All posts by Arjen Lentz

Dad, parallel entrepreneur, cook, gardener, explorer, philosopher, tinkerer....
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Self-Employment Opportunities for Your Teenager

Holidays breaks can be filled with opportunities for our young people to develop themselves in preparation for adult life. For many of us, we would like to see our young people develop skills that can not be built as just a seasonal employee. Skills such as resource and skills planning, negotiation skills, expense management, time management and establishing work/life balance are just some that we can expect teenagers to be able to learn by establishing themselves a holiday business – which, of course, could be extended to part time work should the industry and study commitments allow for it.

Read the full story on eZine Articles (by Kristy A. Bennett)
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Sharing Hunches to Develop Ideas

Steven Johnson’s short (4 minutes!) talk “Where Good Ideas Come From” provides awesome insight in how ideas develop.

For me, it emphasises the importance of Upstarta principle #4: “Pragmatic on Intellectual Property (IP): speed-to-market over protection. Share information. No software patents.“, specifically the bit about sharing information. Keeping everything to yourself hinders you. Others do not have the motivation or the opportunity to do the exact thing that you want to do right now, but they can help you along.

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On US joblessness and economic change

An interesting read: How a new jobless era will transform America (The Atlantic). It doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture in social terms, it’s rough. But, I reckon times like these there are great opportunities for being entrepreneurial, just not relying on the predominant methods.

I started my business (the one the Upstarta principles were derived from) before the GFC, and when it hit I actually found myself better positioned and my business continued growing and in fact flourishing. I find that inspiring, not just economically but also socially – as my life is better for it.

In the end, I think that recession and joblessness is a state of mind on a very personal level – if you wait for work to pop up in your area or your government to do something, indeed things can look bleak. But you could also take the initiative, and start something yourself, differently. There’s always opportunity, you only need to look around you with the right mindset. It won’t be a get-rich-quick goldmine, but it’s likely to be profitable enough for a decent living and a lot of satisfaction.

If you need some help with this, that’s what Upstarta is for. Doing it all on your own is hard, slow, and actually much less fun. What are you going to explore?

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This email is confidential

Every day we get mail with text like this at the bottom:

This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain [big company] proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to [big company]. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout.

Why do people put those tags on their mail? And do they mean anything? I can’t answer the first question, but the answer to the second is definitely No.

A notice like this is basically an attempt to make a contract: they send you the message and you agree to keep it confidential. But, of course, you haven’t agreed to anything simply by receiving a message. A valid contract also requires Consideration, that each party gets something of value from the agreement. There’s no value from just sending someone a message.

Read the rest of this story at John R. Levine’s blog (based on US law, but the basics will be similar in other countries so as a guide it should still apply).