Ben Milne - Importance of Curiosity

- My name is Ben Milne, CEO of a company called Dwolla. When I was a really young kid I guess my grandmother imparted me to reverse engineer things and take things apart without really knowing that's what she was teaching me. And so, you know, what I've kind of realized as an adult, is you can reverse engineer anything. You can take apart a TV or a camera and see what's on the inside. You can hit something with a hammer and see what's on the inside, right? I was raised to believe that it was okay to try, and very much encouraged to do so. School, for me, was just like a very difficult thing where I tried very hard, but I was exceptionally mediocre. But I know when I feel like I want to accomplish something, I can sit down at the computer ask it a buncha questions, I get answers and I can maybe build something cool and maybe show it to other people. The first step for me is knowing that I felt like I didn't really belong anywhere, but once I found the people I thought I belonged with, my life got a lot better really fast. Like try to find the smartest people in the field I can and then just find a whiteboard and figure it out. That might be strange, but that's the way I'm wired. And for whatever reason, that's me. And once I realized, at some point in my life, that, like, that was okay, I started realizing, I started finding myself around the right people and those people supported me and acting like who I am. For me, that was a pretty amazing turning point that I started finding that if I just said what I thought and allowed myself to get loud when I got excited, and if something strange came out of my mouth, just own it, I would find myself around really brilliant people. It's your choice, every morning, if you can choose every day to get out of bed and either be a consumer or a producer, be a producer. Produce something that adds value to the world and just don't sit back and consume your whole life, just for the sake of having something to do. Let everybody else do that. Go make something that you're really proud of. And we all have different personalities that are gonna drive us to gravitate towards different ideas. But if something is keeping you up at night because either you're angry about it, or you just can't figure it out or you can't stop thinking about the solution, that might be something that you might be able to spend five or 10 years of your life working on. Everybody has ideas. Ideas themselves, are quite worthless and the world is not better because people simply have ideas. Talking about it won't do any good, you have to do something about it. And it might not ever work, it might not ever happen, but the pursuit of solving a problem that's meaningful to you, sounds better to me than working in a sea of cubes. I guess I'd rather spend my life chasing the idea that's in my head. That seems like a good way to live. Just ask yourself, what do you want outta life? Not, what do you wanna do, not who do you wanna work for, what do you want outta life? Do you wanna make stuff, do you wanna paint, do you want to save lives? What do you want to do? And then just concentrate on that and the rest will work itself out.