A very dependable feature of people who live abroad is finding them huddled together in bars and restaurants, talking not just about their homelands, but about the experience of leaving. And strangely enough, these groups of ex-pats aren’t necessarily all from the same home countries, often the mere experience of trading lands and cultures is enough to link them together and build the foundations of a friendship. I knew a decent amount of ex pats — of varying lengths of stay — back in America, and it’s reassuring to see that here in Europe, the “foreigner” bars are just as prevalent and filled with the same warm, nostalgic chatter.

But one thing that undoubtedly exists between all of us, something that lingers unspoken at all of our gatherings, is fear. There is a palpable fear to living in a new country, and though it is more acute in the first months, even year, of your stay, it never completely evaporates as time goes on. It simply changes. The anxiousness that was once concentrated on how you’re going to make new friends, adjust, and master the nuances of the language has become the repeated question “What am I missing?” As you settle into your new life and country, as time passes and becomes less a question of how long you’ve been here and more one of how long you’ve been gone, you realize that life back home has gone on without you. People have grown up, they’ve moved, they’ve married, they’ve become completely different people — and so have you.

It’s hard to deny that the act of living in another country, in another language, fundamentally changes you. Different parts of your personality sort of float to the top, and you take on qualities, mannerisms, and opinions that define the new people around you. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s often part of the reason you left in the first place. You wanted to evolve, to change something, to put yourself in an uncomfortable new situation that would force you to into a new phase of your life.

So many of us, when we leave our home countries, want to escape ourselves. We build up enormous webs of people, of bars and coffee shops, of arguments and exes and the same five places over and over again, from which we feel we can’t break free. There are just too many bridges that have been burned, or love that has turned sour and ugly, or restaurants at which you’ve eaten everything on the menu at least ten times — the only way to escape and to wipe your slate clean is to go somewhere where no one knows who you were, and no one is going to ask. And while it’s enormously refreshing and exhilarating to feel like you can be anyone you want to be and come without the baggage of your past, you realize just how much of “you” was based more on geographic location than anything else.

Walking streets alone and eating dinner at tables for one — maybe with a book, maybe not — you’re left alone for hours, days on end with nothing but your own thoughts. You start talking to yourself, asking yourself questions and answering them, and taking in the day’s activities with a slowness and an appreciation that you’ve never before even attempted. Even just going to the grocery store — when in an exciting new place, when all by yourself, when in a new language — is a thrilling activity. And having to start from zero and rebuild everything, having to re-learn how to live and carry out every day activities like a child, fundamentally alters you. Yes, the country and its people will have their own effect on who you are and what you think, but few things are more profound than just starting over with the basics and relying on yourself to build a life again. I have yet to meet a person who I didn’t find calmed by the experience. There is a certain amount of comfort and confidence that you gain with yourself when you go to this new place and start all over again, and a knowledge that — come what may in the rest of your life — you were capable of taking that leap and landing softly at least once.

But there are the fears. And yes, life has gone on without you. And the longer you stay in your new home, the more profound those changes will become. Holidays, birthdays, weddings — every event that you miss suddenly becomes a tick mark on an endless ream of paper. One day, you simply look back and realize that so much has happened in your absence, that so much has changed. You find it harder and harder to start conversations with people who used to be some of your best friends, and in-jokes become increasingly foreign — you have become an outsider. There are those who stay so long that they can never go back. We all meet the ex-pat who has been in his new home for 30 years and who seems to have almost replaced the missed years spent back in his homeland with full, passionate immersion into his new country. Yes, technically they are immigrants. Technically their birth certificate would place them in a different part of the world. But it’s undeniable that whatever life they left back home, they could never pick up all the pieces to. That old person is gone, and you realize that every day, you come a tiny bit closer to becoming that person yourself — even if you don’t want to.

So you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two. For the rest of your life, or at least it feels this way, you will spend your time in one naggingly longing for the other, and waiting until you can get back for at least a few weeks and dive back into the person you were back there. It takes so much to carve out a new life for yourself somewhere new, and it can’t die simply because you’ve moved over a few time zones. The people that took you into their country and became your new family, they aren’t going to mean any less to you when you’re far away.

When you live abroad, you realize that, no matter where you are, you will always be an ex-pat. There will always be a part of you that is far away from its home and is lying dormant until it can breathe and live in full color back in the country where it belongs. To live in a new place is a beautiful, thrilling thing, and it can show you that you can be whoever you want — on your own terms. It can give you the gift of freedom, of new beginnings, of curiosity and excitement. But to start over, to get on that plane, doesn’t come without a price. You cannot be in two places at once, and from now on, you will always lay awake on certain nights and think of all the things you’re missing out on back home.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

Article_Detail_Wildcard_MPU -->

image – Kuster & Wildhaber

Tagged Ex Pat, Homesick, Leaving, Living Abroad, Travel

‎"For the rest of your life, or at least it feels this way, you will spend your time in one naggingly longing for the other, and waiting until you can get back for at least a few weeks and dive back into the person you were back there."

Have you ever had situations where you would greatly look forward to a certain defining event or moment in your life?

One that would allow you to rationalize for all that you’ve put in (or lost) along the journey is worth the while, one that would mark the peak of your bundles of expectation and anticipation, one that would finally give you the permission to give yourself a good tight pat of faith on your own shoulder and say in utter relief, “You’ve finally pulled through”… only to find out at the realization of that event or moment that it wasn’t so much of a glorious culmination but only of a mere, flat and underwhelming ending of sorts.

It leaves you going, “Oh, so this is all to it?”

The last time I had such a moment was when I collected my Pink IC after 2 years of national service in December 2007. Contrary to what everyone claimed they would do to run towards the gate and shout at the NSF camp guards, “ORD lo!”, I went home with this emptiness that needed some processing. Liberating, yes. Exuberance, not really so.

Now with a click of a button, I have successfully filed for graduation and in that split second of doing so, torrents of memories (good, better, awesome, legendary or otherwise) I had over the 4 years in the Singapore Management University (SMU) engulfed me.

Knowing how verbose I can get, I thought I should capture at least the highlights and most poignant takeaways of my SMU life in a checklist of aphorisms if you would insist in a note titled,“What I wished I knew (earlier) when I first stepped into University”.

Here goes…

1. Grades are indeed something, but not really not everything

Yeah right, I hear you say. I stepped into SMU like a blur fish without even knowing what the acronym GPA, stands for. GPA = Geeks Play A lot? It was only until after I got a C- for one of my accounting module in my first semester that I realized that GPA rearranges itself to become a bloody huge GAP and dent in your academic performance when that happens and no, geeks pray a lot instead, to the bell curve god that is.

The upside of getting a C (and a couple more later) is that it is plain liberating – you know your GPA game is foiled for life and you instead concentrate on the game of and for learning, which I contend should be what schooling is all about. The downside, you get passed on for opportunities (like scholarships, awards, sponsored conferences/exchanges. For more, ask the scholars) like an obsolete good and get left on the cold shelves of a factory. FYI, I applied for easily over 30 scholarships/awards, mostly in the areas of student leadership and excellence, and I received a grand total of… one award. At least that’s still a 3 % hit-rate.

Can you play the GPA and learning game simultaneously? I should think so. But you have to consciously balance it and not lose yourself in the senseless doing.

Ultimately, grades serve to be objective measurements of our understanding and mastery of a certain subject matter. It serves you to look at your grades and find out what are your shortfalls (if any) and make conscious improvements but it doesn’t serve you to peg your self-worth to your grades. It’s silly and bordering on ridiculous to catapult yourself into an illusory cloud nine and ego high when you get an A and equally unfortunate to have you feel like a plastic bag when you receive a D . Sure there is the huge emotional and intellectual investment in the process but one needs to recognize at the end of the day that this process is meant to enrich us and widen us with the awareness of the different contexts around us so as to empower us for the next phase of our lives and not to stunt or corrupt our pursuit for knowledge. Who you are and will be in time to come, are manifestations of this process you choose to undertake consciously and the growth and maturity that you’ll observe in yourself… and not your results on the report card.

2. Be damn bloody proud of your voice

I know this sounds like what Lavinia the diver said in the SMU recruitment video while she was having fun with the sharks.

