Thursday, May 16, 2013

What Eric Schmidt Said

I am about to wrap up a very, very busy period.

Probably equivalent to a deployment in terms of weekly workload, but far, far better in the sense that I go to bed and wake up in the same place as my wife and daughter each day.

Also, sometimes weirder: On a deployment, at least everyone around you knows you're deployed.  Here, when people see me unshaven in flip-flops at noon, and ask with an air of faux concern whether I'm employed, and whether everything's okay, I've run out of responses, so I just shrug my shoulders as I couldn't understand their question.  I might mutter something about school.  Nothing about four jobs, and nothing about a place that doesn't know what a gut course is, though.

Besides, the "four jobs" thing gets overdone, and now that I can technically say I'm part of that camp, I've got more power to call it out:  There are 168 hours in a week.  If someone works one extremely demanding job (let's say they're an associate at Choate Hall or Skadden Arps, or a consultant with Bain or McKinsey), you better believe they're working most of their waking hours.  It might only be *one* job, but it doesn't quite have the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow ring to it the way it does when you can say "School full-time with four jobs."

Anyway, once I put the pen down on the Finance final at noon on Tuesday, I'm probably due for a long nap.

When I wake up, though, it's time to finally apply myself full-time to my start-up, which centers around online identity/digital footprint awareness and education.

Here is an excerpt from a book just published by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and former CEO of Google, writing about this very subject:

"School systems will also adapt to play an important role.  Parents-teacher associations will advocate for privacy and security classes to be taught alongside sex-education classes in their children's schools.  Such classes will teach students to optimize their privacy-and-security settings and train them to become well versed in the dos and don'ts of the virtual world.  And teachers will frighten them with real-life stories of what happens if they don't take control of their privacy and security at an early age."
It might not always be feasible for school systems to hire just for it, and they may not always have someone on hand to do it.  Sometimes, it might be easier, faster, and cheaper to bring someone in for just that amount of time that you need.

Who's going to lead this charge?  I think you could do worse than bet on someone with a 99%+ percentile work ethic, years of public speaking experience, and a background in education, security, and business.  

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