the world.
One of the biggest takeaways from this book that I always hoped my students would think about is when you take a chance to follow your dreams “the world conspires to help you.” Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are making a hard decision or pursuing a dream, a project, or a task and you feel ‘in the zone’ that things seem to become easier and people seem to show up at the right time to help you out? Some people call it coincidence or luck…which it is but it also makes you wonder. A few quotes/statements I like from the book are:
About the world’s greatest lie: “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
“The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon [that you are holding].”
“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”
Of course like anything in this world the heart must be balanced with the head to keep things in order and to make progress but a company (or a person) without a heart, a dream, or a vision will not go very far. This is why I believe the Founder of a company should stay with the company as long as possible because they often represent the heart, which we all know is necessary for a human to survive.
For the skeptics out there (myself included), The Alchemist is after all just a fable and Santiago didn’t have a wife or kids while galavanting across the desert. Those are pretty big responsibilities. However, many famous fables, Biblical or otherwise, have inspired people to do many great things! So take it with a grain of sand…like the ones in the vast desert that lay between you and your treasure.
I recently finished reading Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon link) by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell also wrote The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Amazon link) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Amazon link). I have not read either of the other two but have heard much about them. They were and continue to be top sellers. I was sent a copy of Outliers by I’m guessing a publicist several months ago when I was more actively blogging. I didn’t get around to reading this one until just recently and it was a very interesting read. My overall takeaway is that I’m screwed. I’ll never be an outlier, but my kids might have a chance.
He proves through a series of statistics, research, and anecdotal stories that outliers basically have to a) be born at the right time, b) have access to the right resources, c) have the right support/encouragement, and d) have had 10,000 hours (approximately 10 years of experience) in a particular skill when a bunch of economic factors line up. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, had about 10,000 hours/10 years of coding under their belts due to a series of fortunate occurrences that enabled them to start their businesses at the right time. They were both born around the same time as was Steve Jobs. In Rockefeller’s day there were 14 other Americans including Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan born within nine years of each other who were part of the top 75 all time richest people in the world.
I’m too old now to figure out how to get 10 years in of doing something like coding to make me an outlier. I have no idea if I was born at the right time. I do happen to like the year I was born. It’s a cool year. Currently my set up is all about encouraging/supporting my kids and as adults we don’t usually get that same kind of encouragement/support. The only thing I have been doing for a long time in different forms and fashions is writing. I took a huge break from singing. I have a lot of hours logged into thinking too much (not sure how useful that is) and I’ve been in the business world for some time. So my conclusion is that the odds are stacked highly against me being an outlier, but that’s OK because the odds are currently in favor of my kids being outliers. Well, I think most kids at their age have the potential to be outliers.
My son loves to play soccer and practices at least 3 times per week with games on weekends. My daughter loves swimming but only gets to practice once per week. My son wants to be a professional soccer player. At his age, I think I was lucky just to know how old I was let alone what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I also learned the importance of cultural ways of communicating in urgent situations. He describes how several plane crashes could have been avoided if the Korean pilots were not playing to a cultural notion of not defying their superior. It was worse fate to contradict a sleep-deprived captain or challenge a New York sky control person that risk death. I can see that playing out in all sorts of relationships…business and personal. I come from a culture where despite living most of my life in America, we were taught to respect our elders and not challenge them. I had/have a challenging nature so I had a harder time communicating in my family, but I also picked up some of those ways of communicating so I can appear passive when I don’t necessarily think/feel passive. In certain cultures, communication is rarely direct. It’s often implied and those who are seen as being in positions of authority or someone you don’t feel you can challenge, the person in the perceived lower position ‘hints’ or talks in non-threatening ways to influence the person in authority. Cultures who aren’t used to that can make false assumptions about people who communicate that way.
There were several other interesting chapters in between but my final takeaway that I could relate to had to do with the color of your skin. Malcolm Gladwell is 1/2 Jewish and something like 1/8 Black Jamaican. His great-great-great grandmother was bought by a White slave owner in Jamaica who favored her. They had a son whose skin color let him escape slavery and get an education resulting in him marrying another ‘mulatto,’ as they call people of mixed race, and their kids were protected from slavery. Gladwell’s mother had an opportunity to study in Europe and she met his dad. The South Asian culture (as I believe the African culture is too) is very much into skin color. The lighter your skin, the better off you are or shall we say are perceived as more socially elite. People are still judged by the color of their skin. I notice it much less now than I used to even among my South Asian peers, but it’s still there. I’m often the only brown person in a business meeting and often the only woman too. Fortunately in the technology entrepreneurship world, there are a good number of South Asian brown men so I don’t always feel out of place in that regards.
