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You are poor because you have no ambition.



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Being myopic to opportunity
Looking down on opportunities
Lacking understanding
Failing to act quickly enough
You are poor, because you have no ambition.




Juliet Wu Shihong








Juliet Wu Shihong

You are poor because you lack foresight.
You are poor because you cannot overcome your cowardice.
You are poor because you lack the courage and determination.
With ambition you can overcome all inferiority and maximise your potential!



St Mary’s Church, San Francisco







Virtually all acts of greatness are the work of an ensemble.

Keith Yamashita

Myth of Reality

August 27, 2014 — Leave a comment

But the myth is in fact a myth. “Reality” is not fixed—it’s a phenomenon that arises in language. The world does not speak, only we do. Each moment’s meaning “occurs” against a background of understanding, and how the world “occurs” to us lives in language—it’s there that access to restoring our power lies. From there, we can reveal and dismantle old assumptions about the way things have been or the way we thought they had to be. Reality is declarative, interpretive, and actionable—we have dominion in the world of saying. Recognizing that shifts our relationship to the world. It doesn’t just lead to a different view, it gives us hands-on access to a world that’s malleable and open to being invented. It’s where transformation lives.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

My son recently entered college, so I’ve thought often lately about my own undergraduate days at the University of California at Santa Cruz and what remains of them in my world view. If I had to pick just one thing I took away from those four years it would be existentialism. 

The word “existentialism” is much misused and for many people calls to mind gloomy film noirs, smoky cafes on the Boulevard St. Germain and impenetrable texts, but at its heart is a really simple precept. We are born free; we make our own choices; and we are responsible. Or as Jean-Paul Sartre, who created the term, put it: Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Sartre also coined the slogan “existence precedes essence,” which contains the core of the philosophy in just those three words. No generic account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself. In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being—what makes you who you are—is not fixed by your type but by what you make of yourself, what you become.

The relevance to free agency is clear. Outside organizational life, you are on your own, the possibilities are unlimited, and you are responsible for your own successful outcomes based on the choices you make and the actions you take. Whether you find that prospect liberating or terrifying says a great deal about your fitness for the freelance life. 

I can’t claim any degree of existential scholarship, and to be honest, when I picked up Sartre’s seminal work Being and Nothingness for the first time in 30 years, I found it pretty tough sledding. Fortunately, people more clever than I have reduced his knotty prose to an actionable rationale. Jay Ogilvy, a co-founder of the Global Business Network, devised this list:

Five Principles of Existential Strategy


Ogilvy created the list for companies, so let me offer a little tweaking for solo practitioners. Finitude is the core concept because it is all about making the tough choices between multiple possibilities. The first temptation free agents face is to say “yes” to every opportunity that comes their way. We do this because we worry about passing up the revenue, but also because we don’t want to miss out on something cool. But you can’t do everything, you have to choose. 

Being-toward-death sounds dreadful, but it’s really about understanding that since we are not immortal, we have to make choices and act upon them–right here, right now. As Ogilvy puts it, by acknowledging the finite number of them you’re granted, each day of your life gains both preciousness and a sense of existential urgency. Don’t dawdle, and don’t waste time on jobs that don’t engage you on some meaningful level. 

Martin Heidegger, whose book Being and Time is considered by some to be the culminating work of existential philosophy, focused on care as a feature that differentiates human beings from purely cognitive, Cartesian creatures. Ogilvy defines it as the understanding of what you’re good for, but also what you desire, what you care about, what gives meaning to your life. Successful free agency often means reinventing yourself over and over again, and care provides a grounding that can save you from losing track of who you are and why you went down this path in the first place.

Thrownness is the characteristic that connects you to your past and defines its place in your present. We all started somewhere other than where we are now and it’s best to use that history rather than to try to escape it. Much of what I do these days has nothing to do with daily journalism, but I’m always using the basic toolkit I acquired through reporting: getting people to open up; taking careful notes, rapid analysis and synthesis. I can reinvent myself as a strategy consultant and use all of these competencies; I cannot reinvent myself in a role that requires an entirely different set of skills. 


One’s decisions and actions have consequences in organizational life, but they are often blunted or hidden by structural constraints. The free agent is always going beyond what simply is toward what can be: the factual always emerges in light of the possible, where the possible is not a function of anonymous forces but a function of your choices and decisions. You are free and you are responsible. Get used to it. 

[Note: I found a great layperson’s review of existentialism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ]