I hope you all have the opportunity to spend quality time with your loved ones today, and to those students who are celebrating their graduation from college this weekend or will be graduating in the weeks ahead, I give you my sincere congratulations! As a special treat for you guys, I’d like to share a link to some of the best commencement speeches, including wise words from greats such as Kurt Vonnegut, Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Will Ferrell.

Here I’d like to share my favorite commencement address, delivered by Steve Jobs at the 2005 Stanford University graduation ceremony. Jobs is a creative and technical role model for many, and an incredible public speaker. Of course for anyone who’s passionate about Silicon Valley like me this is an exciting address to hear, but Jobs offers something for everyone. The CEO of Apple and Pixar shares his experiences with adoption and growing up in a working-class family. He talks about love and loss, about his fight with cancer and embracing one’s mortality.

Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for a short time, and he relates stories about how he dropped out of college when he didn’t see the returns for his parents’ financial sacrifice, sharing what he learned as he continued to audit classes that appealed to him. If there is one big take-away, Jobs encourages new grads to find what they love to do, citing that “work fills a large part of your life,” and that following your passion is of the utmost importance.

“…it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Congratulations to all of you who’ve worked so hard to graduate from your degree programs this summer.

[source: Gawker]

A degree from a top university often comes with a hefty price tag. But these days you can nearly get an online education from these institutions for free! Though the business world indeed puts a high premium on the actual credentials you can put on your resume, and the peer network you will form at one of these colleges can help you go a long way too, the teachings and knowledge just overflowing from these institutions is nothing to sneeze at!

“Open courseware” has been a hot trend on the web for the last couple of years, as the evolution of web 2.0 encourages sharing, collaborating, and open sourcing of knowledge as well as software. Many of the top research institutions are sharing their lectures and presentations via online videos, audio podcasts, and articles. I’ve personally followed (and highly recommend) series such as Stanford’s Social Innovation Conversations, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program’s Ed Corner, featuring awesome resources on entrepreneurship and presentations by many of Silicon Valley’s tech elite, as well as Google’s TechTalks.

If you’re inclined to learn from some of the incredible educators at MIT or Stanford, Education Portal has put together an invaluable list of the ten best universities with primo online open courseware offerings. The list includes:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu)
2. Open University in the UK (open.ac.uk)
3. Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu)
4. Tufts University (tufts.edu)
5. Stanford (stanford.edu)
6. University of California, Berkeley (berkeley.edu)
7. Utah State University (usu.edu)
8. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (kutztownsbdc.org)
9. University of Southern Queensland (usq.edu.au)
10. University of California, Irvine (uci.edu)

YES, all these universities serve up free education resources! So go learn! To see the full details and get links to each institution’s online courseware, check out Education Portal’s list “Universities With the Best Free Online Courses.” Lifehacker also recommends Wendy Boswell’s guide to the “.edu underground”.

At the 2007 Entrepreneurship Week USA opening ceremonies at Stanford University in California, Carl Schramm (President and CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) surprised some of the audience when he said that 70% of college students will start a business at some point in their lives. Schramm said that while our grandparents had four jobs on average, over the course of their entire careers, Generation Y students in general will look forward to working 13 major jobs during their professional lives! And who is responsible for creating all those new jobs? Entrepreneurs, of course!

Schramm is author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative and calls entrepreneurship the US’ “competitive secret,” which allows us to stay ahead of developing nations economically (who knows for how long?). Startup companies “birth the new” and give security to others by creating jobs, and they posses the only key to creating wealth! They even facilitate non-profits and philanthropic ventures. This presents an interesting new way to look at economic models that I hadn’t approached before: without the for-profit businessman to virtually create capital, governments could not operate (there would be no one to tax!), and the non-profits would not have any money for their causes. Without individuals to start up businesses, there can be no government, no philanthropy, no charity…

1. A while ago I remember you were very keen on going to study at Stanford. Are you still with that goal?

2. What new changes are you planning for Thrilling Heroics?

3. If you’re planning to detach your income from your time (as so brilliantly put by [Steve Pavlina in this podcast]) how do you plan to do it?

I ask these questions out of curiosity and as I too am facing them in my own version of things, I’d like to hear your approach to them. To be more specific, I’ve had a long-running goal of going to film school, I’m currently in the process of making some changes to my blog and I’m interested in the concept of detaching my income from my time.

I thought these great questions deserved a little more in-depth discussion, and they give me a perfect opportunity to recommit to my mission here at ThrillingHeroics.com and share some of the plans for its development in 2008, so I’m happy to answer them here on TH with this post!

