“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
~ Theodore Roosevelt “The Man in The Arena”
Unusually for me, last week saw three podcast interviews onto which I had been invited published within a few days of each other. The first was with my friend Rob Levin, Founder and Chairman of Work Better Now the company he set up with Andrew Cohen in a classic “scratch your own itch” impulse to solve their own problem of finding a good virtual assistant and through whom I was introduced to my wonderful Executive Assistant, Isabel Denoso. The second to appear was a conversation with Aisling Hurley (of The Business Fairy) on the Local Enterprise Office podcast her agency produces and aimed at a Small Business audience in Ireland. Aisling had introduced me to the Tipperary branch of LEO and recorded the interview after I had addressed them on the subject of why achieving financial fluency is so difficult for a section of the entrepreneurial universe. I enjoyed this conversation with her greatly and it served to remind me how much I enjoy and am fired up by the challenge of supporting financial fluency in the SME community (and to be frank everywhere else). I am pledging to direct more energy and effort to pursuing the goal of creating the best resource for lateral thinkers who need their own mental model of business finance under the banner of “Finance for Poets” and grateful for Aisling for her prompt and for a thoroughly enjoyable exchange.
The interview that garnered the most traction was this one with Jay Martin on his eponymous The Jay Martin Show. Jay is a superb interviewer with over an over 170K strong audience and some 1,700 interviews under his belt. His guest list over the past years is a veritable ‘who’s who’ of independent thinkers in finance, business and investment and it was a real privilege to be asked on to talk with him. Jay had done his homework and was well armed with quotes from my own writings here at Pitchfork Papers, which was as refreshing and challenging as it was unusual (actually all three of my interlocutors this week were impressively well-prepared). No interview with Jay can be completed without some reference to Gold (although Dr. Pippa Malmgren, whose outstandingly interesting conversation with Jay aired the day before mine, managed to avoid going down that rabbit hole with dexterity) and we spent some time dissecting that topic but ranged far and wide during our exchange.
I mention this both because I am pleased with the outcome of all of those invitations and am very glad to have been asked and because of one reaction that, much as a grain of sand irritates the oyster to produce a pearl, I have been ruminating on since reading it in the commentary on Jay’s YouTube channel and felt it was worth exploring further in this week’s letter. Here it is, unvarnished:
So apart from being highly complimentary (by the way, an excellent example of how to deliver a hard punch by packing it in a flurry of compliments about the punchee so that they don’t see it coming AND are already well-disposed to the puncher), the last two sentences viz
“Unfortunately he [me] has chosen to take the safer path, and sit on the sidelines , avoiding stepping into the arena. Steven, if you really care about the problems of the world, get out of the grandstand and onto the pitch” @Anomad Hunter (YouTube handle)
has been bugging me all week.
Here is where I am in my thinking on this:
There are three questions or perspectives packed into this, I think
What counts as “being in the arena”? (And conversely where does the grandstand begin?)
How does one translate ‘caring about the problems of the world’ into a specific strategy that contributes to their solution?
Can it more prudent to wait in the grandstand rather than grandstanding in the arena? And related to that: At what point does waiting become disengaging?
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