Hathaway Field Notes

Find the few things you love

2026-06-29T15:05:00.000Z

If you're going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you're not interested enough to do that, don't bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don't waste your time on the many things you merely like.

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SpaceX, Newly Public, to Acquire Cursor for $60 Billion in SpaceX Funny-Money Stock

2026-06-19T14:00:00.000Z

SpaceX is an amazing company but this valuation is insane. The idea that it's even close to as valuable as Microsoft or Amazon is bananas. SpaceX still isn't even profitable, so its price-to-earnings ratio is literally infinity. It's halfway through Thursday as I post this and SpaceX is down ~10 percent on the day, so a touch of sanity is being restored, at least at the moment.

Cursor, with $1 billion in sales, certainly isn't worth 60x revenue — especially in a business where it too isn't profitable. But who cares when you're paying with funny-money stock?

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Snap's Specs

2026-06-16T14:30:00.000Z

New AR glasses from Snap, on pre-order for $2,195. Pricey, but if they deliver they could be worth it. I'm skeptical, but curious.

What I'm really watching for is whether Apple does a glasses version of the Vision Pro. Glasses like these only work well when one company controls the whole stack, down to the phone in your pocket, and that kind of vertical integration is exactly Apple's strength.

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"Anthropic's Safety Superpower"

2026-06-15T20:30:00.000Z

Ben Thompson, on how Anthropic's safety rationale keeps lining up with its commercial interest:

I expect Anthropic to increasingly expose their model's capabilities to end users through endpoints increasingly tailored to different workflows, even as they start to restrict the API. This replacement of software and restriction of access will be done in the name of safety.

The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy.

The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not.

John Gruber, linking to the piece, adds the part I keep coming back to:

I tend to think the Anthropic true believers are all wet — that LLMs, amazing though they are, are not a path toward "super intelligence". But, they used to be clearly behind OpenAI in technical capability, then caught up, and now with Mythos/Fable, they are clearly ahead. I still think they're wrong about where this is heading, but I don't think we can say we know they're wrong.

I agree. I think LLMs are a dead-end when it comes to "super intelligence." But will they become capable enough to help us find a new approach that can get there, and help build it? That feels more likely to me.

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Fox buys the box

2026-06-15T18:53:00.000Z

The New York Times, on Fox Corp.'s $22 billion deal to acquire Roku:

Since the Disney deal, which slimmed down the family's media holding significantly, Fox Corp. has focused more narrowly on sports, news and entertainment, along with building up its streaming abilities. The deal with Roku will immediately put Fox Corp. into greater competition with other major providers of connected-TV devices, such as Comcast, which reaches internet and TV customers with proprietary software that binds Comcast to subscribers and provides it with valuable data. As the traditional cable business continues to erode, those devices make TV distributors a key link between customers and streaming services like Netflix and Disney+.

Buying Roku will allow Fox to own a piece of the infrastructure that powers a major chunk of the streaming business. Roku sells TVs that are powered by its proprietary operating system and owns the Roku Channel, a free, ad-supported channel for shows and movies. The company also makes audio devices and sells subscriptions to other streaming services, such as Peacock and Paramount.

The deal with Fox may test Roku's relationships with rival content companies like Netflix and Amazon, because Roku has thrived by establishing itself as neutral third-party in the entertainment industry. During the question-and-answer session, Mr. Wood said that Roku had experience in that arena, featuring the Roku Channel alongside streaming apps from other media companies.

Interesting move — and one that sits awkwardly with what made Roku valuable in the first place. A platform's strength is horizontal: it integrates with as many providers as it can and stays neutral among them, so every streaming service wants to be on the box. That neutrality is the product.

And the smart case for the deal depends on it. What Fox is really buying is scale: an audience large enough that advertisers have to buy in, built from hosting every service viewers want. That scale holds only as long as the rivals stay. So the bull case asks Fox to keep the platform neutral, which is the one thing its ownership gives it every reason to undo.

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So why not have all forms of computing?

2026-06-15T16:06:00.000Z

Horace Dediu, on why each new computing interface tends to add to the others rather than replace them:

The touch UI did not immediately obviate the need for traditional personal computing interfaces. The smartphone brought computing to more people and more contexts but keyboard and pointer computing cannot be fully replaced by touch. We have a situation where there is co-existence between touch and non-touch computing. Indeed we also have sensor computing in the form of Apple Watch and AirPods. Perhaps there were will also be Apple spectacles to expand the compute real estate on the body.

