Remember kids, you too can follow your dreams! All you need is drive, determination, and $250,000 in seed capital!!! (h/t Thax)
It all started with a high school assembly on the first day back from winter break. The guest speaker was the founder of an Austin-based company with a positive message about following your dreams. But what was supposed to be a motivational speech turned into a war of words between high school students and staff and Kash Shaikh, the founder of #BeSomebody, that played out on blogs and social media.
On January 5, Shaikh spoke to students at Austin High School, at the school’s invitation. According to his Twitter, his talk at the high school was similar to his talk at a recent TEDxUWMilwaukee event, which was produced independently of the famous TED Conferences.
In his speech, Shaikh said he’s tired of people being all talk.
“I called myself out 19 months ago and walked away from everything I once thought was important: money, title, lifestyle, things, a career that started at Proctor and Gamble, the largest consumer products company in the world, and started to blossom at GoPro, the fastest growing camera company in the world,” Shaikh said. “I called myself out to go all in on my passion.”
Okay….. It seems a bit…..interesting to talk about walking away from “money,” “a career,” and other such things to a group of people who haven’t even started their adult lives yet, but let’s see where he goes with this.
When Shaikh used the #BeSomebody hashtag on Twitter, people responded positively. So he decided to create a media platform to encapsulate that passion. According to the #BeSomebody website, Shaikh wants to create a “motivational movement” that encourages people to become “passionaries.” Passionaries, as defined by the company, are people who pursue their passions, find ways to connect with other people with similar passions and make a living from those passions in what he calls the “passion economy.”
Shaikh has been working on #BeSomebody since 2009. But last year, #BeSomebody received a $1 million investment from the media company E.W. Scripps to launch its platform. #BeSomebody now has a mobile app where users can connect with other people nearby who share their passions, including everything from writing and camping to music and travel.
Two thoughts at this point:
(1) Anything preceded by the word “motivational” should be met with the utmost skepticism, at least in my opinion.
(2) It’s not enough to be motivated, determined, or whatever. You have to be motivated and/or determined enough to get venture capitalists or angel investors on your side. How often have you heard of that happening with something that began as a hashtag? I can think of one example, which I learned about in this article just now.
This is still all just background information, though. What did Mr. Shaikh have to say to the kids?
In his speech, Shaikh talks about the importance of struggling to reach your passion. He cited his own struggle when he left his luxury apartment and “75 percent of his stock and equity” at GoPro and moved to Central Texas, where he launched his idea.
“I spent $250,000 of my own money,” Shaikh said. “And when I raised money, I was moving back in with my parents at 35 years old. I had a BMW. I sold that. Now, I drive a 2004 Ford with 270,000 miles on it that doesn’t start in the cold weather. There’s a lot of people in a lot worse situations than me.”
Shaikh says he rented an apartment in Pflugerville where he lived without any furniture except for a whiteboard that he and his brother built by hand because it was cheaper.
I’m gonna stop you right there, sir.
Just my $0.02, but this sounds like a speech you give to a hotel ballroom full of dull-eyed corporate drones, who might have high salaries but have forgotten how to enjoy them. You can sell them on the idea of dropping the things that make them miserable to follow a dream, provided they have the seed capital. This does not sound like something one should say to a room full of people who might not have taken the SAT yet. How many of these kids might be dreaming of corporate drudgery that would enable them to get a BMW? And how can you sleep at night after telling them not to have a fallback plan?
(Students did not respond well to his speech, and this led to some very unpleasant and awkward exchanges on social media. You can read about those at the article I linked above. Now I opine.)
Look, I absolutely support encouraging people to follow their passions, and I think everyone should have a chance to pursue a career that makes them genuinely happy. I walked away from a not-terribly-promising career in law because it made me miserable, but I also recognize that not everyone has that luxury. Yes, being a lawyer was damaging my health in many ways, but I had support that allowed me to walk away from it. Not everyone can do that, and it helps no one to act like anyone can if they just want it enough.
The counterpoint to Mr. Shaikh’s speech, of course, is that if somebody does put everything on the line to pursue their passions, and then fails, the general response from our society—if any—is basically “Well, what did you expect?”
(If that sounds harsh, think about how many discussions that are critical of public assistance programs—and of people on public assistance—feature the words “They should have thought of that before they…”)
We, as a society, claim to love underdogs, but in reality we only love underdogs in retrospect, once they have succeeded. We do not celebrate the people who risk everything to follow a dream but do not succeed. We do not reward the courage to take risks, only the success that sometimes follows from taking a risk.
To be clear once again, I absolutely think we should encourage people to “follow their dreams,” within reason (and that’s a whole extra can of worms). I just don’t think we’re in a place where we can actually do that, unless we’re ready to admit (again, as a society) that people can risks, not succeed, and still be deemed worthy of respect.
Allow me to paraphrase something my friend Eric said years ago: “People sometimes ask me if I’ll remember them if I become rich and famous. I sometimes wonder if they’ll remember me if I don’t.”
UPDATE (03/07/2015): Things aren’t getting better for the startup hero in his beef with a bunch of high school students.
