Value In The Valley Quotes

Their issues are not your issues.

Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralysing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.

A thousand years or more ago, When I was newly sewn, There lived four wizards of renown, Whose name are still well-known: Bold Gryffindor from wild moor, Fair Ravlenclaw from glen, Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad, Shrewd Slytherin from fen. They share a wish, a hope, a dream, They hatched a daring plan, To educate young sorcerers, Thus Hogwarts school began. Now each of these four founders Formed their own house, for each Did value different virtues, In the ones they had to teach. By Gryffindor, the bravest were Prized far beyond the rest; For Ravenclaw, the cleverest Would always be the best; For Hufflepuff, hardworkers were Most worthy of admission; And power-hungry Slytherin Loved those of great ambition. While still alive they did divide Their favourates from the throng, Yet how to pick the worthy ones When they were dead and gone? 'Twas Gryffindor who found the way, He whipped me off his head The founders put some brains in me So I could choose instead! Now slip me snug around your ears, I've never yet been wrong, I'll have alook inside your mind And tell where you belong!

Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.

Like men, some grow best in company, striving to outdo the rest. Others need to grow their own way, though it may be lonely. Both have value.

Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So

Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid- to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things.

In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed. By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It's a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. "Playing it safe" may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don't think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of no trying to live the life you want today. Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other hand, leave us on our own, without this habit of useless measurement and comparison. Only the Whole Life Plan leads to personal success. It has the greatest chance of providing satisfaction and contentment that one can take to the grave, tomorrow. In the Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short.

Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

To discover a metaphysical relationship between Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What’s important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.

On February 4, 2014, Partner Fund purchased 5,655,294 Theranos shares at a price of $17 a share—$2 a share more than the Lucas Venture Group had paid just four months earlier. The investment brought in another $96 million to Theranos’s coffers and valued it at a stunning $9 billion. This meant that Elizabeth, who owned slightly more than half of the company, now had a net worth of almost $5 billion.

Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they’re irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy. Because girls are coached out of the womb to be nonconfrontational, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up. Because speaking up for myself was not how I learned English. Because I’m fluent in Apology, in Question Mark, in Giggle, in Bowing Down, in Self-Sacrifice. Because slightly more than half of the population is regularly told that what happens doesn’t or that it isn’t the big deal we’re making it into. Because your mothers, sisters, and daughters are routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied, harassed, threatened, punished, propositioned, and groped, and challenged on what they say. Because when a woman challenges a man, then the facts are automatically in dispute, as is the speaker, and the speaker’s license to speak. Because as women we are told to view and value ourselves in terms of how men view and value us, which is to say, for our sexuality and agreeability. Because it was drilled in until it turned subconscious and became unbearable need: don’t make it about you; put yourself second or last; disregard your feelings but not another’s; disbelieve your perceptions whenever the opportunity presents itself; run and rerun everything by yourself before verbalizing it—put it in perspective, interrogate it: Do you sound nuts? Does this make you look bad? Are you holding his interest? Are you being considerate? Fair? Sweet? Because stifling trauma is just good manners. Because when others serially talk down to you, assume authority over you, try to talk you out of your own feelings and tell you who you are; when you’re not taken seriously or listened to in countless daily interactions—then you may learn to accept it, to expect it, to agree with the critics and the haters and the beloveds, and to sign off on it with total silence. Because they’re coming from a good place. Because everywhere from late-night TV talk shows to thought-leading periodicals to Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Congress and the current administration, women are drastically underrepresented or absent, missing from the popular imagination and public heart. Because although I questioned myself, I didn’t question who controls the narrative, the show, the engineering, or the fantasy, nor to whom it’s catered. Because to mention certain things, like “patriarchy,” is to be dubbed a “feminazi,” which discourages its mention, and whatever goes unmentioned gets a pass, a pass that condones what it isn’t nice to mention, lest we come off as reactionary or shrill.

My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit… You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us. Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley… Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.

We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.

My conception of freedom. -- The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it -- what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic -- every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization. These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free -- and how much more the spirit who has become free -- spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by "tyrants" are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, who attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong -- otherwise one will never become strong. Those large hothouses for the strong -- for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known -- the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers

And no sooner had Cap been commanded, if she valued her safety, not to cross the water or climb the precipice than, as a natural consequence, she began to wonder what was in the valley behind the mountain and what might be in the woods across the river. And she longed, above all things, to explore and find out for herself.

When you listen to people, they feel valued. A 2003 study from Lund University in Sweden finds that “mundane, almost trivial” things like listening and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership, because “people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork.”10 And a 2016 paper finds that this form of “respectful inquiry,” where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the “follower’s” feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.11

That highest value which anticipates and prevents rather than avenges crime.

the larger the dollar value of your product or service, the longer the sales cycle, particularly for business-to-consumer sales.

There was an acceptance at face value in New York, as if everyone had just been born, with no past heritage to acknowledge or hide.