But what I refer to is the apparent reticence of us students in the classrooms or project meetings. I was at a professional speakers conference weeks ago and one of the speakers aptly describes it,

“You know what’s the problem with us Asians? If there’s a problem, we don’t speak up because we fear being stupid. If we are good, we also don’t speak up because we fear being pompous. But I tell you all, I’m a shameless Asian here and I’m going to tell you I’m good, damn bloody good”

I thought what he said was bloody good. I think we have two big problems. One is that we are afraid of appearing stupid by asking questions (though lecturers always throw out the godly caveat that “there are no stupid problems”) in the lectures. Two, those who have the knowledge or experiences are reluctant to share for some reason or the other. Maybe they are paiseh or that they don’t want to appear arrogant or that they want to hoard their information for their As, I don’t know.

What happens eventually is that those who have questions to ask choose to play safe and ask the politically correct or inane questions that are oftentimes not most value adding for class participation marks. Worse still, some choose not to talk at all. At the other spectrum, those who are in the know keep their lips pursed in the name of modesty.

The result – uninspiring and unintelligible conversations that stretch unnecessarily and incessantly. This inevitably drives everyone to Facebook chat the friend who’s sitting next to them to complain about the resident class part whore/dude. Geez, realize how you’re complicit in this gridlock as well?

3. Professors are humans as well and for you to connect with

If I could collect a dollar from every junior/friend who go “wow, you go for coffee/meals with your professor??”, I’d have saved enough in my kitty for my graduation trip. I don’t have a problem or issue with authority and people in power in part because I often get into trouble with them unwittingly. But the main reason I choose to tell myself is that if success is a function of hard work and time and that occasional smarts with all else remaining equal, they are where they are because they have lived xxx years longer than I have. There shouldn’t be any reason I should be intimidated or fearful of them because my mum was slower in bringing me to this world and hence by virtue of my “late entrance”, I have yet to be where they are. This “unorthodox” philosophy has empowered and liberated me so much in my speech competitions and one-to-one interactions with the “heavyweights”, for example.

Aside from that, I think university is a place for you to say,

“Hey, this person is really interesting and if he/she is walking a path that I hope to walk one day, let’s connect”

and this should apply to professors/deans/students/staff alike. Sometimes, I realize I learn so much more from my professor’s life experiences over a cup of coffee because these are the times that he/she need not be worried about the lesson objectives, facilitating the class blah blah and just be himself/herself. I think our professors are amazing individuals who carry with themselves wonderful stories, mistakes, decisions and non-decisions that pack so much wisdom for young folks like us. It’s a pity how we are just “milking” them for only 3 hours every week. But of course, they are busy people too so draw the line appropriately.

Bottom-line – they are humans as well and every bit as fallible and as human as we are so don’t be afraid to take the initiative to reach out to them instead of waiting for the reverse to happen. The worst that can happen is a… rejection? They don’t bite, I assure you. If they do, you’re just an email away from the President.

4. Choose to be extraordinary

Frankly speaking, I think SMU is an awesome place with awesome people doing awesome work. The problem? This awesomeness is an anomaly rather a norm. (Ok, you may want to argue that if it becomes a norm, then it ceases to be awesome. But what’s stopping us from being outstanding individuals in our defining right?)

My chance conversation with a good friend of mine, Cheon Loon, went on like this

“Look at it this way. When Singapore was in the 1960s to 1980s, it was all about survival and eking out a life in our post-independence times. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was all about ordinariness and striving for stability in times of rapid industrialization and mechanization. And for us Gen Ys who are in our prime in this current period is a time and opportunity for us to be extraordinary and to create miracles”

It’s like how our parents and grandparents have paved this path all the way to our times and now that we don’t have any urgent basic or core needs to meet (generally speaking) as collective themes, we are at a loss because life presents to us this blank canvas for unadulterated creation and expression. Yes it is ambiguous and uncertain but I think this space is exactly fertile and rich and it empowers us to be amazing individuals because we are not saddled or burdened by the baggage from yesteryear. Yes, there will still always be bills to pay and families and babies to support but have we resigned ourselves to the level of survival and ordinariness once again or are we still consciously striving for something bigger than ourselves? To make or be the difference in the realms and circuits we are passionate about and live life intentionally.

Point is you can choose to be the usual 9-to-6 (I think it’s more right?) tax accountant or be a kick-ass accountant who is conversant with the tax act, the go-to guy/girl for your clients and colleagues, the godly tax alumnus for your young and earnest juniors in the tax society to drool over, the director who sits on XYZ board and be sought for your expertise etc. etc. and still be capable at basic bean counting. I may be idealistic but hey, I think there’s so much greatness and mastery we can strive for in what we do. Like taking a gap year off to host and swim with the sharks and yes, I’m truly impressed by that by the way.

5. Love yourself, more

Just today, I had lunch with one of the deans (yes, I apply (3) actively) and he was sharing how we need to take better care of ourselves because all the all-nighters will take a toll on us when we hit our 30s. Granted that I’m not the best advocate for loving thyself especially in the department of sleeping and resting adequately, this lesson is for me too.

I think as final year students, it has come to a point in my SMU life that you’ll instinctively say “no” to late/overnight/weekend meetings or insane all-night chionging sessions at the library and be dressed in formal just an hour before presentation without going home for a bath or having as much as an eye-wink. Of course, unless it’s super duper emergency.

Yet as most of us will realize… it really boils down to starting early, acting fast and being responsible in a group. Yes I’m quite old already. I choose to be extraordinary and that’s why I need to live long enough to watch this awesomeness blossom.

More than that, love yourself for who you are and what you believe in and go after what you really love. Celebrate and rejoice when you’ve done well and don’t beat yourself up so badly when you err or fail. The emotional distress that comes with failure has become so paralyzing that sometimes I’m not surprised that’s the very reason we spend all our energies to play safe and lie in “prevention modes”

I think in this pressure cooker environment where we are so hard pressed to be an all-rounder, we hardly get around to appreciating ourselves enough. We all deserve more gentleness for ourselves, as we’ve been too tough on ourselves for really too long.

Take time off to unwind from the craziness. Do something you love and that will recharge you. If it’s frisbee, throw it. If it’s dragonboating, row the hell out of it. If it’s reading like what I enjoy, my kindle fire and a cuppa = heaven. Work can wait, seriously.

6. Take ownership of your learning and growth

In Singapore, especially in the transition from Junior College (JC) to University means that life no longer presents to you set meals on a platter like how when you plonk your asses down in the cushion seats on long-haul flights with SIA and wait to be served by the lovely Singapore Airlines (SIA) ladies in their Kebayas. When I was a freshman myself, I don’t know if it was the case for you but it was like rushing in to a hotel buffet – there were just so many choices that it was dizzying.

Menu On-board SQ 001 – University

Overseas exchange, overseas summer programs, student consulting projects, conferences, competitions, capstone seminars, CEO talks, recruitment talks, industry talks, lunch talks, entrepreneurship mixers, business incubators, internships, alumni mentoring programs and FREE workshops to learn anything from baking to mixing cocktails to film production and journalism.

One common grouse I hear is that the university school fees are bloody expensive. Yes, they are and I agree. Sometimes I feel I/my parents are paying through their noses. But instead of merely whining about it, have you ever considered milking these “experience cows” when they come your way? I have met and initiated so many informal mentoring relationships through competitions alone and some of these mentors have gone all out to support me in both my professional and work life. This is just one kind of value I could never have foreseen or accounted for on the financial bills at the start of every semester. Of course as you’ll realize soon enough, it’s all reciprocal and you’ll have to do your work and prove your worth first.

Does it also not dawn upon us that all these are opportunities for us to discover new themes and territories and more so, ourselves? In my 4 years at SMU, I have probably taken part in over 20 competitions in Toastmasters, Business Case Challenge, Public Policy, Product Branding, Brand Management, Infrastructure Design, HR, Financial Management (Cashflow 101),  IT Security, Social Entrepreneurship and essay writing. It doesn’t really matter if I win (of course, it’s always good if you do – you take the booty and add some stuff to your CV) or lose because every competition experience presents a golden opportunity to discover what makes me tick and what shuts me down, what can keep me staying up till 4am to work my art to perfection and what can’t even sustain my interest past the first hour and what I would willingly allow my mind, body and soul to be thoroughly “used” and what I would not even want to spare as much as a thought on.

