We’ve been married ten years now. I am ecstatically happy to have a lifelong partnership with my best friend in the world. We have two hilarious, beautiful little girls together. I’m a lucky man.

One thing bugged me during the show, though. Two of the investors openly discussed freezing out Barbara Corcoran, and made an offer for 40% of the company for $105,000 stake, which was a pretty good offer. Mrs. Quillin then left to confer with her husband; it’s a big decision and obviously she want to share the news with her partner. Well, while she was gone Daymond John asked  Barbara to get back in on it, so he could snag another 10% equity.

Now, it’s the Shark Tank, not the clownfish tank, so that’s just the way they feed, but still…

Mrs. Quillin returned, and upon hearing the offer of $105,000 for 50% instead of 40%, said: “That’s the quickest ten percent I ever lost.” She took the offer.

I do not know for sure how I would have reacted: I wasn’t there under the bright studio lights, across from investors/ potential partners who were making a solid offer. The pressure must have been immense: these people can open doors in weeks that would take years of effort to open, for most of us. 
Yet, I did wake up with one formulation of a response to the equity-grab that might have worked:  “Thank you for being so interested in this profitable idea that you’re willing to add a third partner. And I really admired your offer of 40% stake between the two of you (Kevin Harrington and John). What does make me wonder is the logic behind the equity stake change: you’ve added a partner. Your cash outlay has thereby been reduced to $35,000: your risk is that much lower. So… could you help me see how your reduction of risk translates to my losing of a higher percentage stake in my business?”

Ah, who am I kidding? I probably would have said, perhaps regretting it later: “Excuse me, you’re reducing your capital risk but you want me to sacrifice more ownership? Last time I looked, the less you risk, the less I give up. I’d be willing to give 50% for $132,000.”

Still, I think Mrs. Quillin stands to make quite a lot from this idea for the rest of her life once she gets her patents. Her presentation was top-notch and clearly impressed the whole group. If she ever pursues an exit from Lipstick Remix (I am betting a cosmetics firm could buy her patent for a princely sum) there should be a lot of company board positions waiting for her.

I hope the investment she got on the show creates a lot of jobs.

 ”Amgen’s osteoporosis drug Prolia not even approved yet,but co has full-pg Parade mag ad:”Discover Truth About Osteo” $AMGN via @mhuckman.”

If you’re discussing something Google is doing with its algorithm or Google labs, why not include $GOOG? If you’re discussing Windows 7 or Bing, why not include $MSFT? Or $RHT if you’re tweeting about Linux OS? Like something Amazon did? When you tweet, include $AMZN.
In this case it serves as a type of hashtag in speaking to a larger readership (such as the people following conversations about those stocks in their portfolio). The twitter third-party app “Stocktwits,” created by Howard Lindzon, which is incorporated within Tweetdeck, serves as a clearinghouse for all stock ticker symbol-related tweets.

Obviously this should only be used if you are actually conversing about the company in question: you’re providing news and information about the company, either first-hand or by repeating from a news source, so this can useful to investors. If you’re an officer of the company, there may be reasons why you might not want to include your ticker symbol in tweets about internal news, projects, ventures: possibly SEC communications regulations involved there, about how and when news can be transmitted to avoid the appearance of a ”solicitation to buy stock.”

But for most of us, a legitimate value-add to the inclusion of the stock symbol is knowing you’re joining a larger conversation and can add something to it. Your reward for the effort is a much, much higher probability of your tweet being indexed by the ‘bots. If your tweet links specifically to a relevant blog post, this has SEO value (provided your shortener is the right type).

Lastly, if you’re doing work with a non-profit and you want to broadcast thanks to a publicly-traded sponsor, while also promoting the non-profit’s work to new readers, including the ticker symbol in an appropriate context within the tweet can help you  accomplish both.

(To tune of “Running to Stand Still” by U2 [which is about addiction!])