Courage is a tool and a weapon. With just a little, you can build your life and use it to fend for yourself in the world. It

we are always taught the value of “positive coaching,” of leading with praise and then following with constructive feedback.

A double rainbow had changed the course of my relationship with the fox. I had been jogging when I realised that he would live only a few years in this harsh country. At the time I believed that making an emotional investment in a short-lived creature was a fool's game. Before the jog ended, a rainbow appeared in front of me. One end of the rainbow slipped through an island of tall dead poplars drowning in gray sky, their crowns splitting and spraying into each other. I stopped. A second rainbow arched over the poplars. How many rainbows had I seen in this one valley? A hundred easy, and I always paused to watch. I realised that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity. After that, whenever I questioned devoting so much time to an animal whose lifespan barely exceeded the blink of an eye, I remembered rainbows.

We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a "valley of disappointment" where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, the work was not wasted, it was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.

It's a blue collar thing... Middle-class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young close to home. Tearing a working class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley. The professional elite values change and self-development; working-class families value stability and community. The professional elite associate change with challenge, excitement, opportunity, and innovation. But for families, a few paychecks away form losing their homes and stable middle-class lives, respect for stability reigns supreme.

The fate of Yahoo!, its business eventually sold to bottom-fisher Apollo in 2023, is the ultimate case study in a truth universally unacknowledged in the Valley—savvy deal jocks create as much value as coder tech bros.

Stop placing so much value on the known, I tell myself. Fake like this is the hero’s journey. It’s good to get lost. Good for the soul. But how lost is the good amount of lost? If I die here, is that still good for the soul?

ABERRANT GENIUSES—HIGH-PERFORMING BUT DIFFICULT TEAM MEMBERS—SHOULD BE TOLERATED AND EVEN PROTECTED, AS LONG AS THEIR BEHAVIOR ISN’T UNETHICAL OR ABUSIVE AND THEIR VALUE OUTWEIGHS THE TOLL THEIR BEHAVIOR TAKES ON MANAGEMENT, COLLEAGUES, AND TEAMS.

Silicon Valley had perfected the image of itself as a meritocracy and touted that as one of its greatest strengths—that anyone could become a billionaire. In fact, tech has always been a mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same. They keep copying themselves, choosing slight variations on the same avatar template. Financial success was proof of their talents, which was like the old cliché of starting on third base and thinking you hit a home run.

Alice Marwick, an anthropologist who did her fieldwork studying the tech scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, argues that new communication technologies reflect the individualist and status-conscious values of the competitive, commercial milieu in which they were developed.

My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug - it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time.

This is the delicacy of our present moment. Our digital butlers are watching closely. They see our private as well as our public lives, our best and worst selves, without necessarily knowing which is which or making a distinction at all. They by and large reside in a kind of uncanny valley of sophistication: able to infer sophisticated models of our desires from our behavior, but unable to be taught, and disinclined to cooperate. They’re thinking hard about what we are going to do next, about how they might make their next commission, but they don’t seem to understand what we want, much less who we hope to become.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization. These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by "tyrants" are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

It seemed to me that whatever I had that the men of Silicon Valley did not was exactly what I had been trying to sublimate for the past four years. Working in tech had provided an escape from the side of personality that was emotional, impractical, ambivalent, and inconvenient. The part of me that wanted to know everyone's feelings, that wanted to be moved. That had no apparent market value.

JANUARY 30 Fortunately [psycho]analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. —Karen Horney The passage of time, coupled with an openness to the messages gleaned from our conversations with others, can provide answers we need for the way out of painful situations. Life is ebb and flow, peaks and valleys, struggles and sweet times. What we fail to realize, all too often, is that the struggles make possible the times that are sweet. Our conflicts are our special lessons in life. We can learn to flow with them, move through them, trust their value to us as growing, changing women. How good it feels to have found security with one another and that power greater than ourselves who can, when we are willing, show us the path to resolution. Life will never be free of conflict—nor should it be. Our lessons move us to higher planes of awareness. We can experience the joy hidden within the conflict. We can help one another remember that the sweetness of a moment is tied to the pain of a former, forgotten moment. All events, all experiences, are connected. The path I travel, alone and with others, is bringing me brighter days. I will trust my path. It’s right for me.

Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism an moral nihilism.

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

Hoffman had finally gotten a satisfying answer to this at a dinner with Wences and David Marcus and a few other Valley power players late in 2013. Wences agreed with Hoffman that Bitcoin was unlikely to catch on as a payment method anytime soon. But for now, Wences believed that Bitcoin would first gain popularity as a globally available asset, similar to gold. Like gold, which was also not used in everyday transactions, Bitcoin’s value was as a digital asset where people could store wealth.

For the Valley establishment, the creation of the Vision Fund was like that alien, menacing, and transformative Space Odyssey monolith materializing on the divide in Sand Hill Road. From 2013 to 2023, the market value of all unicorns would skyrocket from $100 billion to $5 trillion.31 To remain a player in this ocean of liquidity, Sequoia, like everyone else, needed a bigger boat. This would be Masa Son’s enduring legacy. A billion dollars wasn’t cool anymore. You know what was cool? A hundred billion dollars.

