Serial Entreprenuers

Inventing Dad 
On growing up with a serial entrepreneur 
-Hillary Jonson   https://medium.com/american-dreamers/5742fdaae457

My father, Morgan Johnson, has all the elements of the wildly successful entrepreneur: a concoction of exuberance, irreverence, cockiness, and brilliance. All his life he’s angered and annoyed people with his eccentric, impulsive behavior, yet kept them hooked by his talent, and even more so, by his brazen optimism. He holds 11 patents and has burned through several million dollars’ worth of other people’s money in a series of start-up ventures. But so far, large-scale commercial success has eluded him. Now in his sixties, he’s banded together with a bunch of other old guys and mounted a last ditch campaign that seems, miracle of miracles, to be working. He’s also started wondering about why it never worked before. So have I. And the answers we each came up with are a lot more disturbing than you might think. 

As a small child, I lived in a world of continuous invention. Nothing my family ate, wore, read, thought, or slept in could be remotely described as “normal,” “cookie cutter” or “readymade.” We lived on a tugboat instead of in a house. My mother decorated the ship’s head with a bolt of paisley cloth, laminating it over every square inch, including the inside of the claw-footed tub. There was some fabric left over, so we all ended up with clothes that matched the bathroom.

The futurist, universe-shaping elements of my father’s creative output had been growing ever since he took a college class from a disciple of the iconoclastic futurist Buckminster Fuller. In the weeks before Barbara and Morgan blew out of Portland, they lived in a one-room apartment in a building slated for demolition. In a fit of creativity, he delineated the future of mankind and the universe on the apartment walls. “I drew a dome around the moon and began to map out the parsing and cutting up of the sun for energy extraction,” he remembers. “I converted the sun into a combustion engine and the whole solar system into a vehicle, then spelled out the chain reaction of humans as they moved though the galaxy, eventually consuming it.” He also included a detailed description of what is now called nanotechnology, based on self-modifying DNA. A few days later, he and Barbara were watching the Apollo astronauts land on the moon from a borrowed apartment in New York…

Now, this is something I don't think many people really take insight to: the fact that there is a bit about the entrepreneur that is a bit... off. We follow our follies, and that may lead us to New Mexico, San Francisco, or Mumbai. Just think about the possibilities of the universe. It is something worth giving pause to, is it not? 

In a random evening, I happened to devise a scheme for the habitation of distant planets with the use of thorium reactors, hydrocarbon plants, an kicking greenhouse gas production in to high gear to be able to fake a breathable atmosphere in 250 years. 

My point is: what captures your creativity? Don't just regurgitate the last three Ted talks you saw, but know nothing about... Oh no. Cultivate your interests!

You can't change the world if you have no heart. No passion. Remember, obsession is just a term the lazy use to describe the passionate. 

Cheers!