Revamping Thrilling Heroics for 2008

New Developments & Directions
Some great news — ThrillingHeroics.com has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of blogs to join the new Brazen Careerist blog network! I’m deeply flattered to be chosen by Penelope Trunk and the guys at Employee Evolution, and I’ll be honored to work alongside some other fantastic Gen-Y career bloggers.

Thrilling Heroics has evolved and changed over time alongside my interests and pursuits, and it will continue to do so, but I remain committed to my central mission: to inspire and empower others to pursue their dreams and goals in the face of adversity. The discussion is concentrated more in the direction of personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central message is the same, with a new twist: namely, Thrilling Heroics is a career-oriented resource for college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design.” Above all, I am passionate to encourage Generation-Y readers to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon!

TH started out with strong foundations in green business and social entrepreneurship. But whatever your interests, what remains central to the purpose of Thrilling Heroics is to empower the members of our generation to “think outside the box” of traditional work and traditional business, and really take advantage of all the things that are at our disposal to achieve our wildest dreams. Yes, that’s right — the ones you had when you were a kid. The world is your oyster! Whether your goals are to save the planet or to be the next CEO of GE! Join with other college students and young leaders who want to excel, make their dreams reality, and change the world. Watch as I experiment with entrepreneurship, living the mobile lifestyle, and practicing personal development and growth. Follow my adventures by subscribing to the blog, and share your own adventures as well!

New Format & Improved Features
For 2008, I will renew my commitment to sharing great content with you here at TH regularly, and the strong focus on career development and personal growth will hopefully manifest itself in several ways over the next few months: you should see a fresh, new, more personal design; articles will be organized into new categories and more useful chunk content; I’ve selected a new motto based on input from dozens of friends and colleagues; and I’ll continue to work hard to bring you great interviews within two new series: “Bright Young Minds” with young professionals who are making a difference, and “Proven Success,” a series where we’ll learn from the successes of established entrepreneurs and leaders. Check in later this week for an exclusive new interview with “Duff” McDuffy from Falling Fruit TV — Conscious Media for People Who Care!

Other features in the works include my definitive guide to networking, an introduction to lifestyle design, and further discussion of leadership, travel, personal finance, and personal growth. I’ll be serving up more consistent updates and sharing new, exciting content as I write from my experiences with personal entrepreneurship, and experiments with remote work, living the mobile lifestyle, and geoarbitrage. This is an adventure, so come along with me for the ride and learn from my successes and failures!

Help Me Create a Community for Young Professionals Who Want to Rock Their Careers!
I’ll be looking for guest writers that are interested to share their own stories. Other young bloggers who want to help encourage college students and Gen-Y workers to reach for their dreams, apply here! And to encourage user participation and build a true community, I’d like to potentially set up community forums to continue the discussion beyond the blog posts! That’s up to you guys too, though, so please help me spread the good word about Thrilling Heroics and tell your friends and colleagues. Get involved in the comments, submit your own ideas, and help me encourage our generation to kick ass and take life by the horns! Remember that my mission is to build your confidence to succeed, and to help you realize the freedom and flexibility to invest your time doing what you are truly passionate about.

Cody’s Entrepreneurial Roadmap

Freelancing & Entrepreneurship
To answer questions 1 and 3 above, let me start with the personal side. In the last three months, I left my traditional office job to pursue my true passion and I have been experimenting with freelancing and entrepreneurship. This is why I’ve been somewhat absent from Thrilling Heroics recently — I’ve been very busy with my freelance web development projects and laying the foundations of a business! I now work solely as a freelance web designer and consultant, building WordPress-powered blogs for professionals and small companies. I enjoy serving all kinds of clients, but work particularly well with other professional consultants who want to build up their personal brand, authors and columnists interested in transitioning to a web 2.0 platform, or speakers and coaches who seek to build an online community of raving fans! Some of my recent projects include Life Beyond Code, Moving From Me to We, HighlyObsessed.com, and TomAlexander.com.

I am in the very beginning stages, but my eventual goal is to incorporate and build my own web design company. In the next few months, you should see a full-fledged new business and website dedicated to my freelance design services, and at some point I may need to build a team from among my network of designers and creative-types — or outsource to other freelancers to help me increase my project capacity. This is not something I plan to do for my entire career, nor is it the only project I plan to have going at any one time, but over the next few years my end goal is to create a business that I own. The advantage of being owner, as opposed to president or CEO of a company, is that you profit from a company without necessarily having to run the business. (Not that there isn’t work to be done — but you hire smarter people to maintain things for you.)

