Avoid sugar. Especially soda and juice. All other diet advice is noise.
Bram Cohen is the inventor of BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol, and founder of BitTorrent, Inc. In 2005, MIT Technology Review named Bram one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
Before working on BitTorrent, I was on an ill-fated project called Mojo Nation, which had a massive list of very cool features it was supposed to have, but due to lack of focus, it didn’t deliver well on any of them. After that experience (and being part of similar software project failures earlier) I decided to make a project that did only one thing and did it well, with the goal instead of succeeding being to not fail. Anything is better than never shipping. The result was BitTorrent. These days the term of art is “minimum viable product,” which is an overly clinical term for the ethos of forgetting about succeeding massively and instead focusing all your efforts on desperately trying to not fail. Abject failure is the result of most software development projects.
If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?
“Avoid sugar. Especially soda and juice. All other diet advice is noise.”
Some of the most successful deals are those you don’t do.
Evan Williams is the co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. In January 1999, Evan co-founded Pyra Labs, which created the blog-publishing service Blogger (and coined the term “blogger”), which was acquired by Google in early 2003. He then co-founded Odeo and Obvious Corporation, which gave birth to Twitter in 2006. Evan was Twitter’s co-founder and lead investor, and is its former CEO. He is currently CEO of Medium, the online publishing platform. Evan grew up on a farm in Clarks, Nebraska.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
At Blogger, it was after the dot-bust, and we were out of money (like lots of others) and looking around for a soft landing. We had a meager acquisition offer from another private company for all stock. I wasn’t excited about it, but my team wanted to do it (understandably, as it meant they still had jobs and, in theory, we could continue working on our product). I would have acquiesced, but we failed to close the deal, because their board didn’t approve it. I did have to lay off the team, but we scraped by and two years later sold Blogger to Google. The other potential acquirer went out of business. From then on, I realized that some of the most successful deals are those you don’t do.
Darren Aronofsky is the award-winning filmmaker behind cult classic films such as Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler. His first film, 1998’s Pi, won him early plaudits and a Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival. He is perhaps best known for Black Swan, which was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. His biblically inspired epic Noah opened at #1 at the box office and grossed more than $362 million worldwide. His latest movie is mother!, a psychological horror-thriller film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
I was a terrified freshman walking through the library my first year at university, when I saw the word Brooklyn out of the corner of my eye. Being from Brooklyn and for the first extended time away from my hometown, I was immediately interested. I slipped Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn off the shelf and devoured it in a single night. I had never seen anyone attack the page like he did. He deeply inspired me to write, which eventually led me to my form of storytelling. Eventually I would make another one of his books, Requiem for a Dream, into a film and even get pretty close to him as a dear friend.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
Every single film I have ever made was at first met with a chorus of “no”s. It led my producer at the time to even come up with quote, “When everyone is saying no, you know you’re doing something right.” So I think all success starts with tremendous rejection, and being able to look past those attacks is key.
This may be ridiculous, but I have this belief that as long as we peer at the night sky, feel small, see the universe and say, “Oh, wow, all that mystery,” then we’ll drop some of our nearsighted hubris.
Caroline Paul is the author of four published books. Her latest is the New York Times bestseller The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. Once a young scaredy-cat, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted. She has since competed on the U.S. National Luge Team in Olympic trials and fought fires as one of the first female fire-fighters in San Francisco, where she was part of the Rescue 2 group. Rescue 2 members not only fight fires; they are also called upon for scuba dive searches (i.e., for bodies), rope and rappelling rescues, hazardous material calls, and the most severe car and train accidents.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
The Stars by H. A. Rey. I’ve always loved the night sky, but those old constellation charts made no sense to me as a kid. They were just a bunch of unintelligible squiggles labeled Ursa Major, Leo, Orion. But Rey redraws the lines between the stars so that Leo actually looks like a lion and Ursa Major like a big bear. Giving out this book is my small way of encouraging people to look up, make sense of the sky, and along the way experience an existential jolt. This may be ridiculous, but I have this belief that as long as we peer at the night sky, feel small, see the universe and say, “Oh, wow, all that mystery,” then we’ll drop some of our nearsighted hubris. Maybe even save the planet before it’s too late. Is that too much to ask of a book? I think The Stars is up to the task.