So, Outliers was a good, fairly easy read with interesting factoids and observations. Now I will wonder if my kids will be seen as Outliers some day. They are already outliers to me!
While I find the time to write-up my takeaways on the recent book I finished reading, here is a poem from a friend name Shaku Selvakumar who blogs at Brown Girl In The Ring - Brown Girl grapples with work, life, family and striking that fine balance. How the world affects us and where we can affect change in the world. Reducing our carbon footprint and increasing our heart imprint.
She is brave enough to share her gems on facebook and on her blog. I am not as brave as she to share my poems and song lyrics as I fear most people would not understand them. I don’t know about Shaku but sometimes when I write, the words come out without me having to think too much about them. On occasion, I’ve gone back to read what I have written not remembering that I actually wrote some of those words. With her permission, I am republishing this wonderful poem of hers. I met Shaku many years ago through an organization called The Indus Entrepreneur now known as TIE Austin. One of her three daughters went briefly to the same home care my kids went to. She also worked for a company called Webify that was an ATI company bought by IBM. Although we haven’t seen each other in years it seems, I feel as if we are on similar journey’s.
Icarus In Flight
I have wondered
About the road ahead
It twists and turns
It craves and burns
I have wondered
About the flight of the Dead
Where do souls converge
In oneness or splintered to return instead
I have wondered
About the colour of Love
Is it green, or black, is it blue
Or blood, a reprieve of a fearless vow
I have wondered
About the path of Dreams
Lifting, soaring, flailing, crashing
Breathing barely, fearing a requiem
I have wondered
About the burden of Stones
Gathering, growing,
Silently groaning waiting to be thrown
Now I wander
Through rows of Marigold
Wading in murky waters
Looking for Lotuses to unfold
Who dared the Sun
And touched the Sky
The Gods did he slight
To be Icarus on his flight
I’ve been asked several times by people what business books I read, and honestly I don’t read too many of them. This could partly explain why I’m not a millionaire yet. Maybe I have ADD (which many entrepreneurs purport to having in some form or fashion), but a book really has to get my attention and ones presented in fable or story form seem much easier for me to read. I used to devour books (mostly fiction), but with all I have going on, I’m lucky if I can get through one book every few months. However, as things have started to settle down a little bit in my life (knock on wood), I’m trying to read more books.
Fred Wilson did a post a while back listing the books he recommends for entrepreneurs (e.g., Atlas Shrugged, Shakespeare) which resulted in a guy named Zachary Burt creating a wiki for people to list recommended books for entrepreneurs. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is on this list and one of my favorites. I used to give all my Intro to Entrepreneurship students a copy of Siddhartha as a good-bye gift. It’s one of the few books I’ve re-read at different times during my life and each time I take away something slightly different and more.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a book I read during a much needed break called The Happiness Hypothesis and I just finished Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. I plan to write about books more often on this blog and highlight any connections I see between the content of the book to entrepreneurship and parenting. The books will range from business related, to fiction, to classics, to possibly space exploration but I believe you can learn something from one book that later can help you assimilate (consciously or un) something you experience in the real world or read in another book. I also plan to update the design of this blog and add a page listing book recommendations.
If you have any books you think I should add to my pile, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me. I will be linking to Amazon for books I read and for full disclosure, if you happen to buy a book from that link, I will eventually get a small dollar % of that purchase. To date in the three plus years I’ve been blogging, I have yet to receive a check from Amazon so I don’t anticipate writing about books will be a lucrative endeavor!
May all you mothers out there be appreciated today (and every day for that matter) for all that you do. There are too many things that we do to list here. Although maternal and paternal roles have changed throughout the generations of humanity, the mother’s role is still very important not only from a biological perspective but also a psychological one. As the saying goes, if mom is happy everyone’s happy! My kids gave me lots of hugs and loving today and kept the whining to a minimum so I was a happy momma.
This quote was in an article that hit my in box today: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” The quote was in an email that was referencing a post done by Copyblogger called Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well and is mentioned in his book Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Amazon link).
For some reason it reminded me of times when people talk about scar tissue as badges of honor in the world of technology entrepreneurship. A lot of shit happens behind the scenes of a start-up company. One in 10 make it big and most of the rest of them have some modicum of success or get to 2nd base or fail. But in those other 9, a lot of practicing, a lot of learning, a lot of scarring occurs that make the next iterations closer to masterpieces. Many successful entrepreneurs (and investors for that matter) I’ve met have a few ‘bad deals’ or shall we say deals that didn’t go as well as they would have liked under their belts. The masterpieces are created because of the ‘pages of shit.’ Without those pages, experiences, and scars the masterpiece’s wouldn’t have happened. This is true in music, writing, entrepreneurship, sports, etc.
