Dan Shipper: “The first big idea in Standing at the Edge by Zen priest Joan Halifax is this: Traits, behaviors, and emotions that we usually consider healthy—like altruism, empathy, engagement, respect, and integrity—can, when pursued to their extreme, tip our psychology over the edge from health into sickness. The second big idea is this: That we grow from falling over the edge. If we carefully observe and explore what Halifax terms the “edge states” of our psychology, we can turn what we learn into our greatest possible moments for growth and wisdom. And…just maybe…we can learn to pull ourselves back from the edge more often. In summary: the good pursued to its limit becomes the bad, and exploring the dark places we visit in our pursuit of the good can create the conditions for growth, change, and wisdom.”
Ajit Ranade: “About 13 million young people join the workforce in India every year. Even assuming only half of them seek jobs, i.e., a workforce participation rate of 50%, we still need 6-7 million new jobs (or livelihoods) every year. These are in addition to the churn among existing job holders, which add to the count of total job seekers. Except for a few thousand, most new jobs are not created by large corporates, public or private. These jobs don’t even come from the railways, post office department, the police or the armed forces. They mostly come from small, medium and tiny one-person enterprises. Thus, 6 million new jobs need at least 60,000 businesses to be born every year. Hence, our clarion call for job creation should be accompanied by a stirring call to create enterprises. What does it take to set up new businesses at such scale? Are these to be born mainly in urban areas? Do the midwives at birth present a formidable hurdle? What is the burden of formal registration, tax compliance and other regulations, including at the local and state levels? Will these enterprises have high infant mortality? Do many more therefore need to take birth? Will an inspector raj thwart ambitions? In any case, most youngsters among the large mass entering the workforce are ill-prepared to become entrepreneurs.”
John List: “When I think about high voltage, if you want an analogy, high voltage, to me, gives you a chance to reach new people in new situations with your idea. And, what I say in the book is, from the very beginning, if we’re about making change in the world, we should understand what are the constraints or regulations or changes that we will be facing when we scale an idea and bring that back to the Petri dish and add that to our A/B test.” He is the author of “The Voltage Effect.”