With no intention at all to brag but only to give a sense and perspective, I did all of this while acquiring an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential from the International Coach Federation (ICF), leading weekly coaching programs for clients and training sessions for my coaches, completing 5 internships, taking on TA and RA-ship, leading a charity bare-foot walk campaign and youth health organization, completing a consulting project with a local SME, co-authoring a book on volunteerism that will be published in China, training over 300 SMU students in public speaking, spending a term off in Ewha Womans University in Seoul (yes, 24k girls over there!!) and earning a comfortable side income from 3 years of freelance writing, copywriting, training and hosting. And yes in case you’re wondering, I got attached with a steady girlfriend in my first year too so that’s considerable output of energy and time (that I can assure you )

In retrospect, these 4 years have been really intense and that’s why I said I need to learn lesson 5 myself. I’m not suggesting you be the ultimate opportunist and jump at everything. But be hungry, enough. The large part that drove me to do what I did was because I wanted it badly enough where ‘it’ refers to me evolving, growing and discovering more about myself.

Yet another common question I have when coaching my younger clients, “I don’t know what I like” or “I don’t know what is my passion”

Consider that knowing what you like and yourself for that matter, is a function of external action (i.e. projects and work you’ve taken on) and proper introspection and internalization (i.e. looking back on your experiences and facilitating the completion of it so you take away poignant realizations about yourself). You can sit at a cafe the whole day and wish for your “undiscovered passion” to land on your head like what Issac Newton did or you’ll have better shot at decoding that if you actually get out there and do something. Not everyone’s as lucky as Newton.

Yes, so the ball is in your court and it’s time for you to do something about it, now.

7. Don’t neglect those who matter

There are two groups of people I want to address here – the “unsung heroes” and your loved ones (friends, lovers, family).

The “unsung heroes” – It is a well-known management mantra – “Treat those who you meet on your way up with respect for you will meet them on your way down” I’ve lost count how many occasions  I have had when I was running events in SMU and the lights/AV system/door access pulled a fast one on me and it was the technicians, cleaning aunties/uncles and security guards that come to my rescue all the time to save my ass. Sure sometimes they are grouchy but if you are ever going to step in their shoes and do their jobs with that kind of remuneration, I assure you that most of us will not even survive past Day 1. In fact, I happened to strike up a conversation with a security guard in his 50s at the School of Economics (SOE) and he lamented how despite working 12-hour shifts, his take-home pay for the month is only slightly shy of a $1,000 and that’s just barely enough for his family.

At that moment, I reflected on how I probably put in around 20 hours of copywriting work to earn the same amount for a project in the comfort of my home and my PJs. I felt slightly ashamed for that matter. Yes, I know the “realist” in you will say “life is never fair to start with” and sure I got there with my own merits (and desperation) and you know how the value I deliver is regarded more by the market (blah blah blah) but really, seriously? I don’t know about you but I can’t and won’t buy in to this commercial BS and keep a straight face because these “unsung heroes” or people at the bottom of the pyramid are not just “pawns” in this game. They are likewise flesh and blood and have families themselves and if we do happen to be more able than them by virtue of our resources and circumstances and work, we should see our endowments as gifts rather than blatant rights. And by how gifts are defined, we should be thankful and not arrogant or willful about it. I don’t have a strong economic case around this except a golden word – “karma” or like how my mentor puts it,

“Treat people with humility if not one day, your deeds may just come back and bite you hard from behind”

Just so you wonder – I’m not suggesting that you donate 80% of your take-home to a charity or the tissue seller at the MRT station. I know you and I are not Li Ka Shing or Lee Kong Chian. What I’m suggesting that in your day-to-day encounters, if you can, see the goodness in these “unsung heroes”, smile and say a simple “hello” to them and this will brighten their day. If you are more able, do something substantial through a charity, social enterprise, civil rights group or lobby for policy improvements. But if you can’t do any of that, the least I think you should do is not be an irresponsible childish prick and treat them like dirt or worse still, make their lives terrible with deeds like throwing slabs of wet toilet paper on the walls, leaving your thrash strewn all over the study room or not flushing the toilet bowls after you’re done with your glorious business.

If there’s anything that education has done for us as students in University, it should go up to our minds and make us more conscious and considerate rather than going down south where we think and act through our butt.

Ok, to the next equally, if not, more important group of people – our loved ones. It’s not just smelling the roses but smelling the roses with this core group of people. One event I’ll constantly look forward to on a weekly basis is Friday evenings where my mum spends her off-day cooking for her family. Family Fridays as a routine is always good because you not only force yourself to unplug from the madness but also take the conscious effort to appreciate and acknowledge your loved ones and be present in their presence. Rituals and routines are what you want to consider building into your schedules because if you do not prioritize these interactions, they get easily displaced by work that we deem as “important” and “urgent”. It needn’t be a weekly potluck because that will grow on you (physically and rapidly) but maybe a weekly gym session or catch-up coffee will suffice, whatever that works for you and your family.

There’s yet another saying that goes, “As we are busy growing up, don’t forget that our parents are likewise growing old”. I’m not on scholarship so I know my parents put me through University with their hard-earned savings so if I’ve been going places, that one place I know I need to revisit constantly is this place of provision where I, am sourced and made possible by my parents. I know I’m being really parental here but my point here really is try not to flare up at them when they “are grouchy”, “poke too much into your affairs” and “sound really ignorant that I should perhaps spend my precious time doing my business law assignment” and look beneath into their intention for why they do what they do. Chances are that they are more well than not and sugar-coated with this “secret sauce” called… love.

Also, don’t neglect your good friends/lovers/drinking buddies/bitching partners/(whoever else that applies). Life in University can get that bit more bearable because they are not just “outlets” for you in times of need or distress but more so, people to lend you that additional handful of faith and assurance or be your necessary sounding board or be your trusted cynic and bad cop or just that guy/girl you can hang out with and unwind in simple uninterrupted silence or (fill in your own blanks). The thing about relationships, sadly, is that is oftentimes transactional and a zero sum game because we all have our own unique needs that need to be fulfilled. Like a joint bank account – the more you dip into it without depositing into it, there only comes a point where the other party will feel “used up”, “shortchanged” and will make the exit or be left”suffering” in some way or the other. None of which I suppose, you will want happening to you.

So while mid-term examinations are looming precariously in the foreground, don’t ever forget those who are unwaveringly rooting for you in the background.

—

I hope these 7 pointers will serve you well in your 3 or 4 years at University, wherever you are in this world as there are some timeless principles I personally believe in and subscribe to.

Above all, have a blast at it and let nary a moment go to waste (or so at least we strive to). Probably, Eminem would have better put it, “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime”

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

Date a girl who travels. Date a girl who would rather save up for out of town trips or day trips than buy new shoes or clothes. She may not look like a fashion plate, but behind that tanned and freckled face from all the days out in the sun, lies a mind that can take you places and an open heart that will take you for what you are, not for what you can be.

Date a girl who travels. You’ll recognize her by the backpack she always carries. She won’t be carrying a dainty handbag; where will she put her travel journal, her pens, and the LED flashlight that’s always attached to her bag’s zipper? In a small purse, how can she bring the small coil of travel string, the wet tissues, the box of cracker, and the bottle of water she’s always ready with, just in case something happens and she can’t go home yet?

Yes, a girl who travels knows that anytime, anything can happen and she just has to be prepared with it. Nothing takes her by surprise; she takes everything with equanimity, knowing that such things are always a part of life. She’s reliable and dependable, traits that she’s learned while on the road.

You’ll also recognize a girl who travels by the fact that she’s always amazed at the world around her, no matter if she’s in her home town or in a place that’s totally new. She sees beauty all around her, not just the ones featured in travel guides or shown in postcards. A girl who travels has developed a deeper appreciation for life. She won’t judge you, or pressure you to do things you don’t want to do. She knows too much about the importance of identity and self-efficacy, and she will appreciate all the more if you won’t pretend to be who you’re not.

You can lie to a girl who travels and make mistakes, and you can also be as idiosyncratic as you can be. Trust me, she has seen so much worse in her travels, and knows firsthand the vagaries of human nature.

Date a girl who travels, because when you’re with her, you’ll realize that even though she’s napped at a temple in Angkor Wat, went boating down the Mekong Delta, ran by the streets of Saigon, or went skinny-dipping in the caves in the Philippines, she still retains that humility that is the mark of a real traveler. She knows she’s been to a lot of places, but she’s humbled by the fact that the world is still a big place and she’s only seen a small part of it. Seeing this in her can make you feel all right with yourself too; there’s no need for you to do more, to be more. What you are is enough.

When you meet a girl who travels, ask her where she’s been and what she’s going to do next. She will appreciate your interest, and if you’re lucky, she may even invite you to join her. When she does, do. Nothing bonds people better than traveling. On your trips, you will both see each other’s best and worst characteristics, and you can then decide whether she’s worth fighting for.

