Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Freud’s theory explains that we tend to reserve our most virulent emotions—aggression, hatred, envy—toward those who resemble us the most. We feel threatened not by the “other” with whom we have little in common, but by the “nearly-we,” who mirror and reflect us.
Sivan Cohen (Fast Company) on why everybody hates on content marketers
The reason is that innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.
Ben Horowitz of A16Z
Never doubt that a small startup can take on a huge monopoly. Indeed, it is the only thing that can.
Fred Wilson, Venture Capitalist Margaret Mead
This is the most manic depressive way you could possibly live life. You’re never having a good day. You’re either having the best day ever, or you are thinking you are about to die.
Sam Lessin, Founder of Drop.io, about being an entrepreneur
50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours.”
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Right now, there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in classrooms at our top universities. They’re earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science. But once they finish school, once they earn that diploma, there’s a good chance they’ll have to leave our country. Think about that.
Intel was started with the help of an immigrant who studied here and then stayed here. Instagram was started with the help of an immigrant who studied here and then stayed here. Right now in one of those classrooms, there’s a student wrestling with how to turn their big idea—their Intel or Instagram—into a big business. We’re giving them all the skills they need to figure that out, but then we’re going to turn around and tell them to start that business and create those jobs in China or India or Mexico or someplace else? That’s not how you grow new industries in America. That’s how you give new industries to our competitors. That’s why we need comprehensive immigration reform.
damn straight
President Obama in Nevada today, laying out a four-part plan for comprehensive immigration reform
(via barackobama)
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Steve Jobs
Traction is the new intellectual property.
@paulsingh
By it’s nature, the internet undermines anyone whose status depends on the privileged access to information.
Moneyball (Movie)