How To Automate Your Income
Now to truly separate my income from my time, I plan to generate products that can bring in recurring income. You create it once, and see the profits from it repeatedly. Zen Habits has a great article on automating your income that discusses turning your service into a product:

Do you currently provide a service? If so, you have to devote many hours each week to provide that service. However, if you can turn that service into a product, such as a book or DVD or web site or CD, you can create it once and sell it over and over. Brainstorm the best way to create a product that gives customers the same information or skills that they would get from you in person.

Leo also goes on to speak about other forms of automated income:

Instead of creating an information product, you could create a real-world product, such as a gadget or nutrition product. Freelance designers can turn your idea into an actual design, and contract manufacturers can turn the design into a product. Other types of automated incomes include real estate, online retail businesses (including an eBay business), affiliate marketing, a blog, and a membership-type website. There are many possibilities. Find ways to turn your strengths into a revenue generator.

On my new web design blog, I hope to provide valuable free content, such as WordPress and business blogging how-to’s and instructional training videos that will attract both web design contracts and point users to products like website templates, podcasts, and eBooks that they can purchase from my site.

How To Get Into a Top University
Finally, I do still plan to apply to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but not for a while. Once I prove myself with a few more years of career experience, either through the success or failure of my business and other professional pursuits, I feel I’ll be more qualified to work alongside other entrepreneurs and young leaders at one of the world’s best B-schools! I still maintain my strong interest in studying green business and social entrepreneurship at the University’s Center for Social Innovation and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, but of course, coming from a not-quite-so-prestigious state school, it will be quite a challenge. For anyone who wants to apply to a big, competitive university, the keys are to show your dedication to achievement and personal growth, and to convince the program’s admissions officers that you’ll do great things with a degree from their school. Also, it doesn’t hurt to build relationships with faculty or with members of the alumni network from the school you hope to attend! Here are more valuable tips from Penelope Trunk.

I’ll be sure to post more about my personal goals and my 2008 resolutions very soon, so stay tuned for that before the New Year if you’d like to learn more.

###

I will be leaving to travel overseas at the end of the week (spending the holidays in Spain), but read my upcoming interview with Duff McDuffee — Co-Founder of Falling Fruit TV, philosopher, life coach, and yogin — in the next few days! Duff will share some great thoughts on things from conscious business to GTD to Buddhism!

Thanks again to Gautam for the great questions! Gautam Valluri is a friend from the blogosphere, a sharp young filmmaker, writer, and designer in Hyderābād, India. He does some fantastic exclusive interviews at BrokenProjector.com.

• Budget your finances! Don’t just throw away all your receipts. I know it doesn’t sound fun, but for one to three months, record each purchase you make and categorize it. Use Quicken, Microsoft Money, or paper-and-pencil. This will let you know where all your money is going, and then you can start to plan ahead and set a budget so you don’t go over. Cody’s super-easy hint: Although you have to be disciplined to do this, I use a credit card for virtually all my purchases (earn the rewards points in the meantime and pay it off at the end of each month), which makes tracking my spending a lot easier–no cash purchases to remember! You could also use a debit card. Once you have recorded what you spend, here is the easiest two-category budget plan EVER!
• Pay your bills on time! Use a calendar like Apple iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar, to send yourself reminders a few days before your regular bills are due (rent, utilities, credit cards, etc.). Or use Quicken reminders, or check out a service like BillQ if it works for you. Paying on time is the best thing you can do to ensure you build good credit, which you will need later! Cody’s helpful hint: Most online banking services allow you to do online bill-pay and schedule payments for ANY available business day. So, take your bills as soon as you get them in the mail, go into your online banking, and set up a payment to be delivered by the due date, and then you can forget about it! This means the money is available and earns more for you as long as possible, but the bill still gets paid on time.
• If you have credit card balances, keep them on a 0% card. Mildly shady, but entirely legal. If you have debt, which many of us do, at least keep it on low-interest or zero-percent cards. Better yet, put your purchases on a rewards card! (I once got a card that gave me a free iPod Nano for transferring a $2000 balance.) There are a thousand credit cards out there with 0% introductory rates (usually for the first year), so take advantage of that and then simply transfer your balance to another one when the intro period is up. (This is not to encourage you to continue to maintain a balance though; pay off as much as you can each month until it is GONE!) Cody’s word of caution: Just be careful, read the fine print, know when the introductory rate is up, and AVOID balance transfer fees (many cards charge 3% of the transfer amount, but there are plenty you can find that have no transfer fee for new cardholders). Check out Jim Wang’s posts on 0% balance transfer offers and other credit card offers. Also see the next step for a tip on how to lower your credit card interest rate.