A man occasionally reaches a fork in life’s path. One road leads to doing something, to making an impact on his organization and his world. To being true to his values and vision, and standing with the other men who’ve helped build that vision. He will have to trust himself when all men doubt him, and as a reward, he will have the scorn of his professional circle heaped on his head. He will not be favored by his superiors, nor win the polite praise of his conformist peers. But maybe, just maybe, he has the chance to be right, and create something of lasting value that will transcend the consensus mediocrity inherent in any organization, even supposedly disruptive ones. The other road leads to being someone. He will receive the plum products, the facile praise afforded to the organization man who checks off the canonical list of petty virtues that define moral worth in his world. He will receive the applause of his peers, though it will be striking how rarely that traffic in official praise leads to actual products anybody remembers, much less advances the overall cause of the organization.

It is no more appropriate to speak of a difference between the purchasing power of money in Germany and in Austria than it would be justifiable to conclude from differences between the prices charged by hotels on the peaks and in the valleys of the Alps that the objective exchange-value of money is different in the two situations and to formulate some such proposition as that the purchasing power of money varies inversely with the height above sea-level. The purchasing power of money is the same everywhere; only the commodities offered are not the same.

It was assumed we would never discuss the glaring inconsistencies between the public narratives spun around our startup customers and the stories that their data told: if we were to read breathless, frothy tech-blog coverage about companies we suspected were failing, we would only smile and close the tab. It was assumed that if we had a publicly traded company using our software—and, if so moved, could chart the overall health of that public company based on its data set, or build out predictive models of when its overall value might grow or recede—we would resist buying or selling its stock.

They came late to the empty land and looked with bitterness upon the six wolves watching them from the horizon's rim. With them was a herd of goats and a dozen black sheep. They took no account of the wolves' possession of this place, for in their minds ownership was the human crown that none other had the right to wear. The beasts were content to share in survival's struggle, in hunt and quarry, and the braying goats and bawling sheep had soft throats and carelessness was a common enough flaw among herds; and they had not yet learned the manner of these two-legged intruders. Herds were fed upon by many creatures. Often the wolves shared their meals with the crows and coyotes, and had occasion to argue with lumbering bears over a delectable prize. When I came upon the herders and their longhouse on a flat above the valley, I found six wolf skulls spiked above the main door. In my travels as a minstrel I knew enough that I had no need to ask - this was a tale woven into our kind, after all. No words, either, for the bear skins on the walls, the antelope hides and elk racks. Not a brow lifted for the mound of bhederin bones in the refuse pit, or the vultures killed by the poison-baited meat left for the coyotes. That night I sang and spun tales for my keep. Songs of heroes and great deeds and they were pleased enough and the beer was passing and the shank stew palatable. Poets are sembling creatures, capable of shrugging into the skin of man, woman, child and beast. There are some among them secretly marked, sworn to the cults of the wilderness. And that night I shared out my poison and in the morning I left a lifeless house where not a dog remained to cry, and I sat upon a hill with my pipe, summoning once more the wild beasts. I defend their ownership when they cannot, and make no defence against the charge of murder; but temper your horror, friends: there is no universal law that places a greater value upon human life over that of a wild beast. Why would you ever imagine otherwise?

Sometimes the value of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it, — what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving, — by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle.

The Devil wants nothing more than to crush you. He wants to steal from you everything you value. He wants to kill everything in your life that’s good. Ultimately, he wants to destroy you. If he can claim the victory over your mind, he can eventually claim the victory over your life. But the message of Psalm 23 is that the Good Shepherd prepares a table for you. It’s a table for two, and the Devil is not invited to sit. This book offers an all-encompassing message that can be applied to any number of hard situations. It will help you find encouragement, hope, and strength in the midst of your valley. You don’t need to listen to the voices of fear, rage, lust, insecurity, anxiety, despair, temptation, or defeat.

Through the years, many people have asked me why I set up Khan Academy as a nonprofit. After all, my previous career was very for-profit, and I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, where scalable tech-enabled solutions can be worth a lot of money. Many have been skeptical whether a nonprofit could even compete with for-profit companies. There were two notions I couldn’t get out of my head, however. First, I tend to believe in market forces, but there are a few sectors—namely, education and health care—where the outcomes of market forces don’t always align with our values. Education and health care are two areas where our shared values tell us that, ideally, family resources shouldn’t be a limiting factor in accessing the best possible opportunities. Most of us believe that every mind and life deserves to reach its full potential.

Throughout the U.S., small farms are being squeezed out by large farms, the only ones able to survive on shrinking profit margins by economies of scale. But in southwestern Montana it is now impossible for small farmers to become large farmers by buying more land, for reasons succinctly explained by Allen Bjergo: “Agriculture in the U.S. is shifting to areas like Iowa and Nebraska, where no one would live for the fun of it because it isn’t beautiful as in Montana! Here in Montana, people do want to live for the fun of it, and so they are willing to pay much more for land than agriculture on the land would support. The Bitterroot is becoming a horse valley. Horses are economic because, whereas prices for agricultural products depend on the value of the food itself and are not unlimited, many people are willing to spend anything for horses that yield no economic benefit.