Just think about how many baskets Michael Jordan must have missed in order to make as many as he did. Unfortunately, in the world of start-up businesses we can’t physically (time, money, etc.) get up to bat or shoot at the basket that many times. So we have to get through the pages of shit and heal fast so we can hopefully create some masterpieces.
As I was finishing catching up with some work emails and wondering what I could possibly do next that didn’t involve thinking, I started feeling a little inclined to write a post. But I didn’t want to think much about it. I then thought about singing and how much I have enjoyed the process of beginning to record some songs with my music teacher. Creating recordings and music is a creative and somewhat entrepreneurial process. It’s kind of fun to have headphones on with the karaoke music streaming in. You can sing and hear yourself singing in the headphones. Then when I’m done, he plays it back and it’s so interesting to hear my voice with the music behind it played back to me. It’s funny but what I think I sound like and what I actually sound like seem different to me. I haven’t decided which voice I like better…the one in my head or the one that I hear played back to me.
I’m first working on recording existing songs and then I hope to record at least one original song based on song lyrics I’ve written by the end of the year, but that is proving to be challenging with my other time commitments as well as finding the right guitar player (or keyboardist) to help make it happen.
As I was thinking about writing something, it hit me that it was already May and then the Camelot song The Lusty Month of May came to my mind. Yes, my thought processes are strange, but I love the songs from Camelot the musical and Julie Andrews voice is just divine. Below are the lyrics and here’s a link to a YouTube video of the section of the musical.
THE LUSTY MONTH OF MAY
Camelot, the musical
Tra la, it’s May, the lusty Month of May
That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray
Tra la, it’s here, that shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear
It’s May, It’s May, that gorgeous holiday
When every maiden prays that her lad will be a cad
It’s mad, it’s gay, alive, a lust display
Those dreary vows that everyone takes, everyone breaks
Everyone makes divine mistakes
The Lusty Month of May
Whence this fragrance wafting through the air?
What sweet feelings does it’s scent transmute?
Whence this perfume floating everywhere?
Don’t you know, it’s that dear forbidden fruit
It’s May, the lusty month of May
That darling month when everyone throws self-control away
It’s time to do a wretched thing or two
And try to make each precious day one you’ll always rue
It’s May, it’s May, the month of “Yes, you may”
The time for every frivolous whim, proper or im-
It’s wild, it’s gay, depraved in every way
The birds and bees with all of their vast amorous past
Gaze at the human race aghast
The Lusty Month of May
Tra la, it’s May, the lusty Month of May
That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray
Tra la, it’s here, that shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear
It’s May, it’s may, the month of great dismay
when all the world is brimming with fun, wholesome or un-
It’s mad, it’s gay, alive a lust display
Those dreary vows that everyone takes, everyone breaks
Everyone makes divine mistakes
The Lusty Month of May
I’m still in Portugal and luck has shined on me. The weather has been great, the people have been great, and the experience has been new and adventurous. I’ll do a post on my Portuguese incubator, tech transfer, and entrepreneurial experience next but part of that has to do with the culture and possibly the food. In the interest of time, here are some highlights because I don’t have time to make the bullets work with the pictures:
(Amazon Link) A Fable about Following Your Dream and it was required reading in my class when I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. It is about a shepherd boy who has a dream one night of finding a chest full of treasure. After meeting a gypsy and a king, he decides to trade in his sheep and follow his dream. Along the way he faces many challenges, gets in a rut, meets interesting people, never gives up, meets the love his life who waits for him, and eventually finds his treasure. When I first read the story the parallels to entrepreneurship struck me. Entrepreneurs often have to blindly follow their vision when others around them think they might be a little off their rocker. Entrepreneurship requires a lot of faith, hard work, and luck.
(Amazon link) by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell also wrote 
(Amazon link) and 
(Amazon link). I have not read either of the other two but have heard much about them. They were and continue to be top sellers. I was sent a copy of Outliers by I’m guessing a publicist several months ago when I was more actively blogging. I didn’t get around to reading this one until just recently and it was a very interesting read. My overall takeaway is that I’m screwed. I’ll never be an outlier, but my kids might have a chance.
(Amazon link).
