LIFE BOOK
knowing LIFE...RNK
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Monday, June 24, 2013
A short History of alcohol
ALCOHOL: A SHORT
HISTORY
Fermented grain,fruit juice and honey have
been used to make alcohol (ethyl alcohol or ethanol) for thousands of years.
Fermented beverages existed in early Egyptian
civilization, and there is evidence of an early alcoholic drink in China around
7000 B.C. In India, an alcoholic
beverage called sura, distilled from rice, was in use between 3000 and 2000 B.C.
The Babylonians worshiped a wine goddess as
early as 2700 B.C. In
Greece, one of the first alcoholic beverages to gain popularity was mead, a
fermented drink made from honey and water. Greek literature is full of warnings
against excessive drinking.
Several Native American civilizations
developed alcoholic beverages in pre-Columbian times. A variety of fermented
beverages from the Andes region of South America were created from corn, grapes
or apples, called “chicha.”
In the sixteenth century, alcohol (called
“spirits”) was used largely for medicinal purposes. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, the British parliament passed a law encouraging the
use of grain for distilling spirits. Cheap spirits flooded the market and
reached a peak in the mid-eighteenth century. In Britain, gin consumption
reached 18 million gallons and alcoholism became widespread.
The nineteenth century brought a change in
attitudes and the temperance movement began promoting the moderate use of
alcohol—which ultimately became a push for total prohibition.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Best Time to Start a Company
Don't wait. Here are six reasons to launch a venture today.
Now that you know my belief that starting
a company is your best hope.....
1. You're young
The best time to start a company is when
you are young. The younger, the better. Youth is a beautiful thing. It's the
perfect combination of ignorance and innocence. Stupid decisions are excused as
learning experiences and the worst outcome of most youthful transgressions is a
few days in worse, going broke.
I believe that it's easier to pour
your life into a company when you're young, creative, fresh, and fired up.
I've never met an entrepreneur who said,
"Wow, I wish I hadn't started so young." The world is full of regrets
and one of the main ones is from entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs
lamenting that they didn't start off earlier.
2. You're miserable at work
Life is too short to sit behind a desk and
be miserable. Show me someone who makes a million dollars a year but hates his
job and I'll show you an unhappy guy. Show me someone who makes a tenth of that
and I'll show you someone who is 10 times as unhappy.
I've always believed that misery loves
company for a reason. Look inside any company and you'll find a boatload of
misery, the best fuel to start your own company. We grow up rebelling against
our parents. Many grow companies to rebel against former bosses.
Use
your nights, weekends, and lunch breaks to form your ideas and network and
start laying the groundwork for your eventual prison break. And when you're confident
you're on to something, jump. I assure you that you'll never look back, even if
all you have at the end is less money in the bank and a learning experience.
3. You're out of work
There's nothing like a good ol' fashion
layoff to turn you from a worker into an owner. It shocks and beats the comfort
out of you. It's a mini death forcing the least introspective to examine all
aspects of their lives.
Let's be clear, everyone who is laid off
should not start a business. But a layoff is a great catalyst if you're already
thinking about making the move.
When you're fired or let go, many fall
into the trap of focusing energy on the people who "wronged" you.
Just the opposite. Look at the firing as a blessing in disguise and motivation
to reevaluate your life. Put everything on the table—new opportunities you have
been ignoring, industries you're interested, and starting your own gig.
4. You have no responsibilities
Start-ups and life responsibilities are
often inversely related, if not mutually exclusive. The more responsibilities
you have, the less likely it is that you will start a business.
While age and responsibilities are often
related, they aren't always. So start a company when you have the time
and the energy and the freedom to do so. Don't wait until it's too late and you're
trapped by a mortgage, private school tuition bills, and annual family
vacations that you need to fund.
Providing for others and keeping up with a
lifestyle you've grown accustomed to makes it hard to start companies,
especially for the first-time entrepreneur. If you are single, married without
kids, or thinking about getting married and starting a family—and considering
jumping on the entrepreneurial train, do it now before you decide that it's
just too late.
5. You have an incurable obsession
Our great country was founded on the idea
that anyone with an idea can strike it big
Starting a company is the hardest thing
you will ever do professionally. It's you versus the world. And the world wins
90% of the time.
Start a company after you sit on your idea
for a while—and you can't get it out of your head. You're obsessed. You're
incurable. No matter how much you try not to think about the business, it keeps
coming back. You start working on the idea during all your free time. You can't
stop talking to friends and family about it. And you feel like you will never
forgive yourself if you don't take a chance.
This incurable obsession must be
consistent over an extended period of at least three months. Let it sit. Let it
settle. And don't confuse it with the entrepreneurial seizure, a more temporary
excitement that will wane if you give yourself time to really think about the
idea.
6. Do it today
You can try to pick the best time to start
a business. When you are old, young, rich, poor, fat, thin, with hair or
balding. But any attempt to do so won't make you more or less likely to
succeed. Entrepreneurs come in all sizes, shapes, ages and colors. And, believe
it or not, our country doesn't have a monopoly on business creation.
Great businesses have been created in
times of prosperity. Great businesses have been started when we the country was
facing its darkest hours and the entrepreneur was at her lowest low.
If you're reading this story, you're
interested in starting your own business. And if you are reading to the end
(yes, you! I'm talking about you!), you're about to jump and seriously consider
it. Why else would you read 1,500 words about a topic you weren't passionate
about?
So let me make it simple for you—the best
time to start a business is TODAY. Not tomorrow. Not in two weeks. Not after
you get promoted, pregnant, married, or your MBA. TODAY! You're not getting any
younger. Your life is not getting any simpler.
See that cliff in front of you that you're
scared to go over? Run up to it once again. But this time, actually jump. What
you will find below is the life you wanted to live and all you need to do is
get over the fear that's keeping you back.
To see more about how I decided to start
my first company rather than take a job, and how fear is getting in your way,
check out my talk from late last year.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
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