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle on a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration: they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach.

Rice paddies climb the hillsides in wet, verdant staircases, dense woodlands trade space with geometric farmscapes, tiny Shinto shrines sprout like mushrooms in Noto forests. Villages seem to materialize from nowhere- wedged into valleys, perched atop hills, finessed into coastal corners. Pull over, climb out of your car, breathe deep for a taste of the finest air that will ever enter your lungs: green as a high mountain, salty and sweet, with just a whisper of decay in the finish. Noto gained its reputation as the Kingdom of Fermentation because of this air. For most of its history, Noto was cut off from the rest of Japan, forced into a subsistence model that in many ways endures today. That was possible not only because of the bounty of Noto's fertile environment of trees, grasslands, fresh water, and sea, but because the air is rich with humidity that encourages the growth of healthy bacteria, the building blocks of fermentation.

Zero has had a long history. The Babylonians invented the concept of zero; the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?); the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired Zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits; and both the Mayans and the Romans made Zero a part of their numeral systems. But Zero finally found its place around AD 498, when the Indian astronomer Aryabhatta sat up in bed one morning and exclaimed, "Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam" — which translates, roughly as, "place to place in ten times in value". With that, the idea of decimal based place value notion was born. Now Zero was on a roll: It spread to the Arab world, where it flourished; crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Europe (thanks to the Spanish Moors); got some tweaking from the Italians; and eventually sailed the Atlantic to the New World, where zero ultimately found plenty of employment (together with the digit 1) in a place called Silicon Valley.

to be open and straightforward about their needs for attention in a social setting. It is equally rare for members of a group in American culture to honestly and openly express needs that might be in conflict with that individual’s needs. This value of not just honestly but also openly fully revealing the true feelings and needs present in the group is vital for it’s members to feel emotional safe. It is also vital to keeping the group energy up and for giving the feedback that allows it’s members to know themselves, where they stand in relation to others and for spiritual/psychological growth. Usually group members will simply not object to an individual’s request to take the floor—but then act out in a passive-aggressive manner, by making noise or jokes, or looking at their watches. Sometimes they will take the even more violent and insidious action of going brain-dead while pasting a jack-o’-lantern smile on their faces. Often when someone asks to read something or play a song in a social setting, the response is a polite, lifeless “That would be nice.” In this case, N.I.C.E. means “No Integrity or Congruence Expressed” or “Not Into Communicating Emotion.” So while the sharer is exposing his or her vulnerable creation, others are talking, whispering to each other, or sitting looking like they are waiting for the dental assistant to tell them to come on back. No wonder it’s so scary to ask for people’s attention. In “nice” cultures, you are probably not going to get a straight, open answer. People let themselves be oppressed by someone’s request—and then blame that someone for not being psychic enough to know that “Yes” meant “No.” When were we ever taught to negotiate our needs in relation to a group of people? In a classroom? Never! The teacher is expected to take all the responsibility for controlling who gets heard, about what, and for how long. There is no real opportunity to learn how to nonviolently negotiate for the floor. The only way I was able to pirate away a little of the group’s attention in the school I attended was through adolescent antics like making myself fart to get a few giggles, or asking the teacher questions like, “Why do they call them hemorrhoids and not asteroids?” or “If a number two pencil is so popular, why is it still number two,” or “What is another word for thesaurus?” Some educational psychologists say that western culture schools are designed to socialize children into what is really a caste system disguised as a democracy. And in once sense it is probably good preparation for the lack of true democratic dynamics in our culture’s daily living. I can remember several bosses in my past reminding me “This is not a democracy, this is a job.” I remember many experiences in social groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations in which the person with the loudest voice, most shaming language, or outstanding skills for guilting others, controlled the direction of the group. Other times the pain and chaos of the group discussion becomes so great that people start begging for a tyrant to take charge. Many times people become so frustrated, confused and anxious that they would prefer the order that oppression brings to the struggle that goes on in groups without “democracy skills.” I have much different experiences in groups I work with in Europe and in certain intentional communities such as the Lost Valley Educational Center in Eugene, Oregon, where the majority of people have learned “democracy skills.” I can not remember one job, school, church group, volunteer organization or town meeting in mainstream America where “democracy skills” were taught or practiced.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hilltop near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me.