Intent computing will probably reside primarily with our phones and wearables but Spatial Computing will strengthen their position alongside keyboard computing. Spatial was always a “high commitment” interface. To use it you strapped in, settled down and became acclimated. Then you became productive. A session was going to last at least 20 minutes, perhaps even a few hours.

Intent computing is a few seconds of use. Perhaps a few seconds strung out in multiple sessions but it was far more “glance” computing than “sit down” computing.

So why not have all forms of computing?

As the diagram on the coral of life shows, evolution results in a multitude of “form factors”. Some do become extinct (see the scroll wheel iPod or the stylus PDA.) But most survive and coexist.

I agree with Horace. Intent computing will build on top of the platforms we already have, not replace them. An AI pin isn't going to displace the smartphone. Even when you can just ask your phone to do something, you'll still pick it up to read, watch, and look things up.

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Without human direction, you have compute running in circles.

2026-06-15T15:08:00.000Z

Satya Nadella, making the case that the model itself becomes a commodity — and that the value moves to the learning loop a company builds on top of it:

Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm's AI capability it builds and owns.

Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows. It only becomes more valuable! I believe human agency will be the driver of token capital growth. Humans will set ambitious goals, connect dots across domains, build relationships, and recognize patterns that matter most. Without human direction, you have compute running in circles.

This means the real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound. You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and AI.

This requires a new architectural approach where every business is able to build agentic systems that improve over time, while still retaining control over their IP. A company should be able to switch out a “generalist” model without losing the “company veteran” expertise built into their learning system. This is the key “test” of your control and sovereignty in the era ahead.

He's right about the headline: without human direction, you're leaving compute to wander. The creativity, the instinct, the judgment about what's worth doing — call it taste — still has to come from people. No model supplies that for you.

But his bias shows in the vision he paints. Microsoft is vulnerable in exactly the future he describes, one where the model-makers absorb the very expertise he's urging firms to protect. And the economics push them to do it: pulling that expertise into the model is the business those companies are in.

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Measuring the wrong company

2026-06-13T23:02:00.000Z

Companies are taking a hard look at their AI spending and deciding the numbers don't add up. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months — on a coding tool its engineers couldn't stop using. Another company spent half a billion dollars before anyone thought to set a limit. Forrester now expects enterprises to postpone about a quarter of their planned AI investment into 2027 because the returns haven't shown up.

I've heard this argument before. It's the same one people made about the cloud in the early 2010s.

Back then the case against moving to AWS went like this: we already run our own data centers, we run them well, and we run them for less than Amazon would charge us. So why move? On the spreadsheet, the skeptics were often right. A company that had already sunk the capital into its racks and knew how to keep them humming could beat cloud pricing on raw unit cost for years.

They were answering the wrong question.

The cloud was never about running the same workloads for less money. It was about what you no longer had to think about. Moving to AWS turned infrastructure from a capital expense into an operating expense, from a thing you bought, racked, and depreciated into a thing you rented by the hour and stopped paying for the moment you stopped using it.

I lived this one. In my early days as CTO of Mailprotector, our real weakness wasn't the software — it was everything underneath it: buying, racking, and babysitting the hardware our products ran on. Before AWS was anywhere close to ready to replace a data center, I wrote “AWS as a data center?” in a notebook and circled it. A year or two later we started migrating — and not to save money; the spreadsheet didn't make that case yet. We did it to stop spending our attention on machines and put it where we could actually differentiate: the software. A couple of years after that, we turned the lights off on our last data center and never looked back. In hindsight it's hard to separate that one decision from the company's success — maybe even its survival.

Most companies never framed it that way. They measured the cloud against their own data centers, saw a higher unit cost, and stopped there — and because they already had data centers, the shift didn't help them. It helped the company that didn't exist yet. A startup in 2012 could spin up infrastructure that would have required millions in upfront capital a few years earlier, and pay for it out of revenue as it grew. Whole categories of companies got built that couldn't have raised the money to build themselves the old way.

That generalizes well past the cloud. A general-purpose technology rarely just lowers the cost of what you already do; what it offers is a different cost structure, and different cost structures get used by different companies.

When an established company asks whether AI is worth what it's spending, the buried question is whether AI makes the current operation cheaper. Often the honest answer is: not by enough to matter. Bolting a model onto a process that was designed around people rarely pays for itself. A lot of the spending getting scrutinized right now genuinely is waste. The scrutiny isn't wrong.

