20061106-1112

I know I should start writing the weekly journal no later than the weekend. But I failed to do so for the past two weeks. It’s really a pain to recall what had happened but also a good way to review the past as well. Right now I have a could-not-been-better morning: class started at 10am (Yes, we are in the luckiest section!) and there is only one new email this morning (though this makes me feel a little bit disappointed…). Anyway, let’s turn the clock back to Nov 06, 2006.

For R, the most important thing is we have a new member now. His passion about R is the most impressive and I’d like to have him on board. The good thing of a larger team is there are more brains. We had couple of fierce discussions about the business model and the action plan. Our classmates are really helpful. A few discussions with them in woodland hill and Olin hall did give us some fresh ideas. We really should move on to build our student advisor board. Ah, as one suggested, we would better off to have female classmates in the advisor board if we can’t find a female team member.

The 12^th Cyberposium event held in Harvard last Sat is fantastic. We had some great panelist and I’d met a couple of interesting person and built a good relationship with. As I previously mentioned, be proactive. This is a big big factor to differentiate you from others. Besides, this reminds me the words from the keynote that Mr. Tom Steinberg, founder of Staple and partner at Highland Capital, had given in the Babson Forum of Entrepreneurship and Forum,. What he had said? A couple of things. Be brave. Be rule-breaker. Be xxxx. Courage never hurts. I benefited from them a lot. Everyone should ask themselves, do you want to be an audience or you want to be part of the event? I would choose the latter and I’d approached a few other people, MBA students from Ivey that I will meet in Montreal during the winter break, a Bentley MBA who also working for a VC firm, an interesting dude from SVB… Especially with the VC guy, we had talked a lot in the whole morning and I am very happy I’d talked to him first. Yes, there are many people like me who may not want to initialize a talk but would be more than happy to accept an invitation to start a talk.

This whole week had a lot discussion about R. Especially a lot about various different aspects. It’s necessary to bring Andy updated about where R is and this introduction process inevitably led us to review quite a lot of our previous conclusions. This is very similar to the teaching process. The only time you will know whether you really understand a topic is to explain it to someone else and to answer all his or her questions. It’s quite painful to be challenged about the previous conclusions for everyone but it is really helpful to force yourself calm down and review your past decisions. Is it really right? Is it really good?

I kept the swimming in the weekend. It’s really a wonderful feeling to be in the water. Free, comfortable… One research hypothesis said that in part of our history, our ancestor had been forced to live in the environment where they need always standing or swimming in the sea. And this hypothesis believes that’s why our skin is closer to sea animals such as dolphin rather than other ale or monkeys with long and thick hair allover our body.

I decided to place this journal at my personal blog. It’s a big change to publish your personal life on the public domain. Is it good? Does courage never hurt? Let’s see.