You could put Plato, Socrates, Gandhi, WikiPedia and even Buddha in the room with me and if they claimed something else, then I'd be right and they'd be wrong. Though of course they wouldn't disagree.
Freedom is the lack of fear! Period.I know this since I have experienced this myself lately. Freedom is defined as the opportunity to do what *you* want to do and not what *someone else* is *telling* you to do. And when shit hits the fan there is only one thing that eliminates your ability to do what you want and that is fear. This goes so deep that it paralyzes the entire human race and stalls innovation and all things that are good! Fear is the creator of wars, famin, hunger and greed! Everything that's bad can be traced back to fear!
So if you want to be truly free then you must first eliminate all fear within. And I mean ALL fear! You must realize that there is no "war on terror". Muslims are not terrorists! "War on terror" is an artificial word explicitly constructed to take away YOUR freedoms and enslave YOU! You must also realize that there is no death. And this is not a matter of "believes". It's the plain and simple truth!
You must also realize that humans are all just one consciousness, subjectively experiencing the world through a different set of eyeballs. And the notion of that we're actually separated is nothing but the biggest halluscination ever put onto us. Yet again, this is not something you choose to believe or not, this is plain simple truth! So if you "don't believe" this then you haven't discovered the truth!
And when you realize that we're all just one, there is no death, and you don't need others help or grace -
then all your fears are gone! Then you are
FREE!And when you are FREE you *always* end up doing great fucking things! Gandhi was free, Jesus was free, Muhammed was free! And so can you be!
I just updated myself on
Paul Graham which I truly admire, and I saw he had written three new "essays" since the last time I visited him.
One is called
The Other Half Of the Artist Ship and is about how big companies creates bureaucracy to "protect" themselves against risk. But the actual results are that they end up missing opportunities and inflates their costs.
The second is called
The High-Res Society and is about how the world is just now experiencing a silent revolution from big, huge structures and into smaller and more adaptable units that are more agile and can easier execute on changes in conditions.
The third one was however the most uplifting one and is called
Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession and is about how startups no longer need VC money and if the founders themselves discovers this then VCs have played their role and will instantly become extinct!
I say uplifting for two reasons, first of all because chasing VC money is something which I have done myself and it is really fucking hard! It drains all your energy and you have to answer a lot of really dumb questions! And you probably fail when doing it! It totally sucks! And you often end up with these really stupid questions like "have you considered patenting your product". Believe me when I say that merely *saying* the word "patent" to an Open Source Evangelist is NOT very clever.
The other reason it is uplifting is that if you believe that you are dependent upon something or someone then what you actually have is FEAR for what happens if whatever you feel "dependant upon" goes away. And this takes away your *freedom*! This makes you "unfree" and trapped in a pattern you shouldn't really obey by.
However, the one thing all those three essays have in common is
DO NOT BE AFRAID! YOU are right, all those suckers telling you what to believe and what the truth is are WRONG! YOU are right!
37Signals is one of the current startups I admire the most. Not because of their RoR Framework or their applications, but because they have discovered that they "can survive". They have discovered that they don't need VC money. They don't need to do an IPO. And they don't need a big organization to be successful. In fact according to themselves
they don't even need to build anything else then what they themselves need!
This is one of the key elements of the current financial meltdown in fact. It's like a Circus Elephant which have gone wild one too many times and stampeeded over his audience killing spectators until his audience has understood that they need to bring him down and kill him. Just like the "economy". The more it melts, the more we as human beings realize that we WILL survive anyway. And that we
don't really need the economy to survive. All we need is to be able to cover our own expenses, and if our income is small then our expenses must be small. Kind of like 37Signals who for the first years of existance had small salaries and wooden chairs. Though I bet 10 years form now they will be far better of then the most of us. And that *without* taking VC money!
I truly hope Paul Graham is right and that the "next big startup" ala Google or something does it as a privately held company with absolutely no VC money at all... And without doing an IPO... What a rush that would be... How much more *free* the world would be then... ;)
BE FREE!
.t