I’m speaking at Gonzaga University today. Two 2-hour sessions, up to 200 people per session. That’s big. I really, really, really want this to go well…
Something clicked yesterday about the way I think. I’m really really bad at remembering facts, which has always puzzled me because I’ve done well academically. But I think that success comes from being really good at understanding the underlying broad concepts. Not sure yet how this is going to affect my life, but I’m writing it down before I forget it.
Since Craig began his caveman diet and I tagged along for the ride, we can’t seem to keep bananas in the house. Between smoothies, fried bananas, peanut butter banana toast, and general banana snacking, vast quantities are consumed every day. We figured the four bunches we bought last week would have lasted us, but they ran out days ago and we even ran through our frozen banana reserves.
And that’s why we brought 60 bananas back from the grocery store today. We’re hoping they last us through to next week.
I was invited to attend Gerald Pollack’s talk Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From The Water’s Edge at the University of Washington yesterday. It was the 32nd annual UW faculty address and as I was already on campus for steel drum practice, I dropped by.
It was an interesting talk with some compelling evidence under certain very common conditions, water behaves like a gel. In fact, if Pollack is correct, it’s possible that most of the water in the universe is in a gel form, rather than a solid, liquid, or gas.
Obviously, if true, this would be revolutionary research, which may be part of the reason I have reservations about the talk. Most of the people who saw the lecture with me were skeptical as well. Without the weight of an academic institution behind it, the research sounds straight up pseudosciency. But his results have been published in peer-reviewed journals and independently confirmed.
The biggest question for me is if this is really a paradigm shift in how we think about water, why isn’t anyone at the more prestigious universities looking into it? A number of people suggested that academia is slow to embrace new ideas, but my experience at Berkeley was the opposite – professors get really excited at the opportunity to jump on new research topics.
Craig just finished reading Steve Jobs’ biography, in which Jobs fails spectacularly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars before striking it huge and becoming a billionaire. It does make me feel a lot better about failure and pursuing my own career – what I can’t figure out is financially how to stay afloat in the meantime.
I have a number of ideas that could potentially turn into a profitable career, but they all have a fairly long time horizon. In the meantime, I’ve got about 10 weeks before I’m going to have to tap into my investment accounts, which is not something I want to do with the stock market currently plunging. I’m getting really worried.
In the meantime, every dollar I make keeps me solvent a little longer. I think the solution is to focus hard on my best opportunity for short-term profit, i.e. public speaking. I’m speaking at Gonzaga in a week and half and it’s essential that I parlay the event into more gigs.
That, or fail spectacularly. Hey, it worked for Steve Jobs.