And so she logged in
Logged in from the bus she was riding in
Sayin’ I gotta tweet something about where I’m going
Step on the cluetrain
Pull my career out of the drain
Maybe… blog from a plane while in flight
Singing ha, LOL LO-L
LMAO LOL
R-O-T-F-L

Tweet the spin
Better, the place of our brand….
I see seven channels
But I only see one vid’s out
You got to blog that man’s feelings
Talk without speaking
TWEET without USING ALL CAPS
You know I took that update from the friendfeed stream
Then I linked it back to here
Singing ha, LOL LO-L
LMAO LOL
ROTFL

She reads through the tweets with her eyes turning red
Under a black-hat tagcloud in her brain

In through a netbook

She brings me wild non sequiturs
Stolen from the feed: she’s retweeting, she’s retweeting…
And no idea has entered her mind.
She will suffer the blogger chill,
She’s writing against… her will…

Anybody interested in recording this with me? Leave me a comment!

I disagree with this analysis. Luck is “probability taken personally.”  As commonly perceived: good luck is when things go your way, bad luck is when they don’t. From that perspective, the idea that we have all made our own luck is untenable.

The only thing between us and bad luck, in the final reckoning, is preparation: the actions our minds enable us to make to contend against random circumstance. Good luck seems to accrue to the prepared. Ingenuity, creativity, knowledge, wisdom… and taking action. Many times, however, this is far from being enough. It’s hardly fair to look at the victims of chaos and sudden disaster and declare: ”you make your own luck, good or bad.”

A child with a glioblastoma tumor did not make her own luck. A widow whose police-officer husband was killed by a crazy man in an ambush did not make her own luck. The workers killed in the Twin Towers over 8 years ago did not make their own luck, nor did their kids.Update 1/14/10: The victims of the earthquake in Haiti… did not make their own luck.

Most of us do the best we can, but the majority of objective reality is out of our control. My philosophy is that our best strategy in life is to learn as much as we can, experiment, focus on what we can do and what we want to do, and take consistent actions that produce the results we want. Reading most of Chris’ work, I think he feels the same, so I’m only addressing that one sentence about luck….

Most of us face adversities and overcome them, others overcome most of them but at some point become overwhelmed (some people, a statistical anomaly, will go through life never facing any significant adversity). Things will not always go according to plan. But if they do, and we find ourselves part of that sliver of population with things always going our way, I hope we don’t ascribe that to an innate, preternatural control of destiny, making our own good luck. That’s just as irrational as saying the world is out to get us (and in psychological terms it’s a parallel manifestation of the same malady). It’s a random world and our only defenses are our minds. So then, it would be rational to say, “we can influence our luck, good or bad, with our actions and minds.”

I’ve heard “Life is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you react to it.” I know those specific quantities are poetic license, but the central idea, that life is random and our only hope is wise action, is far more rational than the idea that: ”100% of what happens to you in Life is due to your thoughts.”

Of course, other literature points to even earlier sources, but I offer this… simply because I haven’t read it anywhere else:

There never was a  simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, relig- ion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more. Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.
When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real. That is why there are night-lights. Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.
“Yes, he is rather cocky,” Wendy admitted with regret. Her mother had been questioning her.
“But who is he, my pet?”
“He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.”
At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted
whether there was any such person.
“Besides,” she said to Wendy, “he would be grown up by this time.”
“Oh no, he isn’t grown up,” Wendy assured her confidently, “and he is just my size.” She meant that he was her size in both mind and body; she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew it. 

Not many people that I know of went into business for the primary purpose of creating jobs for others. The goal is usually income/profit: jobs may be created as a side effect, a means to an end. To a few, the good of job creation is more likely to be a “necessary evil” factor for making profits.

This why I was so impressed to watch the story of a young man who had invented an alternative to wheat-based playdough using a patented soy-based mixture: his single-minded focus on creating jobs in his hometown, Bloomfield, IN was inspiring.