It’s easy enough to date a girl who travels. She won’t want expensive gifts; you can buy her (or both of you) cheap tickets to Thailand for the weekend, and she’ll be more than happy to take you to the longest wooden bridge in the country. You don’t even have to go overseas; you can take her out on day trips, caving or hiking, or treat her to a full body massage.

You can also buy her the little things that she keeps forgetting to buy for herself; that carabiner that will attach her backpack to her seat so that she will feel easier about sleeping on her bus trip, or a backpack cover, a small alarm clock, a  money belt, or maybe another sarong that will replace the one she lost in China.

She won’t mind if you get lost on your way to a date. She knows that oftentimes, the journey is more important than the destination. She will help you see the lighter side of things. She’ll walk along with you, not behind you, pointing out the interesting bits of things you’ll see on the way. Before long, you’ll realize that yes, the journey has been more memorable than the destination that you’ve planned to take her to.

Is a girl who travels worth it? Yes, she is. So when you find her, keep her. Don’t lose her with your insecurities and doubts. Because when she says she loves you, she really does. After all, she’s seen so many things, met so many people, and if she had chosen you, better grab that opportunity and thank the gods that you were lucky enough she’s chosen you and not that bloke she met while watching the sun rise in Angkor Wat, or while whitewater rafting in the Padas Gorge in Sabah.

If she says she loves you, she must have seen something in you, something that can always call her back from her travels, something that can anchor her to the world in the way that she wants to after weeks and months of being on the road.

Date a girl who travels. Make her feel safe, warm, and secure. Make her believe that no matter where she goes, and however long she’s gone, you’ll always be there for her, the one that she can call home.

Find a girl who travels. Date her, love her, and marry her, and your world will never be the same again.

Inspired by Date a Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico

Liked this? Click Share!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

 All photos and content here are intellectual properties of Aleah of SolitaryWanderer.com unless otherwise stated. They are not for reproduction without my knowledge and permission. If you would like to use any of my content or images, use the contact form on this site to ask for my permission.

"If she says she loves you, she must have seen something in you, something that can always call her back from her travels, something that can anchor her to the world in the way that she wants to after weeks and months of being on the road."

When it happens, you won’t want to believe it. You’ll take their word for it when they say they’re busy, swamped at work, “just doing me.” You’ll make excuses for them, put your ringer on extra loud in case they call. But you’ll still feel the change, and because you can’t rationalize it, you’ll try to ignore it.

It’s a specific kind of loneliness that hits you like a wave of nausea. When the two of you are having a beer and you realize that you have both been staring out the same window for twenty minutes, nothing to say, the opposite of a comfortable silence. When they cancel plans consistently and stall when giving you reasons. When you scroll through your contacts and stop at their name and almost call but don’t, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, abandoned and confused.

Sometimes there’s no huge fight that marks the end of a friendship. No falling out, no major disagreement. Sometimes it just falls apart for no good reason. Distance. New relationships. Priorities. Somehow these things can become more important than your connection; they shouldn’t but they do. And as we get older we tend to downsize, prioritize. Trim the corners of our lives, keeping what’s important and discarding what isn’t. Sometimes we stop needing people in our lives and it isn’t even conscious. No one wakes up in the morning actively thinking “Hmm, I think I’ll stop being friends with so-and-so today.” It just goes out with an empty fizz, like a cigarette hitting the bottom of a Coke can.

In so many ways, losing a close friend is worse than losing a lover. Lovers are transient for the most part but friends are supposed to be there for you always, or so we like to believe. Friendship is a special kind of love that’s not supposed to fade. You never expect the one person you thought you could always depend on to disappear without saying goodbye. And when they do you feel sickeningly stupid and cheated, wondering what you meant to them all along, whether you were just convenient or in the right place at the right time. You never really know for sure.

You look through pictures from back when you were happy — holding each other up drunk and ecstatic, working on art projects on a rainy Sunday afternoon — and can’t understand what happened. Reach for the phone. Attach a photo to an email, start the subject line with some fusion of “Remember this?” and “I miss you…” Get suddenly overwhelmed by a horrible emptiness and discard the draft, leaving the phone untouched. History. So much history flushed down a dirty sink.

And the worst part is, you don’t even know how to explain yourself. You know if you bring this up with them they’ll give you a blank expression and a blank excuse. You don’t want to explain how you feel. You can’t. You just want them to get it, to read you like they used to be able to. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them, screaming Where are you? What happened?! Until you’re blue in the face. But you can’t do that either, because you’re no longer on the same level and it’s going to make you feel crazy.

In life, it’s a given that you will lose people. People will flow in and out like curtains through an open window, sometimes for no reason at all. But losing someone important to you will feel like a suckerpunch every single time, and you’ll never see it coming. Which makes the friendships that do hold out, the ones that make it through countless breakdowns and breakthroughs and changes and years, so damn important.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

Article_Detail_Wildcard_MPU -->

image – Shutterstock

Tagged Friends, Friendship, Relationships

"In life, it’s a given that you will lose people. People will flow in and out like curtains through an open window, sometimes for no reason at all. But losing someone important to you will feel like a suckerpunch every single time, and you’ll never see it coming. Which makes the friendships that do hold out, the ones that make it through countless breakdowns and breakthroughs and changes and years, so damn important. "

Exhortation - Summer 2008

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Print

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

By William Deresiewicz

 

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.

At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”

The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success, medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the program.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

57 Things I’ve Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies

I’ve been founding and helping run technology companies since 1999.  My latest company is fab.com.  Here are 57 lessons I’ve learned along the way.  I could have listed 100+ but I didn’t want to bore you.

1. Build something you are personally passionate about.  You are your best focus group.

2. User experience matters a lot.  Most products that fail do so because users don’t understand how to get value from them.  Many product fail by being too complex.

3. Be technical.  You don’t have to write code but you do have to understand how it is built and how it works.

4. The CEO of a startup must, must, must be the product manager. He/she must own the functional user experience.

5. Stack rank your features.  No two features are ever created equal.  You can’t do everything all at once.  Force prioritization. 

6. Use a bug tracking system and religiously manage development action items from it.  

7. Ship it.  You’ll never know how good your product is until real people touch it and give you feedback.  

8. Ship it fast and ship it often.  Don’t worry about adding that extra feature.  Ship the bare minimum feature set required in order to start gathering user feedback.  Get feedback, repeat the process, and ship the next version and the next version as quickly as possible.  If you’re taking more than 3 months to launch your first consumer-facing product, you’re taking too long.  If you’re taking more than 3 weeks to ship updates, you’re taking too long.  Ship small stuff weekly, if not several times per week.  Ship significant releases in 3 week intervals.

9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is.  All the rest is noise.

10. The only judge of how good your product is is how much your users use it.

11. Therefore (adding #’s 9 + 10):  In the early days the key determinant of your future success is traction.  Spend the majority of your time figuring out how to cultivate pockets of traction amongst your early adopters and optimize around that traction.  Traction begets more traction if you are able to jump on it.

12. You’re doing really well if 50% of what you originally planned on doing turns out to actually work.  Follow your users as much as possible.

13. But don’t rely on focus groups to tell you what to build.  Focus groups can tell you what to fix and help you identify potentially interesting kernels for you to hone in on, but you still need to figure out how to synthesize such input and where to take your users.

14. Most people really only heavily use about 5 to 7 services.  If you want to be an important product and a big business, you will need to figure out how to fit into one of those 5 to 7 services, which means capturing your user’s fascination, enthusiasm, and trust.  You need to give your users a real reason to add you into their time.

15. Try to ride an existing wave vs. creating your own market.  If you can, catch onto an emerging macro trend and ride it.

16. Find yourself a “sherpa.”  This is someone who has done it before — raised money, done deals, worked with startups.  Give this person 1 to 2% of your company in exchange for their time.  Rely on them to open doors to future investors.  Use them as a sounding board for corporate development issues.  Don’t do this by committee.  Advisory boards never amount to much.  Find one person, make them your sherpa, and lean on them. 

17. Work with the best possible people for your project, regardless of where they are located.  

18. Co-locate as best possible but be willing to travel to remote offices to make multiple offices work.  Online collaboration maxes out at 3 to 4 weeks apart, which means you need to commit to traveling almost monthly to make remote offices work.

19. Work with people you like to be around.  There’s no sense in going to war with people you don’t like.

20. Work with people you trust like family.  

21. Work from home as long as you can.

22. Position your desk in a way in which you are staring at your co-founders and they are staring at you.  If you aren’t enjoying looking at each other each day, you’re working with the wrong people.  

