If you think Elizabeth Holmes is done, she never met anyone she couldn’t fool.
Elizabeth Holmes was a brilliant engineer who dabbled in Mandarin for fun. As a freshman, she dropped out of Stanford in 2003 to found Theranos. Soon after she discovered a look that resembled Steve Jobs, and in one of life’s great ironies, she has the same name as his first girlfriend. Shortly his image became her calling card.
To complement the ensemble, Holmes adopted a James Earl Jones voice that registered an order of magnitude below normal. People who should have known better were blinded by the light-skinned beauty with the throaty baritone that seemed too good looking to be…
To change the world, start with what you want to do, not what someone says you should do.
“Hit the little ball before you hit the big ball.”
Golfers use the expression above to prevent taking a large divot before striking the ball. When you don’t follow this rule, it can be very unpleasant as dirt flies in the air and the ball barely moves or is shanked into the rough. People will look the other way and smirk, “He hit the big ball first.”
The meaning is clear — hit the golf ball first and then the big ball, which as you may have guessed is the planet Earth.
It is also true for those who play…
Bet on the future, just don’t bet the future
Germans have a word for just about everything. Schwellenangst is the fear of embarking on a new adventure. For some, it’s the first time they fly in an airplane, while for others it’s the start of a new job, a new relationship, or a move to a new location. In all cases, it is something everyone is familiar with — the anxiety that comes with crossing a threshold to a place you’ve never been before.
Like a lot of German words, schwellenangst combines several concepts. “Schwellen” means swell, while angst means the same in English, angst.
Verstehen?
It is why…
“My only measure of success is how many people love me.”
On May 29, 1969, Doris and Roberta, two sisters from an average-sized midwestern town, born to an average midwestern family and enjoying an average if happy midwestern life, received a letter letting them know their brother was about to quit his job. Naturally, their first reaction was to ask, “what’s next?” No one would guess that what came next was the largest wealth creation opportunity in history promulgated by a single individual.
When the family’s coffers would be tallied, the family might be the richest on earth, richer than…
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” — Matthew 25:29
The Matthew Effect is the phenomenon more commonly known as ‘the rich get richer.” We see it when preeminent people are given disproportionate credit for something they did or even did not do. It explains mistakes in perception from the reasons for income inequality to why we misattribute famous quotations. Andy Warhol’s well-known example is “everyone has fifteen minutes of fame,” which Warhol never said. His photographer did. …
The famous children’s rhyme, What All the World Is Made Of, is the handiwork of Robert Southey, one of the great English poets (1774–1843). For reasons that will strike most parents as obvious, the most famous eight lines are extracted from the original 44 lines. The problem is not their eternal cuteness but a suggestion that even Victorian children were subject to a pre-woke gender comparison. Nothing could be further from the truth. One has to read the whole poem to understand Southey was only painting a charming tableau, not drawing grafitti. …
The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000 or about 0.02% of the world’s population and has received 128 Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
- 1910 — Paul Heyse
- 1927 — Henri Bergson
- 1958 — Boris Pasternak
- 1966 — Shmuel Yosef Agnon
- 1966 — Nelly Sachs
- 1976 — Saul Bellow
- 1978 — Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1981 — Elias Canetti
- 1987 — Joseph Brodsky
- 1991 — Nadine Gordimer
World Peace:
- 1911 — Alfred Fried
- 1911 — Tobias Michael Carel Asser
- 1968 — Rene Cassin
- 1973 — Henry Kissinger
- 1978 — Menachem Begin
- 1986 — Elie Wiesel
- 1994 — Shimon Peres
- 1994 — Yitzhak Rabin
Physics:
- 1905 — Adolph Von Baeyer
- 1906 — Henri Moissan
- 1907 — Albert Abraham Michelson
- 1908 — Gabriel Lippmann
- 1910 — Otto Wallach
- 1915 —…
Outlier solutions are absurd or too simple. That’s why they work.
(This article previously appeared in Chief Executive Magazine)
“As we know, surprises come in three varieties according to former Secretary of Defense: the known knowns — things we know we know; the known unknowns — things we know we do not know; and the unknown unknowns — things we do not know we do not know.”
— Donald Rumsfeld
If you draw your three circles of competence, the things you do not know that you do not know are at the heart of big disasters, nuclear reactor meltdowns, unintended wars, surprise terror attacks, and lastly, pandemics. …
“Until philosophers are kings and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, cities will never have rest from evil.” –Plato
On May 25, 2020, a day that became a dividing line for people across America, an amiable 46-year-old African American walked into a convenience store around 8 p.m. and politely asked for a pack of cigarettes. George Floyd had recently lost his job and was recovering from Covid, explaining why he paid with a $20 counterfeit bill. As he tore open the pack, he could not have known he was living on borrowed time, and the last chapter of his unhappy life was about to end. The only thing standing between him and death was a rendezvous in the parking…
“Knowledge of the past is the only foundation we have from which to peer and try to measure the future.”
On February 26, 1946, Winston Churchill raised his tiny 5'6" frame to the podium. He looked at the audience of 17,500 students seated in the brilliant light and remarked with that memorable lisp, “I have enjoyed my stay in your genial sunshine, and it has done me a lot of good.” He recently arrived in Florida refreshed and rested after a crushing defeat in Britain’s first postwar election. It didn’t affect his warm and cheerful disposition, yet his message was as foreboding as one he would deliver in Fulton, Missouri warning that an “Iron Curtain” was about to fall over…
Jeff Cunningham
Professor of Leadership. Extraordinary Lives Project. Author “Be Somebody” (2021); 2019 Telly Award IconicVoices.tv; ex-publisher Forbes