Son arrived at Yahoo’s office looking as slight and uncommanding as ever. But he brought a bazooka. In a bid without precedent in the history of the Valley, he proposed to invest fully $100 million in Yahoo. In return he wanted an additional 30 percent of the company. Son’s bid implied that Yahoo’s value had shot up eight times since his investment four months earlier. But the astonishing thing about his offer was the size of his proposed check: Silicon Valley had never seen a venture stake of such proportions.[21] The typical fund raised by a top-flight venture partnership weighed in at around $250 million, and there was no way it would put 40 percent of its resources into a single $100 million wager.[22] Private-equity investors and corporate acquirers sometimes made investments in the $100 million range, but in return they expected to take full control of companies.[23] Son, in contrast, would be a minority investor and on an unheralded scale. Because he had SoftBank’s corporate balance sheet behind him, he could pump in fully one hundred times more capital than Sequoia had provided when Yahoo got started. After Son dropped his bombshell, Yang, Filo, and Moritz sat in silence. Disconcerted, Yang said he was flattered but didn’t need the capital.[24] “Jerry, everyone needs $100 million,” Son retorted.[25]

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

Technology should never simply be foisted on them to help their employer extract more value from their labour; the technology should grant workers agency, and its aim should be making workers’ lives better. Workers need substantial say over the development of any new technology to be introduced in the workplace, and they should be actively involved in its design, in order to ensure that it fits their own needs. Technology that only serves the needs of management, rather than workers, should not be deployed at all.

The logic of the market is to encourage self-interest in the belief that the invisible hand will make everything right, on the grounds that economic activity is a good in itself. But the measurements we use for the health of the economy — GDP growth, unemployment rates, stock market capitalisations — are not themselves infused with ethical values, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that they are a poor proxy for tracking societal wellbeing.

I had used my fame in China to educate and inspire young people. I had done nothing to deserve dying at the age of fifty-three. Every one of those thoughts began with “I” and centered on self-righteous assertions of my own “objective” value. It wasn’t until I wrote down the names of my wife and daughters, character by character in black ink, that I snapped out of this egocentric wallowing and self-pity. The real tragedy wasn’t that I might not live much longer. It was that I had lived so long without generously sharing love with those so close to me.

Imagine a situation in which you informed a smart machine that you were going to pull its plug, and then changed your mind and gave it a reprieve. The machine would not change its outlook on life or vow to spend more time with its fellow machines. It would not grow emotionally or discover the value in loving and serving others.

Building societies that thrive in the age of AI will require substantial changes to our economy but also a shift in culture and values. Centuries of living within the industrial economy have conditioned many of us to believe that our primary role in society (and even our identity) is found in productive, wage-earning work. Take that away and you have broken one of the strongest bonds between a person and his or her community. As we transition from the industrial age to the AI age, we will need to move away from a mindset that equates work with life or treats humans as variables in a grand productivity optimization algorithm. Instead, we must move toward a new culture that values human love, service, and compassion more than ever before.

We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a “valley of disappointment” where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.

It seemed to me that whatever I had, that the men of Silicon Valley did not, was exactly what I had been trying to sublimate for the past four years. Working in tech had provided an escape from the side of my personality that was emotional, impractical, ambivalent, and inconvenient—the part of me that wanted to know everyone’s feelings, that wanted to be moved, that had no apparent market value.

Washington valued well-played music in army life and assigned a band to each brigade. At one point he chided a fife and drum corps for playing badly and insisted that they practice more regularly; a year later, after the drummers took this admonition to an extreme, Washington restricted their practice to one hour in the morning, a second in the afternoon. He was also irked by the improvisations of some drummers and, amid the misery of Valley Forge, took the trouble to issue this broadside to wayward drummers: “The use of drums are as signals to the army and, if every drummer is allowed to beat at his pleasure, the intention is entirely destroy[e]d, as it will be impossible to distinguish whether they are beating for their own pleasure or for a signal to the troops.”44

Today, the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with ‘Save’: Save Our Land, Save the Valley, Save Our Mountains, Save Our Streams, Save Our Farmland. As so often before, these are designated victims – people without official sanction, often without official friends, who are struggling to preserve their places, their values and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government which are using their own tax moneys against them.

Wealth is constantly being created and destroyed in the garden, but the accounts never balance for very long. A shortage of nutrients develops in this sector, a surplus in that one. The value of water fluctuates wildly. Who could hope to orchestrate, much less master so boisterous an assembly of the self-interested. The Gardner’s lot is to try and get what he wants from his plants while they go heedlessly about getting what they want. At the risk of s training the metaphor, think of the gardener as something like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, powerful certainly, but far from omnipotent. The best he can hope to do is smooth out the peaks and valleys of his garden’s cycles, restrain the lythrum’s rampant growth, stimulate a depressed campanula, channel the territorial greed of artemisia silver king. The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.