23. Use a tool like Yammer to share internally what you’re working on.  It’s easier for many people (especially developers) to post a status update than to write an email.

24. Use a file sharing service like basecamp for your team.  It’s impossible for everyone to keep track of every file sent to their email in-box.  Use basecamp so there’s a history and central repository.

25. Figure out quickly what you are personally really good at and focus your personal time around those activities.  Let other people do the other stuff.

26. Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps.  Let them do the stuff they are better at.  Don’t do their jobs.

27. Work with people who are smarter than you at certain things.

28. Work with people who argue with you and tell you no.

29. Be willing to fight like hell during the day but still love each other when you go home.  

30. Work with people who are passionate about solving the specific problem you are trying to solve.  Passion for building a business is not enough; there needs to be passion for your customer and solving your customer’s problem.

31. Push the people around you to care as much as you do. 

32. Be loyal.  Cultivate and coach people vs. churning through them.

33. You’re never as right as you think you are.

34. Go to the gym and/or run at least 4 times per week.  Keep your body in shape if you want to keep your mind in shape.

35. Don’t drink on airplanes unless you are on a flight of longer than 8 hours. It ruins you and wastes your time.

36. Choose your investors based on who you want to work with, be friends with, and get advice from.  

37. Don’t choose your investors based on valuation.  A couple of dilution points here or there wont matter in the long run but working with the right people will.

38. Raise as little money as possible when you first start.  Force yourself to be budget constrained as it will cause you to carefully spend each dollar like it is your last.

39. Once you have some traction, raise more money than you need but not more than you know what to do with.  This is tricky.  Don’t skimp on fundraising because of dilution fears.

40. Spend every dollar like it is your last.

41. Know what kind of company you are trying to build.  There are very few Googles and Facebooks.  A good outcome for your business might be a $10M exit or a $20M exit or a $100M exit or no exit at all.  Plan for the business you want to build.  Don’t just shoot for the moon.  From a money-in-your-pocket and return on time spent standpoint, owning 20% of a $20M exit in 2 years is much better than owning 3% of a $100M business in 5 years.

42. Related to #41, understand whether your business is a VC business or not. A VC business is expected to deliver 10x returns to investors.  That means if you’re taking money with a $5M post-money valuation, the expectation is that you are building for a minimum $50M exit.  $10M post-money valuation = $100M target.  That’s not to say that you might not sell the company for less and everyone involved might be happy with that outcome, but that’s not what you are signing up for when you take VC money with such a valuation.  Know what the implications of taking VC money are and what it means for expectations on you.

43. Make sure your personal business goals are aligned with the goals of your investors.  The business will only succeed if you are motivated.  Investors can’t force the business to succeed.  And they certainly can’t force a CEO to care.

44. Conferences are generally a waste of time.

45. Smile.  Laugh.  Wear funny socks. I wear funny socks to remind myself to not settle for boring and to be creative.

46. Do something, anything that shows you’re not just a robot.  Let people get to know the real you.  

47. Hang a lantern on your hangups. 

48. Wear your company’s t-shirts everywhere.

49. Do your own customer service.

50. Tell a good story.

51. But don’t lie.  Ever.

52. Find inspiration in the people around you.

53. Have fun every single day.  If it’s not fun, stop doing it.  No one is making you.

54. It’s true what they say in sales, you’re only as good as your last sale.  

55. Make mistakes, but learn from them.  I’ve made hundreds.

56. Mature, but don’t grow up.

57. Never give up.

"What most struck my friend was not the disparity of this woman's choices, but the earnestness and bad grace with which she ruminated on them. It was almost as though she begrudged her own talents, Opportunities and freedom - as though the world had treated her unkindly by forcing her to make such a hard choice."

"We're not meant to say: 'I made this decision for this person. Today, you're meant to do things for yourself. If you're willing to make sacrifices for others - especially if you're a woman - that's seen as a kind of weakness. I wonder, though, is doing things for yourself really empowerment, or is liberty a kind of trap?"

"The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined..."

An Intern's Guide to a Summer in the Bay Area

 

Dear Future Intern,

Welcome! You just got an internship at this amazing start-up, so you're starting to look for housing and are getting pumped for your summer. Rightfully so - the Bay Area is awesome!  

I spent my last two summers out here as an intern, first at Facebook and (am currently at my last day) at 2bkco, an early-stage, awesome start-up.  It took me a while to figure out what the things to do were out here, especially as the only intern at a small company.  Hopefully, the following will get you off to a running start:

[Note: What'd I miss/get way wrong? Let me know in the comments]

Housing

Where should I live?

Live in San Francisco, Mountain View, or Palo Alto.  As far as start-ups go, San Francisco is more artsy/hipster-ish/design-friendly, with a ton of startups mostly in the SOMA district and (from what I can tell) more reasonable working hours than down in MV/PA.  If you want a well-rounded summer, San Francisco means that there is a ton to explore around the city without going to the same place twice, from dive bars to fantastic restaurants, to Golden Gate Park to Mission Burritos.  San Francisco is fun.  I lived in Mountain View during my summer at Facebook; some friends bashed MTV as being a dead town, but I don't necessarily agree - Castro Street is a reasonable downtown, and so long as you know other interns/people in tech, you're not going to be bored. Palo Alto is just north of MTV (45 minute bike ride), a bit more upscale/happening, but therefore more expensive. 

Your mileage may vary if you live anywhere else - from what I've heard, it's tough to get out to events and there just isn't the critical mass of other interns/people from tech.  I have been especially advised not to live in north San Jose.  There area also areas of SF you don't want to live in - the Tenderloin, most of the Mission, parts of SOMA. Check out this amazing map that figures out neighborhoods in SF based on Craigslist postings.  Also make sure to check out the Walk Score of a place before agreeing to live there and aim for 75 or above.

How do I find housing/How much should I pay?

Figure out who you are going to live (probably friends from college/general friends also out in the area) and start looking. Early. Looking for housing sucks and the market is pretty competitive, so just try to get it out of the way as early as you can.

Note: it is really hard to find a more than 4-or-so bedroom house in SF. We were looking to put together a huge hacker house and it completely fell through just because of the types of houses that were on the market.

Expect to pay about $1,000 per person per month - slightly less in Mountain View, perhaps.  You can try to find something cheaper, but we were at the point where we were ready to pay up to $1,100 or $1,200 a person a month just to get something.  

In terms of tools, PadMapper is a fantastic layer on top of Craigslist that helps you look for houses that fit your criteria, including subscribing to new listings via email.  I'm still waiting for a somebody to solve Housing to Bay Area interns by owning mass inventory - I spent at least 15 hours over spring semester looking for housing.

Weather: A quick aside: San Francisco is consistently at around 55F over the summer (light jacket and jeans) and Mountain View/Palo Alto are at around 75 (t-shirt and shorts or jeans).  It rains in SF, but very rarely.  FYI, so you know what to bring.

Transportation

Public Transit

If you are not in San Francisco, try to be somewhere reasonably near your Caltrain stop - you'll be going around the Bay Area reasonably often.  I've had friends live 30 minutes away from a Caltrain stop and barely ever hang out with us as a result.  FYI: It takes about an hour to get from Mountain View/Palo Alto to San Francisco on the Caltrain. Bikes are welcome.

In San Francisco, public transportation is surprisingly awesome.  BART is the express let-us-get-you-to-popular-places line and MUNI is the normal, comprehensive transporation grid. I lived a 10-minute walk from a BART stop and was very happy with that.  

From everything I've heard, the VTA (Mountain View to San Jose, as well as other routes) sucks.  Don't depend on it as a primary mode of transportation.

Aim for a short (

Bicycle

I strongly recommend getting a bike, though. I had a 30-minute commute by bike both summers.  It was the only exercise I got all summer, and it was great.  Plus, bikes make it easier to get around Palo Alto and Mountain View, whose public transportation options are nothing to brag about.  Same goes for San Francisco - I'm a 30-minute bike ride from anywhere, and I love the freedom of not having to wait for public transit.  The Bay Area is incredibly bike-friendly: bike lanes everywhere, and awesome bike trails to hit if you're in the athletic mood some weekend.  

To procure a bike, consider one of the following options:

• Summer rental from Stanford's Campus Bike Shop.  Rent an awesome bike for the whole summer for ~$300 and don't worry about maintenance/selling it at the end.
• Buy a bike (either at a new bike store, for about $500 , or off of Craigslist, for ~$200) and either ship it back to your campus (~$120) or try to sell it at the end of the summer, again through Craigslist.  I ended up buying a bicycle and selling it, just to avoid the effort of the Craigslist shopper's experience.  All in all, I depreciated about $200 from my bike over the summer, marginally cheaper than having just rented it.
• Ship one from your home/campus; again, expect to pay about $120 for shipping each way.