But "our AI spending isn't paying off" and "AI doesn't pay off" are very different conclusions, and the distance between them is exactly where the data-center operators got caught. They weren't wrong about the numbers. They were measuring the wrong company.

The company that mattered was being built on rented infrastructure, with a cost structure they could never reach by trimming their own. It's being built again now, with AI in the foundation instead of bolted to the side. That's the spend worth watching, and it isn't yours.

How secure is an email message?

2016-03-08T00:00:00.000Z

Email is a communication medium that is used by nearly everyone on the Internet. It's one of the few protocols so widely used, second only to maybe HTTP. That is the power of email. Everyone has it and uses it.

But the security of email is a topic that is often misunderstood. This is largely because there is no single answer to the question, "how secure is an email message?" As a general rule of thumb, by default it should be treated as a very insecure medium of communication. There are ways to secure your email but let's start out with a discussion of the different pieces at play.

How secure is the email message content?

When discussing the security of an email message, you need to break it up into two pieces. First comes the content of the email message itself.

The most insecure parts of an email message are the sender, recipient, and subject of the message. This information is extremely insecure and visible to anyone who touches the message. Think of it like the names and addresses on the outside of a mail envelope. So you should treat these parts carefully because even if you are using encryption on the email message itself, which we'll discuss later, these components will not be protected.

This is the virtual envelope with your content on the inside. If you were to come across a letter, how easy would it be to view what's inside? Not that hard, right? You simply open the envelope. Email messages, by default, are no different. While in transit and once they get to their destination, email messages are like envelopes that anyone with access can open and view the contents.

How secure are email transmissions?

The second aspect of email message security is the transmission of messages from the sender to the recipient. This area is very misunderstood. By default, you have very little control over how a message is handled in transit. Sure, you can make sure your email client is using SSL or TLS when connecting to send the message, and you should, but once you hand it off to the first email server, you are also handing over control on how that message is handled from that point on. Depending on who you are sending the message to it may or may not be transmitted using encrypted connections from hop to hop. This essentially means that the contents of your message could be openly transmitted over the Internet by a bad email provider or ISP. And when this happens, an unencrypted message could be viewed by telcos, ISPs, or government organizations.

Any decent email hosting company will use encrypted connections when receiving and sending email to other email hosts. At Mailprotector, we always default to using TLS encryption for all email message transmissions. Unfortunately many other email hosting companies still don't support encrypted connections, so whenever you send a message, you have to consider the possibility that it isn't going to be transmitted securely.

How to make your email more secure

So now we know why email is, by default, a very insecure communication method. But there are ways to make it more secure.

Check your email client settings

Start by checking your email client settings to make sure you are using SSL or TLS in your inbound (receiving) and outbound (sending) connections. Any competent email provider offers this option and if yours doesn't, switch to one that does immediately. Setting your client to use a secure connection is especially important when using public networks or wifi (like you find at Starbucks) or when on an airplane. Take this recent story by Steven Petrow, a reporter who had his emails hacked mid-air while writing an Apple-FBI story…now that's irony.

"I hacked your email on the plane and read everything you sent and received. I did it to most people on the flight." He had verbatim detail of a long email that he repeated back to me essentially word for word.

The victim in this example wasn't using a virtual private network (VPN) or even SSL/TLS connections when sending and receiving his emails. If you were in a similar situation, anyone on the same network as you could use software to capture the data being transmitted and view it since the data isn't encrypted. Using SSL/TLS options for sending and receiving email is the bare minimum protection you should have on public networks. Ideally, you should also be using a VPN to protect any data you are transmitting while on public networks.

Look into full encryption options

If the security of your email is a high enough priority, you should also consider encrypting the content of the email messages you send. These technologies protect the actual content inside the message. Based on the mail analogy cited earlier, if someone were to get a hold of your encrypted email message, they wouldn't be able to view or understand the content. It would be like opening a letter written in code.

A couple of methods for encrypting email content are S/MIME and PGP. However, there is a downside to both of these technologies. Each requires the sender and recipient to exchange encryption keys prior to sending an encrypted message. So there is a barrier to using these technologies and managing the keys can become frustrating. There are better options available.