The product, Soy-yer Dough, is for kids with wheat allergies, and/or celiac disease, apparently a sizeable market. Sold out of his home, he has moved 19,000 units. Although not a frequent TV watcher, I caught the segment the ABC show “The Shark Tank” that featured this innovator.

In negotiations with the sharks (ABC’s term for people who risk their money in exchange for equity), his initial rebuffs were refusals to take jobs from his community. The investors were eager to get ahold of his patent for licensing his idea to Play-Doh, which had made a preliminary offer on his patent for $500,000, before he even went before the Shark Tank panel. He didn’t budge on yielding control of the business until he was assured that negotiations would include bringing jobs back to Bloomfield; the investors also persuaded him that their combined capital could do even more for his hometown’s employment. It was downright heartwarming to watch…. after the deal was made, the inventor, Sawyer Sparks, addressed his neighbors back home: “This is for you, Bloomfield.” Provincial? I think not.  Think about what Sawyer was willing to do: it’s every bit as much “giving back to community” as a corporate gift for a philanthropy.

When I was a kid, I don’t recall fantasizing about creating jobs for others. I wish I had. Like lots of other pre-teen kids, any imaginings about a future career ran the gamut from fame & fortune as an actor or rock star, to adventure as a fireman or soldier, to authoring as I got older…”What do you want to be when you grow up?” for most kids is not: “A source of jobs.”  Too bad, too.  Because it doesn’t appear to be too common even in adults.

Walk the halls of a business school and ask people what they want to do with their lives, what they want as a legacy. I think, as probably do you, that not terribly many would speak passionately about adding to the payroll. True, many of them would think about growing their business and impacting their city, but you don’t hear “I want to hire, hire and hire some more” every day, do you?

A good business is usually the creation of innovative individuals, who grow it and might end up opening the doors to new employees, even if that’s the last thing they wanted! More people able to feed their families, build or buy houses, buy furnishings, art, books, games, classes, trade in their community. The exchange of value leading to even more value… That scary unemployment number affects us all, even if we’re not in the ranks of the laid-off. The job creator thus affects us all too… and thee people seem to be relatively rare creatures.

Not long ago I read an interview with successful husband-and-wife  entrepreneurs, a really nice couple, whose work has become famous and whose site receives massive traffic. If they decided to, they could monetize their notoriety, scale their work, and create scores of jobs… and they know it. When asked about growing the business, they replied, point blank: “We would have to hire people to grow the company, and we don’t want to hire.”

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but serves to show that success in creating a market for a good product, does not equal creating jobs, necessarily. It takes an individual act of will to create them, in addition to the quality of their business offering… the unemployment number will not go down without individuals making that decision. It can be a complex undertaking, with regulations, costs, risks, and potential for stress. Once the payroll grows, if things slow down, the entrepreneur is faced with the choice of operating at a loss, or terminating some of the positions.  All the more reason to say the person that takes the risk is courageous.

Don’t more people use the terms: getting a job, finding a job, landing a job, than creating a job? I think owning your own business is a huge step in that direction: you’ve created a “job” for yourself. How can the entrepreneur be supported, to encourage the willpower to invest capital and energy to grow beyond solo entrepreneurship?

Most of us are asked to donate our money or time, or donate services or product-in-kind to support charitable causes. You’ll hear that called “giving back to the community.”

I can’t think of an individual who gives more back to the community than the person who sets his or her mind to expand opportunities for others through direct employment. Every job created is an achievement, a victory. What if disadvantaged inner city kids grew up thinking about creating a business, about hiring their friends, before they started thinking about finding a job?

People like Sawyer Sparks should give us hope. We need a lot more like him.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”
-William Hutchinson Murray,   The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.

Originally posted in Biznik’s discussion forum, revised to flesh out some ideas.

