As quoted in yesterday’s Golden Oldie, Columbia law professor Tim Wu said, Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

His premise is that the more convenient something is, e.g., Amazon, the more likely people will gravitate to it, rather than trying something new.

Think about it.

Amazon. Facebook. Google. Microsoft.

Over the years, many companies, from startups to giants, have challenged them and have either been bought, bankrupted or buried.

Either can be a solution when your resources are almost unlimited, whether the money is spent on acquisition or increasing convenience.

Simple as 1-2-3-4

More convenience = stronger addiction = fewer competitors = greater monopolistic actions.

So the next time you find yourself concerned or complaining about the power of big tech try looking in the mirror for its source.

Image credit: Alena Navarro- Whyte

Winning and competition are fundamental to our lives.

It starts early with your siblings fighting over the same toy and progresses to fighting with your spouse over the TV remote.

It is also something that enables us to push past what our preconceived limits are. I am sure you have had a time when you thought you could do no more, but then you see someone else succeeding a bit more and you push on.

The competition was what helped you achieve your goals and at the end of the day, everyone is better for it.

I have been watching the World Series, full disclaimer I am not a baseball guy, but I do love to see a winner. I happened to be in Houston for the start of the series and that determined the team I would root for, so for the past week or so I have been an Astros fan.

As I watched the series I started to get invested in the lives of the players and what had enabled them to get to this grandest of stages. It was interesting to learn about their paths to the big league and what challenges they faced.

I learned an interesting fact from my wife this morning. Her high school friend is a relief pitcher for the Houston Astros by the name of Tony Sipp. I looked up his stats and as far as I can tell he didn’t pitch a single ball, but he will get a ring.

What I found to be interesting about his life, though, was the path he took to get to where he is. He is from Pascagoula, MS, where he also played for the football team that took home the state championship in 2000, so the guy was a talented athlete that had been around success. He then went on to play at the local Junior College before transferring to Clemson. From there it was a series of double and triple ball teams before entering the majors many years later.

As I read a bit about this guy, I am realizing that he is a winner. He isn’t the big time flashy name that you hear every day, he is the grind-it-out-and-pushes-on kind of guy. He has continued to push his way to the top of his talent and been able to surround himself with others who are doing the same thing.

I am pretty sure we can do the same thing in business.

Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.

It is up to us to make that happen.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Sad. Sick. Stupid.

Those are are the words that best describe the effect of wealth on kids, especially in Palo Alto.

The Atlantic has a well-researched article delving into the extraordinarily high teen suicide rates for the children of the so-called meritocratic elite.

Suniya Luthar, professor at Arizona State University, has done a lot of research on the subject.

The rich middle- and high-school kids, Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm. They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average.

She tripped over the situation by accident when comparing an inner-city school with a nearby high-income, suburban, mostly white school.

The results were not what she expected. In the inner-city school, 86 percent of students received free or reduced-price lunches; in the suburban school, 1 percent did. Yet in the richer school, the proportion of kids who smoked, drank, or used hard drugs was significantly higher—as was the rate of serious anxiety and depression.

The rash of suicides has gotten a lot of parental attention, but mostly focused outward, instead of seeing it as a parenting crisis, but the kids know.

Martha Cabot put up a YouTube video that eventually logged more than 80,000 views, and comments from parents all over the country. Sitting in her bedroom in a T-shirt, with curls falling loose from her ponytail, she confirmed many parents’ worst fears about themselves. “The amount of stress on a student is ridiculous,” Martha said. “Students feel the constant need at our school of having to keep up with all the achievements.” She was recording the video mostly for parents, she explained, because apparently it took a suicide to get adults to pay attention.

Sadly, the parental attention is in the form of calls for data to evaluate, statistics to analyze and meetings/discussions with experts, as if it is an engineering problem as opposed to a human one.

The spike in teen suicides, along with the increase of suicides at elite colleges and among entrepreneurs, should sound an alarm — one that big data and all the stats in the world aren’t going to solve.

Our friends, colleagues and especially our children aren’t robots that can be reprogrammed at will.

In these days of assumed meritocracy, where children can be turned into anything, we admire them as displays of remarkable engineering, to be tweaked and fine-tuned into bilingual perfection. What we’ve lost, perhaps, is a sense that there may be things about them we can’t know or understand, and that that mysterious quality, separate from us, is what we should marvel at.

Read the entire article and send the link to every parent you know.

And for the rest of your life be the nonjudgmental, safe-to-talk-about-anything haven for every child with whom you come in contact.

Your actions could save a life.

Flickr image credit: Darin House

Last Friday we looked at the disturbing number of entrepreneurs who suffer from anxiety and depression, exacerbated by the pressures of founding a startup, and too often find their solace in suicide.

Mark Suster wrote how the same problems often haunt success.

Today’s New York Times had a complimentary article, Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection.

There are several compelling points to consider;

• almost all are young;
• they are high achievers recognized for ‘crushing it’ — whatever ‘it’ happens to be;
• they are driven to live up to outside expectations; and
• they constantly compare themselves to others’ external images as depicted in social media.

The acts required to “keep up with the Joneses” have changed significantly from my under-35 days.

Back then it was your neighbors and school/social/professional circles that comprised the Joneses.

Now it is the no-holds-barred world.

The existential question “Why am I here?” is usually followed by the equally confounding “How am I doing?” In 1954, the social psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the social comparison theory, which posits that we try to determine our worth based on how we stack up against others.

Growing up and in the years since ‘how am I doing’ was never my focus, because I never fit in; never was part of any crowd and certainly never told I was special.

Fortunately, I wasn’t competitive; in fact, competitive has never been part of my personal vocabulary.

Somehow I’ve always known that no matter what I accomplished there would always be people who were richer/smarter/thinner/more popular/more whatever than I.

Unlike those described in the aforementioned articles.

And the pressures have increased exponentially for those susceptible.

In the era of social media, such comparisons take place on a screen with carefully curated depictions that don’t provide the full picture. Mobile devices escalate the comparisons from occasional to nearly constant.

“Curated” is the polite way to say that people lie — not only to convince the world, but probably to convince themselves.

Don’t get caught in this trap; teach yourself to talk about how you feel — to at least one real person, preferably more.

And take time to be there for others who are struggling.

Flickr image credit: Rodney Campbell