A Quantum Immortal

Hi all,

We are making a lot of progress in ReverseFunder, and are looking for a strong 3rd co-founder with background in bizdev/marketing.
Know anyone relevant? Please refer him/her to ron@reversefunder.com

Last week I published a poll, calling out to people to tell me, anonymously, what is my biggest flaw.

My reasons for doing this were that I wanted to get to know myself better, and try and improve. Allowing people the space to speak out honestly, and only asking about my flaws, gave them a safe space to speak their mind.

The results are in.

1. You tend to act before you think things through
2. Very naive
3. Take yourself rather seriously

I would like to say thank you to the three individuals who agreed to give me feedback. I appreciate it a lot.

Even though I had asked for this feedback … hearing criticism is rather difficult. My natural instinct is to try and defend myself in my head, and “explain to these people why they’re wrong”. It’s amazing how much we humans need to be loved and appreciated by others, which is why hearing anything negative about ourselves is so difficult to hear. Still I believe truth is the only way to grow.

I can’t leave this post without a retort to each of these individuals. I’m trying not to be defensive here, but rather just speak my mind:

1. True. I do act before I think. Thank you for pointing this out. As you said, it is also an upside, but I can try and maintain the positive influence of this trait while minimizing the downsides… try to adjust my “action parameters” and recognize when something is sensitive and deserves more thought and not straight out action.
2. True, I am very naive. I like it this way! I prefer to be naive than cynical. I might get screwed or make blunders because of it once in a while … but for me, the upside in being naive is too great to pass up.
3. And finally yes, I tend to take myself too seriously sometimes. Don’t we all? Luckily I complement this with not taking myself seriously at all at other times 🙂

Now I’ll finish with a call to the reader – what do you think of this experiment? Would you be interested in doing such an experiment on yourself, and get some honest to God feedback from your friends?

Always be growing,

Ron

Do you want a quick fix of startup juice? Want to read a bunch of books on entrepreneurship, but just don’t have the time?

Then this is for you:

• http://www.blockshelf.com/
• http://www.blockshelf.com/the-lean-startup/
• http://www.blockshelf.com/startup-reid-hoffman/
• http://www.blockshelf.com/zero-to-one/
• http://www.blockshelf.com/rework/
• http://www.blockshelf.com/4-hour-workweek/

I recently came across a short “paper” I wrote in 2006 titled Quantifying Love.

It’s a pseudo-mathematical non-serious attempt to quantify what love is.

Pull requests welcome 🙂

P.S

I learned a lot in the last 8 years. The paper reflects what I thought 8 years ago, not necessarily my current way of thinking. Read it with a grain of salt, if you will.

I need your help for 30 seconds. Please.

Update – and the results are in.

Hi all,

whateverorigin.org is an open source projects I started several years ago as a weekend project (github). Apparently, people are using it in production, while I have zero time to maintain it.

I am looking for an equal partner to join and help maintain the project.
This partner would fix a few ongoing issues, and can develop new features if they want. This partner would receive 50% of the ownership of the project.

The project is currently completely non-profit, it costs zero to run and makes zero revenue. However if it would make any revenue in the future, that would be split 50-50 with the new developer.

Profit aside, this could be a great opportunity for someone to get some production experience and engage with users. Be in touch at ron@reversefunder.com if you’re interested.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, just officially came out as gay. He wasn’t in the closet, as his friends knew about his sexual orientation, but he felt it’s important to speak out and broadcast this. He said:

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.

Now, those of you who know me know that I have no big need of privacy. I broadcast major aspects of my life over various social platforms, and people close to me know I have (almost) zero secrets. I too have thought about broadcasting my sexual/romantic preferences. I even wrote a blog post about it two years ago … and decided not keep it in my drafts and not to publish it, in order to protect the privacy of the people close to me. But following Tim’s post, I too feel the need to let the world know. If this post can help and inspire others, then I am obligated to write it.

If you have a concept of Too Much Information feel free to stop right here, I don’t want to force this on anyone.

—

Still with me? Great. So you will learn that:

• I’m polyamorous. This means I can feel and exercise romantic love and sexual passion to more than one person at the time. This doesn’t mean I have to do this, but rather that I want to do this, and will strive to make this my reality. Right now I am living in a mostly monogamous marriage with my wife, but I definitely see the possibility of this changing in the future.
• I’m somewhat bisexual. I’m mostly attracted to women, by I have felt romantic and sexual attraction to men, transgenders, and people in general, and have had a few sexual experiences with one particular man. Some people like to call this preference “pansexual“. I think I’m about 1.5 on the Kinsey Scale.
• I’m a self-defined slut. This means I enjoy sex and don’t think that sex without love is wrong, and if “in a perfect world” I would have sex with any person I fancy.
• I love kink. Not to say I don’t like “normal” sex, but I also like various types of kinks, including BDSM, humiliation, power plays, as well as more activities that I don’t feel the need to elaborate on here (but ask me if you’re curious). This doesn’t mean I practice all these forms of kink that I enjoy, most of them remain fantasy … but I’m not ruling out anything.
• I think that there is nothing wrong in any exchange between consenting adults. In particular, selling or buying sexual services is ok, and I’ve been on the purchasing end of that in a few strip clubs. Don’t get me wrong, the situation where poor girls feel they have to sell their body for money is bad. I wish everybody had enough money to never do anything they don’t want to (like sell their time and work in a dead end job). But the current reality is that there are people who feel the best thing for them is to strip, lapdance, or even have sex for money. By taking the moral high-ground of shunning these people or these acts, you just condemn them to a poorer existence. Prostitution should be legalized.
• I’ve smoked weed and enjoyed a couple of space cakes, and have lived to tell the tale. Up until a year or too, I was literally afraid of any form of drug including cannabis, and have never tried any kind of drug, ever. In the last 1-2 years I’ve sampled cannabis in a few forms, and it was a positive experience for me. It opened my mind, and haven’t left me an addict, nor did it make me try other drugs.
• I believe that there are no bad deeds in the world. Hitler went to heaven. Love is infinite, and God is infinite love. It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain this, I’ll reserve the discussion to another post (see in meantime on Quora).

I am very very fortunate to live in an environment where I can publicly tell the world all of the above, and still be loved by my friends, still be able to work for a living, still have a roof over my head. Some people out there can’t. If the world knew them for what they are, they employers would fire them, their parents would kick them out of their homes, their loved ones would divorce them. I thank my wife Aya, my family, and my friends for loving me for who I am.

I may attract some heat over this post, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay.