The Mattopia Blahg

25 August 2013: Part II

No sooner do I load up my quotes from Lincoln than I turn on Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and get a mindful.

First there was the interview with Sara Blakely. She founded a women's underwear company called Spanx and now she's a billionaire.

That's cool. But what's really cool is how her father encouraged her to fail. It's a funny/sweet little part of the interview, toward the end, that really resounded with me. Her dad would be disappointed if his kids didn't fail. It's a logic that runs counter to today's "everyone's a winner" mentality. At one point, Blakely recalls, as a schoolgirl she tried out for something and really sucked at it. She told her dad about it and he high-fived her.

Why?

This is the best part. Because if you're not failing, you're not trying.

Awesome. And that's only one part of Blakely's great story. It's a story, dare I say, of Mattopian proportions. Without adversity, there's no innovation. Without failure, there's no learning.

Check out Fareed's blog entry and more about Blakely at Spanx.

Then, after Blakely's interview, was an interesting bit about Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and Ayatollah of Iran. He ranks Les Miserables as the greatest novel ever written. Hugo's work is considered a masterpiece in Mattopia, so I'm going to have to read more about what Fareed describes as a "softening" of the political figure and the deeper history that led Iran to its current state of international relations. Check out the full feature article on Foreign Affairs.

25 August 2013

My parents amassed a huge collection of folksy advice, witticisms, visual mindbenders that forced people to study the image in order to figure out what's going on, and good ol' timeless quotes. While sifting through some of those papers this weekend, I stumbled on the following quote from Abraham Lincoln. These words apply now more than ever, seems to me.