Now here are a few other, little-known hacks that you can use, and then laugh and taunt your friends for being stupider than you! Remember, the little things add up:

• Call your bank/credit card to get a better deal! This sounds so simple, but 99.9% of people DON’T do it! Here’s what I suggest, every time your bank charges you an overdraft fee, an international fee, or any other kind of fee, or if your credit card charges you a late fee for receiving your payment a day after the due date for instance…CALL THEM! And ask nicely. Give your defense if you have to. The worst that can happen is they’ll say no. And you’ll be no worse off than you were before placing the call. But I guarantee you, 95% of the time they will say exactly this, “Well, we normally don’t do this, but I’ll give you a one-time fee-waiver.” Remember, they want to keep you as a customer, so financial institutions are usually willing to part with 10 bucks here and there, and the majority of people won’t call them out on those fees, so they’re making plenty already. If the customer service rep denies you, just call back in a few minutes and speak to someone else! Also, here’s a fantastic guide to lowering your credit card rate with one phone call. Cody’s additional $0.02: in addition to the FreeCreditReport site they recommend, check out the Federally-mandated AnnualCreditReport.com for your free yearly report. If you pay your bills on time and you have a 700+, you have a LOT of leverage with credit card companies! (And you should look into getting some fantastic rewards cards!)
• Use coupon codes and discounts when shopping online. This one’s pretty simple, but when you shop online, especially around the holidays, try to take advantage of promotional codes and discounts. I don’t recommend going out of your way to buy the things you see coupons for (that’s why companies print coupons, don’t you know? So you will SPEND more!). But, if you already plan on getting a few items online, check a site like CurrentCodes.com to see if there are any special deals for the particular website you’re looking at purchasing from–discounts, free shipping offers, etc. This saved me about $30 on a Lost Season 2 DVD set once! That’s pretty good for a coupon.
• Open up a high-yield online savings account! This is one of the SMARTEST moves you can make! Most banks these days only offer annual percentage yields under 1% on their savings accounts, unfortunately (actually the national average right now is only 0.54%). But, there’s an easy solution that not everyone has caught onto yet. If you’re willing to do your transactions online and go without a paper statement, a high-yield online savings account is the perfect solution. There are a lot of banks doing this, but here are some of the top APY rates. All of these are FDIC insured and have zero fees, zero minimum balances:
  • I use the EmigrantDirect American Dream Savings Account, which returns 5.05%
  • HSBC Direct offers 5.05%. Try entering the promo code “start” and see if it gets you an opening bonus…
  • E*Trade Complete Savings 5.05%
  • CitiBank Direct at 5.00%. You need to open an EZ online checking account along with the e-Savings to get the bank fees waived on this one.
  • I also have an ING Direct Orange Savings Account, which is now up to 4.50%. If you would like, I can send you a referral and you can earn $25 for opening an account with a minimum opening balance of $250 (hey, it’s good if you want a quick 10% return!) Just email me if you’re interested (see sidebar for email).

  It only takes 10 minutes to set one of these up (literally!). All you need is your personal info and your regular bank checking account info. And you’ll immediately be making 6 to 9 times the national savings average! It’s easy. Do it.

Finally, I recommend you always continue learning about financial stuff and keep up your financial intelligence. For something you can read daily, check out the master of all personal finance and entrepreneurship bloggers, Ramit Sethi, at IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Read his 5 Steps To Getting Rich first, and then he’ll lead you through budgeting, saving, investing, and retirement. Read my one-on-one interview with Ramit Sethi. Also check out J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly.

I’ve been meaning to share my travels to Stanford for a few days, so I’ll start from the beginning. Last weekend, February 24th, was the national opening ceremony for E-Week at Stanford University. I travelled down to Palo Alto with my roommate Steve, where we stayed with our buddy Patrick Briggs (the Zazzler).

At the E-Week kickoff, Jonathan Ortmans (National Executive Director of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA) stressed the value of entrepreneurs to the US and world economy, citing that entrepreneurs especially reflect the pioneering spirit of the early American colonizers. An entrepreneurial career definitely highlights the difference between merely taking a job that someone else provides for you and making a job for yourself! It is a move back toward the self-made legacy of great American heroes like Ben Franklin, for one.

