Marriage in decline?

My father-in-law sent me this editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune entitled "Marriage faces inevitable decline in face of 'me' generation". It's a fairly interesting piece - a little too extreme relative to my own position on some of these topics but still thought-provoking. I was a little surprised that married couples are the minority in America today. Certainly more and more people are waiting in life to both get married and have kids - and having less kids than in the past. From a sustainability perspective, having less kids (or no kids) is potentially a good thing. It puts less pressure on the Earth's resources and our environment. On the other hand, it places a greater economic burden on the newer generation since there are less of them to support the ever-growing needs of older, longer-living generations at-or-near retirement.

Here's an interesting question. Is it better to have lots of people rush into marriage but have a 50% divorce rate? Or is it better for people to wait, potentially have sex outside of marriage, and get married once they're ready (if ever)? No easy answers here.

Road to Balance

The other day at work, a woman came in to talk about the "road to balance" (see her handouts). Given the fact that I'm about to join a small startup company, this is a particularly timely topic and one that I need to take very seriously. Relative to where I was a couple of years ago, I feel like I am more grounded and disciplined with respect to the importance of balance. But there is a high risk of this getting out of control in a hurry if I'm not careful about it - especially all the new things I need to learn for my new position (see this post). I'm really going to need to rely on my wife and the rest of my family to keep me honest here. It's not easy to tell someone that they have their priorities out of whack but I'm glad I have people in my life who care enough to do so.

Lots to learn

I'm starting to get ready for my new job. There's definitely no lack of new things to learn. And, what fun would it be if I didn't make the challenge extra-hard? Given the fact that Newco is focused on biofuels, I thought it might be interesting to learn more about conventional fuel production. So I looked at a book called Petroleum Refining: Technology and Economics. The very first sentence of the introduction is: "Modern refinery operations are very complex and, to a person unfamiliar with the industry, it seems to be an impossible task to reduce the complexity to a coordinated group of understandable processes." Wow ... and I thought it would be easy to get up to speed on this stuff. Well, perhaps the science side of things will be easier. Just ordered Organic Chemistry I for Dummies. The first sentence of the book description is: "Organic chemistry is rated among the most difficult courses that students take and is frequently the cause of washout among pre-med, medical, and nursing students." Hmm ... perhaps that won't be any easier. But, if freshmen and sophomores in college can tackle organic chemistry, I don't see why I can't too. My theory going into my career search was that there isn't any subject I can't learn. It's time to put that theory to the test.

The Lord's Prayer

ExploreFaith.org has an eight-part series exploring the meaning of the Lord's Prayer line-by-line. I won't have the chance to read through it anytime soon but others might be interested. When I was growing up, I had the Lord's Prayer hanging on my wall - although I must admit I never really paid attention to it.

Got hobbies?

I don't have any hobbies. I aspire to having hobbies but I really don't have any. A while ago, I created a list with my wife of hobbies I might want to take up at some point - including swimming, basketball, golf, biking, tennis, fine arts performances, sporting events, volunteer work, learning a musical instrument (piano), and getting into fantasy football. No progress on any of those fronts but it's a good list nonetheless.

I also created a list of things I wanted to learn more about - including statistics, game theory, complexity theory, auto maintenance, the environment, energy/alternative energy, culture of obesity, sleep patterns, and open source software. Some progress here - especially related to the environment and alternative energy (but there's plenty more to learn).

And one more list for good measure. At one point, I was thinking about taking a 3-6 month sabbatical from work. Some of the ideas I had for activities were visiting NYC, going to a fitness camp, taking a bike tour, getting some personal training, getting into yoga, going to India, going to Boston and Nantucket, doing some volunteer work, getting more into religion, and catching up with people. With the new job, I guess the sabbatical will need to wait a couple more years.

Since I found the lists, figured I'd share ... but the level of progress is a little depressing.

Lose Yourself

I was going through old papers this afternoon and came across a sign I created for myself when I did fat2phat originally. It contained an excerpt by an Eninem song called "Lose Yourself" (from the movie 8 Mile):

If you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
...
Success is my only option, failure is not.

Seems oddly appropriate given my jump into the biofuels space (see previous post).

Newco

Some of you may be wondering why I haven't posted a new entry in so long. Others may not have noticed. Regardless, there is a good reason why I haven't posted recently. Specifically, over the last two weeks, I met and decided to join a small (9-person) startup. They're in stealth mode so no website or other information at the moment. Current investors include Khosla Ventures and Flagship Ventures. On the Flagship site, they describe Newco as "designing microbial factories to produce energy related products". So very different than what I've been doing in the past but certainly well-aligned with my desire to help fight global warming (since biofuels are carbon-neutral since the feedstock for the biofuel is plant-based and takes an equivalent amount of CO2 out of the air as cars put into it).

I'll be the "business entrepreneur" (officially "Senior Director of Business Development") - basically the first full-time business person. Everyone else in the company is a scientist-type. Should be interesting. Certainly an opportunity for me to shine ... or fall flat on my face. Hopefully it will be the former. =)

I'm actually writing this from the Advancing Renewable Energy conference in St. Louis. Even though I won't officially begin my new position for about a month, I'm here "drinking from the firehose" to learn about this new space. President Bush will actually be speaking at the conference tomorrow but, unfortunately, I'll miss his speech since I need to catch a flight and couldn't get onto a later plane (darn!). It's not everyday that you get a chance to see the President of the United States in person.

I have to admit that I'm very curious to see how I do in this new role. If nothing else, there is going to be a massive learning curve associated with both the technology involved (biochemistry and synthetic biology) and the market for the technology (biofuels). I basically have zero domain knowledge/experience with either and will be relying upon (a) being smart, (b) learning quickly, (c) being a strong overall "business athlete" with diverse functional experience, and (d) leveraging the experience of others wherever possible. We'll see if that's enough to be successful .

I'm both excited and scared about what's to come. But I take a lot of comfort from knowing that I have so many people in my corner. Let the new adventure begin.