I love to sweat. It’s like a cleansing process for me. I don’t like to perspire but I like to sweat.
Dan Gable is one of the most legendary figures in wrestling history. On the mat in high school and college, Dan compiled an unbelievable record of 181-1. He was also a two-time NCAA National Wrestling Champion, three-time all-American, and three-time Big Eight champion. Following his single loss in college, Dan was driven to train seven hours a day, seven days a week, which culminated in a gold medal at the 1972 Olympics without surrendering a single point. As a coach, he was the University of Iowa’s all-time winningest coach from 1976 to 1997, where he won 15 NCAA National Wrestling Team titles. Dan was listed as one of the top coaches of the 20th century by ESPN, and during the 2012 Olympics, he was inducted into the FILA Hall of Fame Legends of the Sport category, making him the third person in the world to receive this honor. Dan has been named to several Halls of Fame, including the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling A Wrestling Life.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
The Heart of a Champion by Bob Richards was very important, because it answers all the questions. It just happened to come at the right time in my life. Bob was an Olympic pole vault champion back in the 1950s, and he was also on the front of Wheaties boxes. He was that spokesman for a long time.
Don’t think being at the bottom of the totem pole is a bad thing…. You have nowhere to go but up.
Dara Torres is arguably the fastest female swimmer in America. She entered her first international swimming competition at age 14 and competed in her first Olympic Games a few years later, in 1984. At Beijing in 2008, Dara became the oldest swimmer to compete in the Olympic Games at age 41. She took home three silver medals—including one for the infamous 50-meter freestyle race where she missed the gold by 1/100th of a second. Dara has competed in five Olympic Games and has won 12 medals in her Olympic career. She was the first female athlete to be featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and in 2009, she won the ESPY award for “Best Comeback.” Dara was also named one of the “Top Female Athletes of the Decade” by Sports Illustrated magazine. She is the author of Age Is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage in Your Life.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?
Many people have started from the bottom and have worked their way up, so don’t think being at the bottom of the totem pole is a bad thing in the work world. You have nowhere to go but up. Ignore hearsay and rumors until you know it as fact.
Jon Call is best known as Jujimufu, the anabolic acrobat. In 2000, he started teaching himself “tricking,” an aesthetic blend of flips, twists, and kicks. In 2002, Jon launched trickstutorials.com, which he ran for 12 years and became one of the largest communities of online tricksters. He became famous from viral videos involving weighted splits between chairs, with massive barbell weights held overhead, and has appeared on America’s Got Talent. Men’s Health wrote that he “looks like a strongman, moves like a ninja, and performs the most insane fitness stunts you’ll ever see.”
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind by Chunliang Al Huang. It is a sports psychology book based on Tao teaching. It’s a very unique adaptation of the Tao. I was fortunate enough to select it from a bookstore for reading when I was 15 years old. At the time, it greatly complemented my tae kwon do training. I still to this day pick that book up for random readings.
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?
An electric single burner. I use the Aroma Housewares AHP-303/CHP-303 Single Hot Plate. It costs less than $20 and is great for keeping a cup of coffee (or three) hot!
Nick Szabo is a polymath. The breadth and depth of his interests and knowledge are truly astounding. He’s a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer best known for his pioneering research in digital contracts and cryptocurrency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” were developed by Nick with the goal of bringing what he calls the “highly evolved” practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Nick also designed Big Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, explains more about life (including human behavior and myself) than anything else I’ve read.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”?
Everybody is striving after social proof—from a close friend’s adulation to online likes and upvotes. The less you need positive feedback on your ideas, the more original design regions you can explore, and the more creative and, in the long term, useful to society you will be. But it could be a very long time before people will love you (or even pay you) for it. The more original your ideas, the less your bosses and peers will understand them, and people fear or at best ignore what they do not understand. But for me, making progress on the ideas was very rewarding in itself at the time, even though they would have made the worst party conversation topics ever. Eventually, decades after, they generated more social accolades than I now know what to do with.