To be someone or to do something, which would I choose?* A man occasionally reaches a fork in life’s path. One road leads to doing something, to making an impact on his organization and his world. To being true to his values and vision, and standing with the other men who’ve helped build that vision. He will have to trust himself when all men doubt him, and as a reward, he will have the scorn of his professional circle heaped on his head. He will not be favored by his superiors, nor win the polite praise of his conformist peers. But maybe, just maybe, he has the chance to be right, and create something of lasting value that will transcend the consensus mediocrity inherent in any organization, even supposedly disruptive ones. The other road leads to being someone. He will receive the plum products, the facile praise afforded to the organization man who checks off the canonical list of petty virtues that define moral worth in his world. He will receive the applause of his peers, though it will be striking how rarely that traffic in official praise leads to actual products anybody remembers, much less advances the overall cause of the organization. I certainly had options. I can’t say I didn’t. I had outs, and could have walked away from FBX. All I had to do was shut up, keep my head down, go through the motions with whatever shitty product was handed to me after FBX, and read along from the Facebook script about how to be a proper product manager. I might even resurrect my career if one of those products was “successful.” In the rapidly ossifying Facebook culture, one could get along simply by going along. Plus, there were real stakes on the line. Consider the number of shares and the fact that at the time of this writing, in December 2015, Facebook is worth almost four times what it was when I struck my AdGrok deal. I had two children, whose mother’s nine-to-five corporate job provided for them, though just barely. Her London trader heyday was long gone, and now her salary was that of your standard-issue MBA inside the corporate machine. I contributed a slab of cash every month, per California support guidelines, but it would be my Facebook stock vesting yet to come that would pay for private high schools and Stanford, so Zoë and Noah wouldn’t have to sneak into this country’s elite through the back door from cattle class, as I had to do.

In my work I’ve noticed that senior executives of companies are among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs. I recently spent some time with the CEO of a company in Silicon Valley valued at $40 billion. He shared with me the value statement of his organization, which he had just crafted, and which he planned to announce to the whole company. But when he shared it I cringed: “We value passion, innovation, execution, and leadership.” One of several problems with the list is, Who doesn’t value these things? Another problem is that this tells employees nothing about what the company values most. It says nothing about what choices employees should be making when these values are at odds. This is similarly true when companies claim that their mission is to serve all stakeholders—clients, employees, shareholders—equally. To say they value equally everyone they interact with leaves management with no clear guidance on what to do when faced with trade-offs between the people they serve.

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It is not that Pueblo Indians hate modern America, especially since they find our modest cultural wants much easier to live with than colonial Spanish ones. Indeed, they don’t hate us at all—many have volunteered and served with distinction in our armed forces, and a number of Pueblo homes fly the American flag daily. Others, such as the famed Jemez Eagle smoke jumpers, serve as first responders throughout the American West. As forest fire teams go, the Jemez men are among the world’s best, and they will hold a dangerous but critical fire line with stunning resolve. No, it’s not about hatred, it is just that our unchecked growth, lack of social cohesion, and flamboyant use of resources—especially water—worries them as being unsustainable. They expect to outlast us. A few years ago, a local tribal elder appeared in an educational film about the Anasazi and commented that his people had to hold on to traditional Pueblo land, culture, and values because some day his descendants would look out across the Rio Grande Valley and modern Albuquerque would be gone.50 He is in the mainstream of opinion among traditional Pueblo leaders. Given our wasteful ways, weak communities, reemerging regional cultural conflicts, and rapidly diverging economics-based class system, we may in fact not be a sure bet for long-term survival.

In business studies, value is understood as being created inside the company by bringing together managerial expertise, strategic thinking and a dynamic (changing with circumstances) division of labour between workers.3 All this ignores the massive role of government in creating value, and taking risk in the process. In The Entrepreneurial State I argued that Silicon Valley itself is an outcome of such high-risk investments by the state, willing to take risks in the early stages of development of high-risk technologies which the private sector usually shies away from.4 This is the case with the investments that led to the internet, where a critical role was played by DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense – and also by CERN in Europe with its invention of the World Wide Web. Indeed, not only the internet but nearly every other technology that makes our smart products smart was funded by public actors, such as GPS (funded by the US Navy), Siri (also funded by DARPA) and touch-screen display (funded initially by the CIA). It is also true of the high-risk, early-stage investments made in the pharmaceutical industry by public actors like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – without which most blockbuster drugs would not have been developed. And the renewable energy industry has been greatly aided by investments made by public banks like the European Investment Bank or the KfW in Germany, with private finance often too risk-averse and focused on short-term returns.

Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas. It had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, Burners and leather daddies, the disenfranchised and the weird. It also had a historically corrupt government, and a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices and midcentury internment camps—but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe. The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity. It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists. In the absence of vibrant cultural institutions, the pleasure center of the industry might have just been exercise: people courted the sublime on trail runs and day hikes, glamped in Marin and rented chalets in Tahoe. They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.

often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a “valley of disappointment” where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed. All big things come from small beginnings.

As we transition from the industrial age to the AI age, we will need to move away from a mindset that equates work with life or treats humans as variables in a grand productivity optimization algorithm. Instead, we must move toward a new culture that values human love, service, and compassion more than ever before.

Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.

In schools the art of investing in this different investment products is to an extent not taught. The Death Valley of education has created a division between what investing is and how to go about doing it. The secrecy in how to go about doing this is shocking

MANAGE THE ABERRANT GENIUS ABERRANT GENIUSES—HIGH-PERFORMING BUT DIFFICULT TEAM MEMBERS—SHOULD BE TOLERATED AND EVEN PROTECTED, AS LONG AS THEIR BEHAVIOR ISN’T UNETHICAL OR ABUSIVE AND THEIR VALUE OUTWEIGHS THE TOLL THEIR BEHAVIOR TAKES ON MANAGEMENT, COLLEAGUES, AND TEAMS.