At Mailprotector, for instance, we offer a way to make email encryption much easier with our Bracket Encrypted Email service. Not everyone needs this level of security, but some people do. Bracket lets you securely send encrypted email containing corporate and financial data, personal info, legal docs, medical records, but it's much easier for people to use.

Summary: 3 steps to improve email privacy

Check your email client settings to make sure you're sending and receiving email over encrypted connections
Ask your email provider if they encrypt all email in and out of their networks, and if they don't find one who does (hint, hint)
Look into the possibility of utilizing full email encryption options

So while email remains one of the most popular and useful communication mediums, it can be quite insecure by default. That said, you do have options when improving the security of your email.

Your goal needs a system

2016-03-08T00:00:00.000Z

The goal is your destination. The system is your vehicle.

The key to accomplishing something significant is not in the large success but in the small successes. These small successes are based on the habits that will continually move you towards accomplishing your goal.

Most people think the secret of goals is to simply set a big goal and then everything else will just magically happen. They aim high and then never take the first step because it seems too big. They view accomplishing the goal as one giant step. This is where most goals fizzle out.

There is an important piece missing here. It's not enough to just aim for something. Creating a system is the key.

I think there is a place for both goals and systems. However, they work better together than they do separately. You need to set goals to know where you want to go. But setting goals is not enough. You need to have a system that will get you there. The goal is your destination. The system is your vehicle.

The system should be actionable steps that you can consistently perform to move you toward your goal. These consistent steps will form habits. Those habits are the foundation for your system. Once you have a goal, work backwards to determine the habits that will are required to take you to your goal.

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, not only when they hit their ultimate goal. These small successes create momentum. And momentum is a powerful thing.

On Google's acquisition of Nest

2014-01-14T00:00:00.000Z

Google's Nest acquisition has very little to do with selling thermostats and smoke detectors in particular. Instead, it's about Google having the ability to do consumer hardware right, in general.

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Netflix: hold the flix

2014-01-09T00:00:00.000Z

I've long had a love affair with Netflix. But perhaps more so than any other service, the relationship has changed over time. Not in a bad way, necessarily — it's just different. And it's different, because Netflix is different. It's a service that keeps re-inventing itself.

That should be obvious to anyone paying attention. But it took this post by Felix Salmon to point out the obvious to me: in its transition to full-on streaming, Netflix is no longer about movies.

Said another way: Netflix has ramped up the "net" and wound down the "flix".

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Four questions before you speak

2014-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

Four questions to consider before you speak:

Is it true?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?
Does it improve upon the silence?

The secrets of happy families

2014-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

People think it's natural to live in a world where everyone is dysfunctional. It's not. It's normal for people to be satisfied. All you have to do is remove the barriers that are making you unhappy and you'll be a lot happier.

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8 races. 70 miles. 158 obstacles. 1 good year.

2013-12-31T00:00:00.000Z

8 races. 70 miles. 158 obstacles. 1 good year.

Knowledge may be priceless

2013-12-31T00:00:00.000Z

Knowledge may be priceless, but a higher education is clearly not. University administrators keep hiking tuition, the wages of graduates keep falling, and a whole generation of Americans is struggling under the crushing burden of debt as they postpone their dreams for a tomorrow that may never come.

This leaves him time to read and think

2013-12-31T00:00:00.000Z

Berkshire Hathaway, despite a market value now approaching one quarter of a trillion dollars, is managed from a tiny office with a staff smaller than a soccer team's starting roster. Buffett is not the slave to a corporate calendar jammed with the humdrum inanities of business life like performance assessments, facilities planning, analyst meetings, compliance training, budget reviews and travel. This leaves him time to read and think so that for Buffett the only real difference between a weekday and the weekend is that for two days the markets are closed. Buffett is no fan of spreadsheets or reams of analytical mumbo-jumbo. Facts, a pen, a sheet of paper and an agile mind are his tools.

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Zappos is going holacratic

2013-12-30T00:00:00.000Z

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos' traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical "self-governing" operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that's part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there's a flatter "holarchy" that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there's no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

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Overcoming the impossibility of amazing

2013-05-25T00:00:00.000Z

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are. For now.

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The tax of new

2013-05-25T00:00:00.000Z

The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high. I cannot stress this enough. Sure, maybe the new feature isn't hard to build, maybe it only takes a couple days and a handful of people, maybe it can be shipped and delivered by next week. And maybe the additional cognitive load for a user isn't high — it's just an extra icon here, after all, or an extra slot in a menu there. But once your new feature is out there, it's out there. A real thing used by real people.

