Career advice from Guy Kawasaki
April 9th, 2010
Q. What’s your best career advice for somebody who’s just graduating from college?
A. Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice. Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it Google? Is it Apple? They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life.
Looking back, that’s absolutely incorrect. By definition you cannot make a mistake in your first job other than becoming a consultant or an investment banker.
Let’s say you land in a start-up, and it becomes the next Google. Now you’re 25 years old, and you’re worth $50 million. Anybody would call that a success.
But let’s say you join a start-up, and it implodes. You would learn more about leadership inside a company that crashes than you would inside the next Google.
Specifically, you will learn what not to do. You can’t make a mistake as a college graduate.
Q. Why did you carve out investment banking and consulting?
A. With investment banking, you make a lot of money, and you get a distorted feeling of how wonderful you are. You’ll be flying around in corporate jets and you’ll be attending board meetings, but you don’t really add value.
The issue with consulting is that if you go straight to work for a consultant, you develop this perspective that the hard part is the analysis and the decision. In reality, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it.
From an interview of Guy Kawasaki in the ‘Corner Office’ column.
Leave a commentIl pipistrello – Part 2
November 23rd, 2009
When I wrote that the bat was gone, that was not the whole truth. We found it in another corner and of course proceeded to take a couple more pictures.
The poor bat on the next day
Interesting trivia: According to the Wikipedia article on bats, there are about 1100 species of them, which represent about 20% of the classified mammal species.
Leave a commentIl pipistrello
November 19th, 2009
Yesterday my flatmate found a bat in his room. It was clearly alive but probably sick or in a state of shock. Since it didn’t move he took a camera and made some pictures. Then he put it in a box and kept the poor thing for a couple of hours in order to allow me to admire it upon my return from university.
Being a medical student, he did however advise me not to get too close to it because of Rabies (a fatal disease with the initially flu-like symptoms followed by slight or partial paralysis, cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, hallucinations, progressing to delirium).
Then (that is, after my admiration, not after delirium) we released it on the balcony and since it didn’t leave immediately, we wrote a note to the other flatmate (who was still at work) in order to prevent her from stepping on it. True gentlemen, I say.
When I checked a little while later, it was gone.
Here’s what it looked like:
Poor bat