Freedom's Call [Verse 1] The wind's whisperin' warnings, the sky's turnin' grey, Our freedoms are vanishin', slippin' away, From the hills to the valleys, each small-town street, They'll take what we cherish unless we rise to our feet. [Verse 2] The big shots in charge, they just don't seem to care, Leadin' us blindly to who knows where, But we ain't just pawns in their twisted game, If you stand, I will too, let's fan this flame. [Chorus] If you don’t get active, if you don’t take a stand, They’ll take all you love with an iron-clad hand, Demand better, my friend, from those who lead you, Or the chains of control will bind me and you. [Verse 3] There's dust on the fields and rust on the plow, Work hard for our keep, but it's harder now, Politics and power play tricks with our lives, Hold tight to your values, keep freedom alive. [Verse 4] From the honky-tonks down to the church hall pews, The heart of our country beats strong and true, Let's raise up our voices, let liberty ring, For the land that we love, let's all dare to dream. [Chorus] If you don’t get active, if you don’t take a stand, They’ll take all you love with an iron-clad hand, Demand better, my friend, from those who lead you, Or the chains of control will bind me and you.

Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 With the worldwide shift towards feasible energy sources, the sunlight based charger producing industry in Bangalore has seen critical development and advancement lately. As a conspicuous player in this market, SuneaseSolar has arisen as a main producer, offering state of the art advancements and answers for satisfy the rising need for environmentally friendly power arrangements. This article investigates the scene of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore , digs into the vital elements and advances given by SuneaseSolar, and features the maintainability advantages of sunlight powered chargers. Moreover, it grandstands the upsides of picking SuneaseSolar for sunlight based charger arrangements, presents client tributes, and talks about future patterns and advancements molding the Bangalore sun powered charger market. 1. An Overview of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, also known as India's Silicon Valley, is also making a name for itself in the solar energy industry. The city's energetic tech culture and obligation to maintainability have made ready for a developing sun powered charger fabricating industry. Significance of Sun powered chargers in India's Energy Scene Sun powered chargers assume an essential part in India's shift towards sustainable power sources. With its plentiful daylight, India can possibly outfit sunlight based power for an enormous scope, decreasing reliance on non-renewable energy sources and moderating environmental change. 2. Outline of SuneaseSolar as a Main Maker Organization Foundation and History SuneaseSolar has arisen as an unmistakable player in Bangalore's sun powered charger fabricating scene. With an emphasis on development and quality, the organization has gained notoriety for conveying dependable and productive sunlight based arrangements. Scope of Sunlight powered charger Items Advertised SuneaseSolar offers a different scope of sunlight based charger items custom-made to meet different energy needs. From private roof frameworks to enormous scope business establishments, they take special care of a wide range of clients. 3. Key Highlights and Innovations Presented by SuneaseSolar High level Sunlight powered charger Plans and Materials SuneaseSolar values utilizing state of the art plans and materials to upgrade the proficiency and solidness of their sun powered chargers. By remaining on the ball, they guarantee clients get first class items that go the distance. Metrics for Efficiency and Performance When it comes to solar panels, efficiency is absolutely necessary. SuneaseSolar focuses on execution measurements to ensure ideal energy creation and cost reserve funds for their clients. With a sharp spotlight on result and dependability, they endeavor to expand the advantages of sun oriented power. 4. Maintainability and Ecological Effect of Sunlight based chargers Job of Sun powered Energy in Lessening Carbon Impression Sun powered energy assumes a urgent part in bringing down fossil fuel byproducts and battling environmental change. By bridling the force of the sun, sun powered chargers offer a perfect and manageable option in contrast to conventional energy sources, adding to a greener future. Reusing and Removal Practices for Sunlight powered chargers To address worries about the finish of-life pattern of sunlight powered chargers, SuneaseSolar carries out reusing and removal practices to limit natural effect. By advancing dependable waste administration, they guarantee that sun powered energy stays a genuinely economical answer for the long run. 5. Cost-Effectiveness and Return on Investment of SuneaseSolar's Solar Panel Solutions When it comes to solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, SuneaseSolar shines brightly like a diamond.

Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach—and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon— Aloud, she said, “I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle”—you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build—“Now I know that I was fighting for this valley”—it is my love for you that had kept me moving—“It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil”—my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face—“I am going back to fight for this valley—to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit—and to meet you again on the day when I’m able to deliver to you the whole of the world—or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life”—but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’m never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t—“I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor . . . even if I am never to see you again.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

Every man builds his world in his own image,” he said. “He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice. Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought—he, and to that extent, is a man and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They”—he pointed at his pupils—“made no concessions. This”—he pointed at the valley—“is the measure of what they preserved and of what they are. . . . Now I can repeat my answer to the question you asked me, knowing that you will understand it fully. You asked me whether I was proud of the way my three sons had turned out. I am more proud than I had ever hoped to be. I am proud of their every action, of their every goal—and of every value they’ve chosen.