Rent-a-Car

Also, ZipCar is apparently friendly to 18 year-old drivers. I ended up renting a car the old-fashioned way over weekends for road trips, but ZipCar might be cheaper for evening trips.  

Things to Do (tech)

Intern-Specific

The questions an intern (especially at a smaller company without a formal intern program) is going to face is, how do I meet other interns/hear about intern-specific events that I should be going to?  I'm not sure which of the programs/list-servs below are going to persist next year, but here's what was up (that I know of) this year:

• StartupRoots is a non-profit that hosts speaker events once a week, specifically for start-up interns. I only went to one event, but the vibe that I got was that the speakers were interesting and the community of ~50 interns that showed up to most events was a solid one.  The weekly program costs $150 or so (to cover food), and the idea (from what I understood) was that your start-up would pay for that as part of your internship.  If not, pay yourself. It's well worth it.  
• Apparently, there was a Wednesdays.com Bay Area Intern group this summer. Unfortunately, I only found out about it while doing research for this article.
• Your school should have a Facebook Group or a list-serv for people in the Bay Area over the summer. If it doesn't, start one. Ours at Penn was pretty useful.
• Figure out who backs your start-up; I know that at least YCombinator, True Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz had intern programs (or at least list-servs) for interns at their start-ups.  

Any time I would hear of an event over the summer, it would be through one of these groups. It was pretty frustrating, actually, that there was not a single group somewhere for all of these intern/tech/Bay Area events.  In an effort to solve this problem, here's a group for next year.  

Intern Events

Throughout the summer, start-ups and larger companies consistently had fun events for general Bay Area interns. Throughout the summer, I either went or heard about events at Facebook, Stripe, Color, Yelp, Twitter, Bump, LikeALittle, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twilio, Quora and Dropbox.  Several companies (LinkedIn, Mozilla, Stripe, Quora) held intern hackathons that (from what I hear) were a bunch of fun. 

How do I hear about one of these?  Keep your head up and follow the list-servs above. If there's a particular company that you are interested in, email the recruiter, introduce yourself as an intern at X this summer and mention that you'd love to check the company out/be notified of any such events. Assertiveness is impressive. From my experience, approaches like this tend to work.

General Tech Events

Intern events are fun, but it's also worth checking out what the full-time tech scene is up to.  Some recommendations:

• Hackers and Founders and 106 Miles are two of the tech meet-ups that I've been to and can say were a worthwhile experience to have attended. You meet a lot of people starting their own companies or working at cool companies or just generally interested in talking to other people in the industry.  Github also hosts a monthly drinkup (if you're over 21) which I have not been to but hear a lot of good things about.
• Worthwhile mailing lists that I'm familiar with include Hacker Dojo's and Startup Digest.
• If you're the kind of extrovert that is comfortable meeting random new people, try Grubwithus, which organizes dinners for new/interesting people. 
• If you're super extroverted and all networky and everything, check out my roommate Max Wendkos' post on networking in Silicon Valley.
• Hackathons: There's a lot of them here. If you can't find a hackathon that's happening on any given weekend, you're not looking very hard.  I got hackathoned out somewhere around the beginning of July, so I'd advise not doing more than one a month or so.  Still, some cool hackathons that I attended that will probably be occuring next summer as well: HapiHack, BeMyApp, Mozilla's World Series of Hack and the Muther of All Hackathons.  
• Some of my friends also attended Defcon in Las Vegas; form what I hear, they learned a ton and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
• SuperHappyDevHouse is a fantastic day-long hackathon/meet-up that is run by the folks at Hacker Dojo, once every six weeks or so. I met a ton of people and thoroughly enjoyed the lightning talks. You should go.

Tech Hangouts

 I'm not sure if I've got all of these, but here are some of the cool 'people with laptops hang out here and you can tell they are your kind of people' places in the area:

• San Francisco: Check out Epicenter Cafe in SOMA and The Summit on 19th and Valencia in the Mission.  The Summit is also the I/O Ventures incubator space and has delicious drinks (Berry Bomb Cooler and Loose Leaf Tea FTW) and great food.  Epicenter Cafe's cool too, but they charge for the Wifi.
• Palo Alto: Every time I go to Coupa Cafe, I end up meeting somebody I know from somewhere, or hear an entrepeneur pitch their start-up to a VC or Angel. Kind of fun. No wifi on weekends, sadly. 
• Mountain View: Red Rock is the Coupa Cafe of Mountain View. Hacker Dojo is, from what I hear, a 24/7 version of Super Happy Dev House.

Things to Do (non-technical)

Start-ups are awesome and all, but make sure you actually check out the Bay Area - the weather is fantastic and there are some great things to see.

• Bike the Golden Gate Bridge in SF: Rent a bike if you don't have one near Fisherman's Wharf, and do the two-hour bike ride through the Golden Gate Bridge and to Sausalito, (and Tiburon, if you've got the energy for it) then take the Ferry back.  Bring a group of friends. Sausalito is beautiful, the trip is well organized for tourists and a lot of fun. Don't miss this.
• Walk Around the Santa Cruz Boardwalk: Rent a car or find somebody with one and drive down to Santa Cruz.  Check out the Coney Island-style outdated boardwalk/amusement park (I'm partial to the indoor minigolf course), hang out at the beach (take a Surf lesson if you've got the energy), maybe play some Volleyball. A quick not on Beaches in Northern California: They're pretty cold and windy, and something like two beaches have real sand. Santa Cruz is OK on a warm day.  It's still worth going, but don't expect to swim too much. 
• Napa Valley if you're over 21 and don't mind spending $100 or so in a day, go on one of those fancy Napa Valley Wine Tasting tours (alternately, Bike and Wine tastings are fun too).  
• Organize a weekend trip to LA or a nearby National Park: Rent a car and a cabin somewhere. Book a couple of weeks in advance. Don't expect to find a ton of space for 4th of July weekend. I never went, but a bunch of friends did and they thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  
• Computer History Museum: another "I never went, but this comes highly recommended" things to do in Mountain View.  

That's it (so far).  Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Credit to

• Max Wendkos for his networking research.
• Eric Allen my boss for the summer, for introducing me to Hackers and Founders, Super Happy Dev House, and who knows how many of these others.

PS

• You should follow me on Twitter. I tweet about hackathons and startupy things, and not too often.
• If you're looking for a summer internship, may I recommend 2bkco?  I had a fantastic time (post on that coming up)
• If you're a CS student/hacker on the East Coast, you should check out PennApps, our friendly neighborhood hackathon. It's a lot of fun.

 

testing

We love a good entrepreneurial success story – entrepreneur as protagonist overcomes obstacles and builds a thriving, successful company (and become wealthy while doing so).  We want to hear about, learn from and even replicate what they’ve done.  However, this survivorship bias is problematic.  Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software does a nice job articulating this issue stating:

The fact that you are learning only from success is a deeper problem than you imagine…drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results.

Luckily, the startup community often courageously shares their stories – even when things don’t end well.  And so below is our list of the 25 “best” startup failure post-mortems of all time.  Three notes before we begin:

1. After reading these, you realize more than ever that the startup community is really like no other.  We were amazed by the candor and generosity of many of the writers of these post-mortems.  Corporate America could learn from this.
2. We didn’t find post-mortems by investors (VCs, angels, etc) except for one by Roger Ehrenberg.  We’d love to see these given the number of businesses you see and ultimately invest in.  It would be an admission that you’re not infallible, but we already know that
3. If we’ve missed a great post-mortem others would benefit from reading, please leave it in the comments, and we’ll add it.  BTW, if you do the count, there are actually 32 post-mortems in this post.  Think of it as 7 bonus post-mortems on the house.

With that preamble, here is the list in no particular order.  We’ve picked quotes out of each that we thought were insightful, funny, poignant or some combo of the three.  They in no way summarize the posts so please do read them (but probably not all at one time).

Post-Mortem Title:  How My Startup Failed

There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the pc operating system, I would launch a revolution that would transform society while bringing me wealth and fame. I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains.

Post-Mortem Title:  Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
Company:  Wesabe
Author:  Marc Hedlund

Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly. Everything I’ve mentioned — not being dependent on a single source provider, preserving users’ privacy, helping users actually make positive change in their financial lives — all of those things are great, rational reasons to pursue what we pursued. But none of them matter if the product is harder to use, since most people simply won’t care enough or get enough benefit from long-term features if a shorter-term alternative is available.