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Lying Microsoft advertising

2013-05-23T00:00:00.000Z

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This is what the long game looks like

2013-05-22T00:00:00.000Z

This is what the long game looks like.

via ventureswell

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Biz monkey

2011-04-15T00:00:00.000Z

A biz monkey is a replaceable, Powerpoint toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle manager business dude drone. They are quick to comment and sneer, slow to actually ship.

People who understand technology and are willing to bend it to their will, on the other hand, are scarce. They can't be found with a classified ad on Craigslist or in a blind project ad on eLance.

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Master craftspeople

2011-04-06T00:00:00.000Z

At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider "vertical" ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.

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“I'll just give you a new one”

2011-03-22T00:00:00.000Z

That is what was said to me after about 30 seconds of me explaining why I was bringing my 8 month old Magic Trackpad back in. It was that easy and the customer (me) was happy.

I purchased the Magic Trackpad back in July 2010 when they were released and from the get go, it was having weird issues where it would randomly get a mind of its own and start moving around erratically and even clicking on things. It finally reached a point where it closed windows that I was working in and I lost information. At that point I threw it aside and went back to a Magic Mouse.

Months later I came across it again and realized I had forgot to take it back. I figured they didn't have any reason to help me with it now because it had been so long but since Apple has taken good care of me many times before I thought I would give it a shot.

I took it in its original box back to the Apple Store in Greenville, SC and explained my story. No half truths or trying to get around the fact I just waited a long time to bring it back. Sarah helped me out and gave me a new one. No questions asked. No stupid forms to fill out. The simplicity of her solution was great. "I'll just give you a new one." This is why I buy and recommend Apple products to others. Not just because their products are great, but because they care about their customers and making them happy.

By the way, the new Magic Trackpad works great. No issues at all.

Build a company to own it

2011-02-22T00:00:00.000Z

The idea of building a company to flip it has always annoyed me. There is a fundamental flaw in that plan. When you are faced with the tough decisions, you tend to take the quick and easy road. That is not going to be the best choice for the long term health of the company or product. It takes time to develop a good company or product.

It's not only good software that takes a decade to develop, good companies do too. If you agree that's true, it follows that you wouldn't want promising entrepreneurs to go chasing waterfalls before they know how to paddle in the pond. Or something like that.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to see evolution get a chance to work its magic, but if great products and companies keep getting abandoned or bought after 3-5 years, there'll be less of that. And that's a damn shame.

I've always thought you should build a company to own it. This leaves you with good options for the long term. If you decide to keep it, you have done things the right way without cutting corners. And if you decide to sell it, you have made it much more valuable. After all, if you built something that you want to own, someone else is likely to feel the same way and even pay more for it.

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Pushing Safari on the Apple iPhone to the limit

2007-07-02T00:00:00.000Z

Apple did a great thing when they put their full Safari web browser on the Apple iPhone. The functionality of the Safari browser paired with an unlimited data plan from AT&T, or even better a Wi-Fi hot spot, turns your iPhone into a mini laptop.

I just purchased the iPhone this weekend while on a business trip and on the way home, I found a deal on an item on eBay that I really wanted to bid on. My first thought was to call my brother and have him login and place the bid for me. This is what I would have normally done in the past.

Then I realized, I have everything I need to buy something on eBay with my iPhone.

Right before the auction ended, I jumped on my iPhone, opened up Safari and went to eBay.com. Placed my bid for the item and a few minutes later received an email, on my iPhone, that said I had won the item.

This is only one great example of how useful and powerful the iPhone device is. Try doing the same thing I did with this on a traditional cell phone. I know it can be done on some smart phones but not nearly as easy and as quickly as I was able to do with the iPhone.

The Safari web browser on the iPhone opens up a huge world of opportunities for iPhone specific web applications. But it is not limited to only web applications designed for it, you can use the iPhone Safari web browser with pretty much any existing web site.

Think about how much functionality is available to you right there in that one feature of the iPhone.

Apple iPhone: simplicity at its best

2007-01-11T00:00:00.000Z

When I read the initial news about the Apple iPhone, I was excited to see what Apple had come up with.

I had no idea that I would be as impressed as I was after watching all of the iPhone demo videos.

Once again Apple has made all other related devices look like a complicated mess with their simple approach to user interfaces.