WHY I AM A FATALITY I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable—a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses—a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood—that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my time, no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on EArth.

One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul. Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

The use of history is to give value to the present hour and its duty.’ But I’d add Goethe’s view, that the ‘best thing which we derive from history is the enthusiasm that it raises in us’.

Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

argue that the physical world matters no less today, but we are in denial about its power and relevance. We seek to control it, to hold it steady, and to marginalize it ideologically by worshipping Silicon Valley and elevating the value and power of information. We

What is the school like? First, let me set the stage. The school enrolls students from the age of 4 up. No one is too old, although most of our students are 19 or younger. The people in the school, no matter what age they are, are each doing what they want to do. Usually that means that some people are doing things with others, who can be of the most various of ages, and some people are doing things alone. Usually it means that most people are doing things not done in most other schools, and some are doing things that are done in other schools with a very unusual intensity and concentration. It more often means that children are teaching adults than that adults are teaching children, but most often people are learning and unconscious that “learning” is taking place. Doing what they choose to do is the common theme; learning is the by-product. It is first and foremost a place where students are free to follow their inner dictates. They are free to do what we all do when we have the time to, and what we all find to be most satisfactory—they play. Play is the most serious pursuit at Sudbury Valley. Some people play at games, and some play at things we who have more traditional educations are more comfortable with—writing or art or mathematics or music. But we are quite clear at Sudbury Valley that it is doing what you want to that counts! We have no curriculum and place no value on one pursuit over another. The reason that we are secure in feeling this way is that we constantly see that people play more and more sophisticated “games,” explore more and more deeply, that they constantly expand their knowledge of the world, and their ability to handle themselves in it. Children who play constantly do not draw an artificial line between work and play. In fact, you could say that they are working constantly if you did not see the joy in the place, a joy most usually identified with the pursuit of avocations. I

Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.

In the breadth of its impact, Wilder’s work—even in its bowdlerized, co-opted versions—has few parallels. It has shaped and inspired politicians across the decades. The second heir to the Little House fortune, Roger MacBride, ran for president as a Libertarian. Ronald Reagan wept over his TV tray in the White House watching his friend Michael Landon enact a blow-dried Simi Valley version of Wilder’s homespun pioneer values.9 Little House on the Prairie is the one book Sarah Palin’s family could remember her reading as a child.10 Saddam Hussein is said to have been a fan.11

The values that America stands for are superb; it’s what we do, especially in those places few Americans care about, like the Valley of the Caves, or south-central Somalia, that makes a mockery of these values.

They would need a logo for the app, something that instantly enticed users to download and use Picaboo. Reggie and Evan sat together and created the logo over the course of a few hours, going back and forth on ways to symbolize the disappearing nature of the app. They settled on a friendly ghost who was smiling and sticking out its tongue. Evan drew the ghost in Adobe InDesign while Reggie tossed in ideas. Reggie named the ghost Ghostface Chillah, after the Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah. Evan studied the hundred most popular apps in the app store and noticed that none had yellow logos. To make Picaboo stand out, he put the Ghostface Chillah logo on a bright yellow background. Reggie slapped the logo on Facebook and Twitter pages he made for the app. While Evan worked hard on the design and vision for the product and Bobby coded, Reggie contributed less. Plenty of successful Silicon Valley founders do not write code; but they play other roles, relentless hustling in the early days of their companies, dominating nontechnical jobs like marketing and user growth. Reggie simply wasn’t doing that. Having recently turned twenty-one, he wanted to enjoy the Los Angeles nightlife, and he stayed out into the wee hours of the morning. While Evan and Bobby lived the plot of Silicon Valley, Reggie was more Entourage. Evan had always remembered and valued what Clarence Carter had told him when he worked at Red Bull, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.” His co-founders felt Reggie was not pulling his weight, and it was beginning to cause resentment.

It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.

So I lean over carefully, and there, piled a foot high against the sides of the metal bin, are beat-up U.S. quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Next to the filling bin is another bin, a full bin of coins that fell from the pockets of Americans who had more pressing matters than loose change. According to Jack, an average junked U.S. automobile contains $1.65 in loose change when it’s shredded. If that’s right—and from what I see, I believe that it must be—then the 14 million cars scrapped in good years (good for automobile recyclers, at least) in the United States contain within them more than $20 million in cash just waiting to be recovered. Understandably, Huron Valley isn’t interested in revealing just how much money they recover from U.S. automobiles (they have a deal whereby they return the currency to the U.S. Treasury for a percentage of the original value), but David is willing to note that the coin recovery system has “paid for itself.” It occurs to me that Huron Valley has happened upon the most brilliant of businesses: one whose product is money itself! That is, rather than make something that needs to be marketed for money, Huron Valley just makes money.