Post-Mortem Title:  ArsDigita – From Start-up to Bust-up
Company:  ArsDigita
Author:  Philip Greenspun

For roughly one year Peter Bloom (General Atlantic), Chip Hazard (Greylock), and Allen Shaheen (CEO) exercised absolute power over ArsDigita Corporation. During this year they

1. spent $20 million to get back to the same revenue that I had when I was CEO
2. declined Microsoft’s offer (summer 2000) to be the first enterprise software company with a .NET product (a Microsoft employee came back from a follow-up meeting with Allen and said “He reminds me of a lot of CEOs of companies that we’ve worked with… that have gone bankrupt.”)
3. deprecated the old feature-complete product (ACS 3.4) before finishing the new product (ACS 4.x); note that this is a well-known way to kill a company among people with software products experience; Informix self-destructed because people couldn’t figure out whether to run the old proven version 7 or the new fancy version 9 so they converted to Oracle instead)
4. created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. The ArsDigita of Greylock, General Atlantic, and Allen had nearly 200 with lots of new executive positions at $200,000 or over, programmers at base salaries of $125,000, etc. Contributing to the high cost structure was the new culture of working 9-5 Monday through Friday. Allen, Greylock, and General Atlantic wouldn’t be in the building on weekends and neither would the employees bother to come in.
5. surrendered market leadership and thought leadership

Post-Mortem Title: RiotVine Post-Mortem
Company: RiotVine
Author: Kabir

It’s not about good ideas or bad ideas: it’s about ideas that make people talk.

And this worked really well for foursquare thanks to the mayorship. If I tell someone I’m the mayor of a spot, I’m in an instant conversation: “What makes you the mayor?” “That’s lame, I’m there way more than you” “What do you get for being mayor?”. Compare that to talking about Gowalla: “I just swapped this sticker of a bike for a sticker of a six pack of beer! What? Yes, I am still a virgin”. See the difference? Make some aspect of your product easy and fun to talk about, and make it unique.

Post-Mortem Title: The Last AnNounce(r)ment
Company: Nouncer
Author: Eran Hammer-Lahav

A month ago, half way through my angel funds raised from family members, I decided to review the progress I’ve made and figure out what still needs to happen to make this a viable business. I was also actively pursuing raising VC funds with the help of a very talented and well connected friend. At the end, I asked myself what are the most critical resources I need to be successful and the answer was partners and developers. I’ve been looking for both for about a year and was unable to find the right people. I realized that money was not the issue.

Post-Mortem Title: My eHarmony for Hiring Failure

This started to make me more nervous. I was manifesting this huge monolithic application in my head that would revolutionize the job search, I had even written some code at this point, and didn’t have any idea if actual businesses were willing to pay a dime for it.

Post-Mortem Title: BricaBox: Goodbye World!
Company: BricaBox
Author: Nate Westheimer

Go vest yourself.
When a co-founder walks out of a company — as was the case for me — you’ve already been dealt a heavy blow. Don’t exacerbate the issue by needing to figure out how to deal with a large equity deadweight on your hands (investors won’t like that the #2 stakeholder is absent, even estranged, from your company). So, the best way of dealing with this issue is to take a long, long vesting period for all major sweat equity founders.

Post-Mortem Title: Boompa.com Launch Postmortem, Part 1: Research, Picking a Team, Office Space and Money
Company: Boompa.com

Ethan and I came up with the “Zombie Team” test for figuring out whether or not someone is ready to work on an intense project, be it a start-up or otherwise. The test is this: If zombies suddenly sprung from the earth, could you trust the perspective team member to cover your back? Would they tell you if they got bit? Most importantly would you give them the team’s only gun if you knew they were the better shot? If the answer is no to any of those questions you need to let them get eaten by the cubicle wasteland of corporate culture, because they aren’t ready for this kind of work.

Post-Mortem Title:  End of the Road for Xmarks

Company: Xmarks (company seems semi-dead given recent pledgebank setup)

Author:  Todd

For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down.

Post-Mortem Title:  EventVue Post-Mortem

Company:  EventVue

Our Deadly Cultural Mistakes:

– didn’t focus on learning & failing fast until it was too late

- didn’t care/focus enough about discovering how to market eventvue

– made compromises in early hiring decisions – choose expediency over talent/competency

Post-Mortem Title:  YouCastr – A Post-Mortem

Company: YouCastr

Author: Ariel Diaz

The market was not there

The thesis of our current business model (startups are all about testing theses) was that there was a need for video producers and content owners to make money from their videos, and that they could do that by charging their audience. We found both sides of that equation didn’t really work. I validated this in my conversations with companies with more market reach than us, that had tried similar products (ppv video platform), but pulled the plug because they didn’t see the demand for it.

Video producers are afraid of charging for content, because they don’t think people will pay. And they’re largely right. Consumers still don’t like paying for stuff, period. We did find some specific industry verticals where the model works (some high schools, some boxing and mixed martial arts events, some exclusive conferences), but not enough to warrant a large market and an independent company.

Post-Mortem Title:  Leaving IonLab

Company:  IonLab

Author:  Swaroop C H

Second, as one of my friends observed, I talked to about 7 people (both acquaintances and friends) whose judgment I trusted. 3 of them sympathized and agreed with my decision and 4 of them admonished me and asked me to “hang in there.” You know what was the clincher? The first 3 had done startups themselves and the latter 4 had not. The latter 4 did not really understand the context, even though they meant well and are intelligent folks.

Post-Mortem Title:  Lessons Learned

Company:  Devver

The most significant drawback to a remote team is the administrative hassle. It’s a pain to manage payroll, unemployment, insurance, etc in one state. It’s a freaking nightmare to manage in three states (well, two states and a district), even though we paid a payroll service to take care of it. Apparently, once your startup gets larger, there are companies that will manage this with minimal hassle, but for a small team, it was a major annoyance and distraction.

Post-Mortem Title:  Lessons from Kiko, web 2.0 startup, about Its Failure

Company:  Kiko

Author:  Mahesh M Piddshetti

Make an environment where you will be productive. Working from home can be convenient, but often times will be much less productive than a separate space. Also its a good idea to have separate spaces so you’ll have some work/life balance.

Post-Mortem Title:  Lessons Learned: Startup Failure Part 1

Company:  Overto

Author:  Pawel Brodzinski

Thin line between life and death of internet service is a number of users. For the initial period of time the numbers were growing systematically. Then we hit the ceiling of what we could achieve effortlessly. It was a time to do some marketing. Unfortunately no one of us was skilled in that area. Even worse, no one had enough time to fill the gap.

Post-Mortem Title:  Monitor110: A Post-Mortem

Company:  Monitor110

Author:  Roger Ehrenberg

The Seven Deadly Sins

While we certainly made more than seven mistakes during the nearly four-year life of Monitor110, I think these top the list.

1. The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
3. Too much PR, too early
4. Too much money
5. Not close enough to the customer
6. Slow to adapt to market reality
7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

Post-Mortem Title:  Why We Shut NewsTilt Down

Company:  NewsTilt

Author:  Paul Biggar

None of these problems should have been unassailable, which leads us to why NewsLabs failed as a company:

• Nathan and I had major communication problems,
• we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism,
• making a new product required changes we could not make,
• our motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above.

Post-Mortem Title:  Aftermath

Company:  Diffle

For anyone faced with winding down a company, I’d highly recommend taking a while off before making any big decisions, and not just the two and a half weeks that I’d initially tried. You’re not thinking straight when your startup dies – your perspective may be a bit different in a few months, as might your preferences for what you want to do next.

The corollary to that is to wind up your startup before you’re totally out of money, so that you have options for what to do next and don’t have to bargain from a place of total weakness.

Post-Mortem Title:  6 reasons why my VC funded startup did fail

Author:  Stephan Schmidt

So the most important thing is to sell – a fact lots of startups forget. And we did too. After much thought it comes down to these six reasons why we failed (beside the obvious one that the VC market imploded when we needed money and noone was able to get any funding):

1. We didn’t sell anything
2. We didn’t sell anything
3. We didn’t sell anything
4. The market window was not yet open
5. We focused too much on technology
6. We had the wrong business model

Post-Mortem Title:  10 Lessons from a Failed Startup

Company: PlayCafe

Author:  Mark Goldenson

I would advise any entrepreneur or investor considering content to think twice, as Howard Lindzon from Wallstrip warned us. Content is an order of magnitude harder than technology with an order less upside; no YouTube producer will earn within a hundredth of $1.65 billion. This will only become more true as DVRs and media-sharing reduce revenues and pay-for-performance ads eliminate inefficient ad spend, of which there is a lot. The main and perhaps only reason to do content should be the love of creating it.

