Avoid the Grey Twilight

For some time now I have been a big fan of the "Entrpreneurial Thought Leaders" lecture series they have been running at Stanford University, the basic premise being that every week throughout term they invite guest speakers from the world of entrepreneurship to come and talk about, well, anything they like.

Most of the talks are about how to become an entrepreneur, things to avoid, lessons learnt, etc, but they are always very interesting to listen to, so I highly recommend getting over to their site and checking them out. They generally put the new lectures up pretty quickly and have an archive of over 100 great lectures (a whole range of speakers including Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO), Marissa Myers (Google VP), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO)  and many more - you can check it out at itunes.stanford.edu or just search for Stanford in your iTunes store and it should come up (all the lectures are free downloads, and there are also many more lectures and complete courses that can be downloaded).


The most recent one I have listened to is one by Alec Ross, who was chief tech advisor to President Obama during his campaign (which is a pretty massive role, considering the role that the web/tech played in giving him the edge) and is now chief advisor on innovation to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Alec gave 4 pieces of advice to anyone wanting to become an entrepreneur:

1. Manage your time like you manage your money,
2. Hire believers
3. Avoid the Grey twilight

Most of the advice was very similar to that given across the ETL series, but with different anecdotal stories, but I quite like his piece of advice "avoid the grey twilight" - this was in reference to a quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat"

I think this is a great quote, and have always remembered a very similar quote from Spike Lee's basketball film "He Got Game", which I can only assume is based on the above:

"And if we fail, at least we fail whist daring greatly, so we will not be remembered with those cold timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat"

I am of the mind that people can achieve anything, and if we put our minds to things they can be done..