GUEST SPEAKER: ERIK HANBERG

On November 23, 2009, we were introduced to a great guest speaker, Erik Hanberg. All throughout his presentation I was able to remain attentive to his speech because the contents of his preparation for the class was really interesting. In his presentation he was able to cover a lot of important information that answered many questions I had about the "WORKING" part of Living and Working in a Virtual World. In the beginning, he covered the two kinds of work, hourly/salary and scalable, and told us the differences referring it to some examples. Hourly and salary work is the most common source of work in which wages are capped hours, pay is steady, and other people working with the same job would earn similar amounts. On the other hand, scalable work, it is known to be a commission based job, limited amount of jobs, almost no limits, pay can "spike", and the pays would vary wildly among individuals. Moreover, he talked about the "winner take-all", which is basically when a company has the most market share or authority in the particular market such as, Amazon or Google. The two most interesting topics that caught my interest throughout the speech was the "Black Swan" and the message "Little Book of Gold" conveys. The topic about "Black Swan" seemed quite catchy because I didn't realize that the theory of this whole myth is really true. Some people would do so much within the same career but at the same time, a person who is doing the same amount of work or less would become THE most successful person. In addition, the "Little Book of Gold" also states a message that seems so simple yet incredibly difficult in my opinion. Contributing some time and money wouldn't be too hard but the difficult part is the big step one must take in order to make the action. You will never know if the decision one has made would be a hit or not until one really takes the sacrifice and does the ACTION. These messages were really influential because it certainly mentioned the reality of what successful people had to do in order to be acknowledges for their great input and work.