Post-Mortem Title:  Lessons from our Failed Startup

Company:  SMSnoodle

I have been hearing this advise from the time I have been in my mother’s womb.Dont take this easily.If you are a techie there are more chances that you won’t follow this advise. Your heart doesn’t get satisfied with any levels of development.Ignore your heart.Listen to your brain. If you are a web startup , you can take max 6 months to release your first version( for something like mint.com) .Simpler websites shouldn’t take more than 2-3 months.You can always iterate and extrapolate later.Wet your feet asap.

Post-Mortem Title:  Untitled Partners Post-Mortem

Company:  Untitled Partners

Author:  Jordan Cooper

Hiring is hard, and without proper experience, we should have leaned more heavily on our investors to help us with this decision. Hiring was a challenge we found difficult throughout the life of our Company. We made as many bad decisions as we did good ones with regard to hiring full time, part time, and independent contractors/consultants. Biggest takeaway: As soon as the data starts to suggest someone might be the wrong hire, don’t wait, immediately start recruiting a replacement, and upgrade as soon as possible.

Post-Mortem Title:  Key Lessons from Cryptine Networks’ Failure

Company:  Cryptine Networks

Author:  Andrew Fife

No matter how close of friends, how much you trust each other or how good your intentions are money comes between people and everyone over estimates their own contributions. Furthermore, founders become highly emotional about their companies. Thus, the process of negotiating taking back stock from founders is not rational and inherently very difficult. However, vesting schedules reduce the difficult negotiation to simply and mechanically exercising the companies pre-agreed right to repurchase stock at the price it was issued. I foolishly let myself fall into the “it won’t happen to me” trap but no startup gets it right on the first try and theses hiccups often lead to changes in the team. Believing that any startup won’t have to deal with stock vesting issues is totally unrealistic.

Post-Mortem Title:  A Happy Failure Story: Lessons Learned From My First Startup

Company:  SubMat

Author:  Laurent Krentz

My philosophy was to get as far as possible with a small seed round. To do this, I thought keeping my day job would allow to spend the money wisely on product or marketing actions. Wrong. Quit your job (if you can), and get down to business. Period. You need to be dedicated to your project, meet people, talk about it, code and hack this sh*t out of it. At the end of the day, I was doing both things wrong: my day job, and my startup.

Post-Mortem Title:  Imercive Post-Mortem

Company:  Imercive

Author:  Keith B. Nowak

For one, we stuck with the wrong strategy for too long. I think this was partly because it was hard to admit the idea wasn’t as good as I originally thought or that we couldn’t make it work. If we had been honest with ourselves earlier on we may have been able to pivot sooner and have enough capital left to properly execute the new strategy. I believe the biggest mistake I made as CEO of imercive was failing to pivot sooner.

Post-Mortem Title:  Meetro Post Mortem

Company:  Meetro (aka Lefora)

Author: Paul

We could have gone about trying to fix Meetro but the team was just ready to move on. Raising money on the flat growth we had was nearly impossible. Plus I knew that in order to keep the tight-knit team we had built together, we needed to shift focus for sanity sake. People (myself included) just felt beat up. We knew that fixing these issues would involve a complete rearchitecturing of the code, and people just weren’t excited about the idea enough anymore to do it right.

Post-Mortem Title:  Post Mortem on a Failed Product

Company:  eCrowds

Author:  David Cummings

As the product became more and more complex, the performance degraded. In my mind, speed is a feature for all web apps so this was unacceptable, especially since it was used to run live, public websites. We spent hundreds of hours trying to speed of the app with little success. This taught me that we needed to having benchmarking tools incorporated into the development cycle from the beginning due to the nature of our product.

Post-Mortem Title:  Hubris, ambition and mismanagement: the first post-mortem of RealTime Worlds

Company:  RealTime Worlds

Note:  This post-mortem is not by the company and so is unlike others in the list and is quite editorial (warning).

Dave Jones made a virtue of having no business model for APB. He said “if a game is built around a business model, that’s a recipe for failure.”

Bullsh1t.

Post-Mortem Title:  A Startup Idea Postmortem: Proof That Good Ideas Aren’t Always Good Business
Author:  Rob May

But the more we moved down the path, the more I realized the complexities involved with selling answers. Knowledge is a tricky thing to sell, because even experts disagree on some answers. What’s worse, most people think they know more than they really do. Look at how many idiots think they know stocks, or programming, or even business. Nearly everyone thinks they can give good management tips. It is difficult to sell something so… confusing, and we realized it would lead to problems down the road. Yahoo, and most of the other sites, fix this by having people vote on the best answer, but we couldn’t post answers in public because that would take away our residual incentives. And anyway, I’m not convinced in the “wisdom of crowds” for anything beyond general knowledge. It doesn’t work for domain specific stuff.

Post-Mortem Title:  Co-Founder Potts Shares Lessons Learned from Backfence Bust
Company:  Backfence
Author:  Mark Potts | Mark Glaser

Hyper-local is really hard. Don’t kid yourself. You don’t just open the doors and hit critical mass. We knew that from the jump. It takes a lot of work to build a community. Look carefully at most hyper-local sites and see just how much posting is really being done, especially by members of the community as opposed to be the sites’ operators. Anybody who’s run a hyper-local site will tell you that it takes a couple of years just to get to a point where you’ve truly got a vibrant online community. It takes even longer to turn that into a viable business. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Backfence was unable to sustain itself long enough to reach that point.

Post-Mortem Title:  What an Entrepreneur Learned from His Failed Startup (interview)
Company:  Sedna Wireless
Author:  Rajiv Poddar | Kamla Bhatt

Finances were just one part of the story. The other part was that we failed to execute our own plans. Both external factors (e.g. the hardware ecosystem in India) and internal reasons (e.g. the expertise of the team) played a role. With money it would have lasted a bit more longer.

Post-Mortem Title:  Couldery Shouldery
Company:  Lookery
Author:  Scott Rafer

We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure called Facebook. I’ve ranted for years about how bad an idea it is for startups to be mobile-carrier dependent. In retrospect, there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context. To succeed in that kind of environment requires any number of resources. One of them is clearly significant outside financing, which we’d explicitly chosen to do without. We could have and should have used the proceeds of the convertible note to get out from under Facebook’s thumb rather to invest further in the Facebook Platform.

Post-Mortem Title: How To Develop a Product Nobody Wants
Company: ChubbyBrain

Like a Printer/Fax/Copy Machine – We were trying to be a credible data company and a community. Most companies struggle to be good at just one thing, and we decided we were going to be good at two. Bottom line – We are data guys. We’re good at data. We like data. Community was about things we didn’t have as much familiarity with, i.e., social media, game mechanics, community building, etc. These were things when we started that we honestly had little insight into given the composition of our team. Even those who know these things intimately will admit it can be difficult. As novices, the task was even more daunting.

We have shamelessly included our own quasi post mortem. We messed up a lot of things in v1.0 of ChubbyBrain so this is a post-mortem of our first product which we’ve gotten a lot of nice and positive feedback on. We’re happy to report we are still alive.

If you have a friend, colleague who is starting their own business, and you found one of these post-mortems useful, please share this with them.  Success stories are inspiring of course, but there is a lot to be learned from failure.  And the startup community, as evidenced from the above, is immensely generous in sharing their knowledge – whether the outcome is good or bad.  Best of luck in your venture.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely should:

• Try out our Funding Recommendation Engine
• Follow us on twitter here
• Check out the Brain’s Guide to Angel Investing and the Brain’s Guide to Venture Capital
• Review our Guide to Reverse Due Diligence on Investors

You may also like...

ChubbyBrain Crosses 26,000 Profiles – The Web’s Largest Startup Database Gets Bigger

18,000 Startup and 1800 Investor Profiles – The Largest Global Startup Database

Is ChubbyBrain the Godzilla of Startup and Investor Databases? Hint: Yes

John Yap, founder of Awfully Chocolate, rightly pointed out that, unlike our parents’ generation where there were two distinct groups of people- those who were formerly educated and those who weren’t- we are merely a batch of mass produced test machines, with the same or similar paper qualifications. So, what makes us think we can be more successful than our parents? Just a little food for thought.