i owe you something i can't explain:
the mass of answers here are all brilliant in their ways,
but they are touching my memory of a very long time ago, in my twenties, when i first was throwing my all into business, my own startup, which i was indescribably lucky to keep from trashing..
i had the benefit of insane experience around me. By accident of a very long story, i had 200 years of multi national board level experience advising me, and i started silly young.
And i sounded nothing as good as, but really like pretty much all of the above.
Now, is many many years later.
Please nobody take this in any way meaning anything down on the true effusion of positive comment, above,
but for me it is a nostalgia trip,
i just got reconnected with a barely twenty something me
the outpouring here is amazing
i so wish there was anything like such a community, anyplace, the poles i'd relocate..
.. the energies i read above, are what i yearned for, when starting out
and yet despite i had the most amazing advice, counsel, business partners even, i only now realize to the extent at which they nurtured me, were patient with me, and how- long after each of those great guys retired or we parted ways - only now do i actually sound a little like they did, and it is so unlike the brilliance here, so much tempered, so much becalmed by blows and booms i never could have imagined, so much moderated by - not really cynicism, but by simply the experience of years distilling everything to the shortest short hand I could... Now i know how hard it was for my mentors to expand arguments they had reduced to great simplicity. I seem to have come full circle.
Oh, this isn't coming across how I wanted. But i mean without the slightest ill comment, to say how reading this discussion reminds me of me, what i wanted for colleagues, when young, but now i find, decades later, i think entirely differently, and feel so distant from the first energies I tried to let run in the world, and i rather have become what i once thought was cynicism in my elders. I hope i've not appeared cynical. But I really really want to say to cosmorocket, whose life may be changed by this, that a great deal of the replies here are exactly what my mentors railed against, were aghast against, when i expressed myself similarly. That does not invalidate any replies, but without addressing any individually, i really see the critical elements as missing in the debate entirely, which i note in my above comment. And my company survived because I was babysat by guys retired form boards of multinationals (fluke, fluke times a million, very difficult to believe, my story, really) who somehow tolerated me. But I was wrong, and i sounded like - rather I wanted to sound like but also be as confident, as what seems to majority here. And it took me all this time to learn why that ain't the full ticket, by some long way.