I love having fun. I attend every little festival or celebration I can get my hands on and regular the local cinema with various groups of friends. It’s become a bad habit. Or maybe a good one.
To this day, I’ve never been disappointed in my grade average, which consistently hovers around 86 and 87. However, after every semester, when everyone loves to fervently compare their averages, I will never be on top. There are always those passionate students who commit themselves unconditionally to acing every test and crafting a masterpiece out of every assignment. They are almost dutiful in their devotion to whizzing through every 600-page philosophy book and then reading ahead in the history textbook in whatever time’s left over.
And honestly, I have the utmost respect for these people because of how much they are willing to sacrifice in order to reach their goals. Probably, by the time they’re 25, they’ll have amassed a degree at Harvard and a $2 million contract at some Wall Street investment firm.
But in this day and age, it’s not the all-out bookworm that founds the billion-dollar brands; it’s the intelligent socialite who was able to take in all the culture around him and make something of it.
Take Maureen Kelly, the CEO of one of America’s fastest growing cosmetics companies, Tarte Cosmetics. She operates strictly off instincts, never exploring price models or running cost analysis. Her brand’s latest product launch is a groundbreaking line of cosmetics formulated with the highly-touted Amazonian clay. But she didn’t read about this secret ingredient in The Economist or some century-old book on principles of warfare. She discovered it while on an eco-vacation in Brazil.
Now that’s taking “getting out more” to a whole ‘nother level.