Apple has set a new bar for cell phone technology that all other companies are going to have to match. Even the most elegant of cell phones like the LG Chocolate series of phones looks obsolete next to the iPhone.

One thing I was tired of hearing about new cell phones on the market is how nice the built in cameras are and that being a key selling point for the phone. You will not see one mention of the built in camera in Apples demo because even though it is there, it is not the reason you should want the iPhone.

Apple has done what all other cell phone manufacturers should do and built a personal communications device instead of adding all sorts of useless features to the already over complicated devices that are out there. And especially recently with the approach of a "new" model being the same old phone in multiple colors.

The hardest part now is waiting until July when they are expected to be released. I am glad that I already am a Cingular customer. If this phone really lives up the expectations, it would be reason enough for anyone to switch to Cingular if necessary for the iPhone.

Playing to win

2007-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

I learned a valuable lesson this holiday season, and it was all done by watching college football. It was a simple lesson that I've heard many times but until I saw it in action, I did not fully understand the power of it.

Play to win

If you want to succeed at anything in life, make sure you approach it with an attitude that you are playing to win.

Expect the unexpected

Many of you may have missed it but the best college football bowl game may have been the least popular one. Boise State was not expected to be able to play with Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl this year. Not only did they play with them, they looked like a team that expected to win the game.

Even in the face of adversity as they were down by seven with 0:51 left in the game, they were playing like they came there to win no matter what it took. They ran some of the most impressive (and risky) plays but the most impressive move by the Boise State team didn't happen during a play, it was a decision that was most likely made a few weeks ago.

The coaches were faced with what most teams wouldn't even have considered a decision when they scored a touchdown in the first overtime. They had the choice to either kick the extra point to tie (and go to another overtime) or go for two to win.

Most teams would not have hesitated to kick the extra point and stick around to see another day. Not Boise State, they never even looked at their kicker to go on and kick the extra point. In fact, they were so quick to go for it, the other team had to call a timeout because they weren't ready.

Boise State players and coaches were on the same page that they were there to win the game not just play along with Oklahoma. And it showed on the final play. It looked as if they had this play drawn up for this exact situation all year long. They were prepared and expected to win that game and they did.

So what does this have to do with my business or life?

Everything. When I saw this happen, I thought about many situations in business and life which I went in not to lose instead of going into it to win.

It is amazing how just that simple change in attitude can completely change the result. You should have the same approach to everything you do in life. Figure out ahead of time that you are doing something not just to do it but to win at it and succeed. It will not only change they way you approach that event but how you perform and most likely the result.

Important versus necessary

2006-12-21T00:00:00.000Z

Why is it we describe the things we want to do in life as important instead of necessary?

The definition of important is "marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence" while the definition of necessary is "of an inevitable nature" or "absolutely needed".

Instantly you can see the difference between the two words.

Look at the things that you do on a regular basis. A normal day will most likely involve you eating, going to work, and sleeping. Why is it that we do these things?

Because they are necessary.

If you decide that it isn't necessary to go to work, then you won't go. But the consequence of that decision is probably going to be losing your job.

So lets face it, what we do on a daily basis are things that are necessary.

How do you describe your dreams?

Things that you want to do are typically considered important but not necessary. That's why they never get done. Until something makes the jump from important to necessary, you will never get to it. There are simply too many other necessary things in life to get to those that are just important.

It's easy for someone to say that something is important to them. Important leaves room for it not to happen. You can always get to the important things tomorrow.

But when something becomes necessary, you will stop at nothing to make sure it happens. It must happen and it must happen now. Why? Because it is necessary.

History has shown that humans are capable of accomplishing the most amazing things. But in each circumstance, you will find one common factor, necessity. If you are having trouble getting what you want out of life, chances are, that something is only important to you, not necessary.

How can you make sure you accomplish more of your dreams?

That is simple, make your dreams and goals something that is necessary to you. Only then will it become a high enough priority in your life to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

If you can ask yourself the question "Is this something that I have to do?" and can honestly answer "Yes", then that is not only important but necessary. You have made the first step to making it happen.

Can you change the way you think?

You are where you are in life because of the priorities you have and had. In order to change your life, you must change the way you think and prioritize. So the question really should not be can you change the way you think but rather…

Will you change the way you think?

Once you have made this decision, you will think about your dreams differently. You finally put them higher on your list of priorities. They will no longer only be important to you but now they will be necessary.

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable." —Christopher Reeve

Are your dreams inevitable?