Belief that getting rich will somehow solve all your problems is wrong. You will not be able to avoid wasteful and irresponsible behavior unless you practice good decision making while on the road there.

I’ve noticed people take a liking to stories about experiences that are not the norm…. it intrigues and attracts them to you. A piece of paper outlining shit you have done doesn’t blow em away. You cant tell a story of how you studied 20 hours a week or mastered a textbook. You can with real life experiences outside the classroom.

I totally acknowledge the fact that I am a perfectionist, and am equally cognizant that on more than one occasion a fear of failure has limited my actions. Even with smaller problems – social interactions, per se – where long-term affects were small but still unpleasant, I was suffering for my resistance.

So I really forced myself to let go, care a little bit less and throw a bit more caution to the wind. And as I made my mistakes and learned from them, I also learned how to laugh at those errors and land on my feet; any degree of adaptability I may have in a given situation, I totally credit to those early experiences.

But I am sorry that you didn’t find anything else worth blogging about from the trip up the sea.

i talk about “evidence” in every post i write. so let’s discuss it – because you’re clearly not seeing it.

for example, my post today about the ongoing meltdown of the economy is one gigantic discussion of data about value destruction.

or when i say starbucks has destroyed value because of stale dna, that’s also a statement rooted in evidence (ie, check the share price).

here’s the point. good, evil, etc, aren’t simplifications. building real businesses around them is the challenge of the next decade.

there will be quant evidence when they *are* built, and we can compare many of them to one another statistically. but if you want to know *how* to build them, you need to begin with logic that’s a bit less statistical.

that relates to taleb’s point: the assumptions we make about what constitutes evidence in the first place are what limit our thinking.

what can you show your dad to make him understand? kiva, threadless, last.fm, grameen, take your pick.

But I’m still learning it myself. I am digesting your post…

But dude, the reason he’s not supplying the empirical data you’re used to is because most of it doesn’t apply. For instance, how do you valuate Craiglist? Is it on revenue? I wouldn’t think so because they’re purposely not exploiting all the revenue they could potentially have – for the sake of long term sustainability. But at the same time, they’ve decimated the classifieds industry. Good vs. Evil. Umair thinking is about those very strange and very specific types of decisions and markets. Does that make sense?

Do you want empirics for Tucker’s messageboard? I’m not joking, it makes less than $1,000 a month. Without it though, he wouldn’t have a bestselling book or be making a movie. Or my site, my traffic is actually really low. So you could try to compare it empirically with other sites and decide how important or valuable it is. But you’d be missing the fact that I’ve been fortunate enough to make a name for myself in a very hard to reach demographic. One that people spend tons of money to try to get at.

So yes, empirical data is important. If you look for it in the right cases – Wikipedia, Craigslist, MySQL, a few of Google’s programs, and so on – there’s plenty of it.