To help her see how this looks to other people, I made up a story about a girl called Sandy Greenfinger… a girl who starts losing friends due to her habit.  her finger gets stuck in her nose for days. Then in frustration while she’s trying to sprinkle some pepper on her food, she sneezes her finger back out… “and she never picked her nose again. And they all lived happily ever after.”

It worked for a few days. We were at Disney on Ice “Worlds of Fantasy” at Comcast Arena in Everett (a lot of fun by the way, big thanks to Jeff and Julie Mitchell for the tickets), as she was watching the show, she started again. We gave her tissues, but still…

So I made up a little song that I sang on the way home (she laughed a lot):

Oh, please don’t bring her
Sandy Greenfinger
Is there an issue
With using a tissue?

I asked for a yes
and I got nose
Oh, please, please don’t bring her
Sandy Greenfinger…

Recently a friend on Facebook, Jeff Collins (myHaberdasher.com), posted a status update about his intention to donate bone marrow. Several people gave praise for his action (which he definitely deserved). One wrote: “That is one of the most selfless, courageous things I have ever heard.”
He responded:

Donating bone marrow isn’t what people think it is, i.e. painful. They do not have to tap into the pelvic bone anymore. Over a few days they give you an injection of Filgrastim which causes increased stem cell production & they then flow through your blood stream. They do apheresis (like in platelet donation) to cycle your blood through a machine where they collect what they need and send the rest back to me. It’s a few hours off work and some flu-like achiness but that is about it.

It’s easy to get on the registry because all they need is a cheek swab to get your DNA. And it is one in a bunch to even get called. Here’s how you can look into registering: http://www.psbc.org/programs/marrow.htm

What he did was compassionate and caring: someone is going to live because he was willing to sacrifice time, take medication, endure some pain and discomfort, and give his life’s blood to someone not close to him.

An organization called the Institute for Justice recently began making the case that many more patients are in need of bone marrow donations than are available; there are too few people making the sacrifices Jeff did.

If they could only be legally compensated, the IJ contends, more people would do it:

From  IJ’s Bone Marrow Case: An Intro:

Bone marrow transplantation is a lifesaving treatment for 70 deadly blood diseases, including cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.  Most people who need a transplant need one from a stranger, and tens of thousands have died because they lacked donors.  Our clients want to increase the number of unrelated donors by having a charity offer them a $3,000 scholarship, a housing allowance, or gift to the donor’s favorite charity.  Unfortunately, using scholarships to save lives is considered organ-selling under NOTA, a major federal crime….

Congress didn’t intend to criminalize compensation for renewable cells such as blood or sperm.  In fact, the Conference Report the House and Senate jointly sent to President Reagan with the bill he signed said so.Congress included bone marrow in the statute by mistake.  A “bone marrow” transplant involves the collection of immature blood cells, not the removal of an organ or tissues.  Most marrow cells are now collected using the same equipment and methods for blood donation.  Donating marrow cells is safe and they quickly replenish themselves just like donated blood.  Bone marrow wasn’t discussed in the legislative hearings and was inserted in the statute at the end of the drafting process, probably by a staffer….

Hard to imagine anyone on the floor of the House or Senate arguing against this… however the IJ is taking a judicial rather than legislative route. I hope someone in Congress decides to take this on: if another member attempted to employ a “slippery-slope” fallacy, the fact that it’s not much different from giving blood should stifle any animus. Who could be bombastic about preventing an outpatient procedure that causes no negative health effects?

The compensation is pretty tame, too: scholarships, credits, or charitable donations. I would support legal compensation for bone marrow donation even if it were plain old cash!  It’s purely rational. Objective reality should factor in at least the time-cost to the donors. Many sick and hurting people would be helped by lifting the ban.

In the meantime, I hope more people follow Jeff’s lead.

Here are some other articles about the case:

• IJ’s Bone Marrow Case: History of NOTA
• IJ’s Bone Marrow Case: Judical Engagement, Not Activism
• IJ’s Bone Marrow Case: Rational Basis Test