Next we heard from John Hennessey, president of Stanford University. Hennessey is one academic who has an entrepreneurial legacy himself, as he transferred his important research in microprocessor technology to actual industry application by co-founding MIPS Technologies (he also sits on the boards of Google and Cisco). President Hennessey explained that fostering an entrepreneurial atmosphere does five important things: it 1) increases people’s creativity and willingness to think outside the box, 2) encourages individuals to follow their passion and therefore excel at what they do, 3) creates a community that embraces and leads change, 4) encourages people to have a “glass half full” approach to problems and see them as potential opportunities, and 5) increases people’s willingness to take on and overcome challenges by building excellent teams. This entrepreneurial atmosphere is definitely prevalent throughout Silicon Valley–which is why I feel myself drawn there. It is one community of people who do not let fear of failure prevent them from giving their BIG ideas a shot! And they are great at assembling quality teams to tackle problems-as-opportunities.

Carl Schramm (President and CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) surprised some of the audience when he said that 70% of college students will start a business at some point in their lives. He referenced the common statistic that while our grandparents may have had on average four jobs over their career, we will have something like 13! And who is responsible for creating all those new jobs? Entrepreneurs, of course! Schramm is author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative and calls entrepreneurship the US’ “competitive secret,” which allows us to stay ahead of developing nations economically (who knows for how long?). He says that startups “birth the new” and give security to others by creating jobs, and they posses the only key to creating wealth! This presents an interesting new way to look at economic models that I hadn’t really approached before: without the for-profit businessman to virtually create capital, governments could not operate (no one to tax), and the non-profit foundations would not have any money to give to their causes. So without individuals to start up businesses, there can be no government, no philanthropy, no charity…

Finally Steve Jurvetson (Partner in the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson) shared some insight into what ties philanthropy, raising families, creating art and literature, and entrepreneurship together–people’s desire to create some kind of a legacy that will last beyond our short time here on earth. He recommends students pay close attention for uniqueness, persistence, and infectious enthusiasm in their classmates (his peer Jim Yang went on to start up Yahoo!) because successful entrepreneurs are rarely lone rangers, but more often come in dynamic duos as he says. Most importantly, he says to look for ways you can harness what you’ve learned from past experiences in new and perhaps unfamiliar territory. That is why I try not to let job descriptions discourage me when I am looking for something new–I feel that my accumulated experience across many different job types will lend itself to being a flexible team-worker in different settings even if I haven’t worked in that field before. And I hope that my experience leading teams successfully in my academic career, recruiting and assembling student teams, and creating my own leadership projects in a position where I’m not officially given a lot of seniority, will translate well into being a fair and effective leader in business. You take the lessons you learn, and just apply them in a new setting.

In the end, I really felt like these guys opened my eyes to a few new ways of looking at entrepreneurship and how it benefits society. In a capitalist community, it really spurs all progress, and is responsible for all wealth- and job-creation. Carl Schramm says that all entrepreneurs are social entrepreneurs for these reasons.

I recently had a run-in with these terms when the Federal Direct Loan people sent me a letter saying I have payments coming due the 15th of this month! And I was still under the impression that my loans wouldn’t come due until July 2007, because that’s what my paperwork originally said. And I never received notice that the date was moved forward until November 28th. Oh well, it will be a bit of a pain for me to prepare to pay an extra $120 a month in bills on such short notice, but I guess it was my responsibility in the first place. I should have realized that by dropping from half-time units to just one class this semester, I was no longer eligible for the deferment. (I just wish they’d told me earlier on!)

Anyway, after reading Jim Wang’s post, now I understand that if I go into forbearance my loan still starts accumulating interest this month, and at the end of the forbearance period it capitalizes (or becomes part of the total loan, and accrues interest on that interest!). That’s important to know. Unfortunately they didn’t tell me this over the phone when I called to find out what was up with the sudden news that I had to start paying, and found out that I was only eligible for forbearance (not deferment) if I wanted to postpone my payments at all. So, while I may go into forbearance for a month or two to make preparations to accommodate this extra expense in my budget, now I know the best route is to pay that interest that accrues during forbearance up front with my first payment, before it capitalizes. So, read up! And learn from my mistakes.

Most important things to remember about repaying student loans:

• You are only eligible for deferment if you are still enrolled half-time or more.
• KNOW your own eligibility status! And know when you come into repayment. Don’t depend on the loan officer to let you know about changes in your due date!
• If you go into forbearance, do it only for as little amount of time as necessary. And…
• Pay off any interest accrued during forbearance before it capitalizes.