The legacy of Nelson Mandela lives on in the hearts of global communities, who find inspiration and hope in his way of life and way of leading the country.&nbsp; We can reflect on some of the things he taught us about leadership and change.

The legacy of Nelson Mandela

When you engage in a noble cause, you become energised and passionate. That passion fuels perseverance. Opposed to the policies of his country's white minority government, Madiba was instrumental in the action against apartheid in South Africa that caused him to be imprisoned for 27 years. However, he emerged from incarceration and became South Africa's first black president.

Passion produces perseverance

Innovation and change is rarely a neat path. Pushing for change often leads to sacrifice and difficulty. But just because it is difficult does not mean that what you are working on is not right.&nbsp; Mandela was a partner in the only black-run law firm in South Africa. The company was overwhelmed by aggrieved clients demanding compensation for the government's actions against non-whites. Mandela could have created a comfortable life for himself, but instead focused on making a worthwhile change.

Expect change to be messy

When Mandela was released from prison, former president Bill Clinton of the United States observed the anger and hatred on Mandela's face as he walked from his cellblock to the front of the prison. Then in a moment, Mandela's rage seemed to vanish. Madiba taught us that at some point in our lives, we are all victims of something. But, we don't have to be victims of our past. We can let go of our bitterness and achieve greatness.

Forgiveness is key to moving forward

In marriage, social justice or business, you can focus your energy on being right or ending right. Being right is often about our ego and focuses on the past. Ending right is about the future and what you want to achieve. Nelson Mandela vehemently fought for what he believed in, but he was not willing to humiliate the opposition. He stated that "no one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated." To be successful in a relationship of any kind requires the ability to let all sides gain.

End right vs being right

Madiba learned through his years in imprisonment to look in the mirror and create within himself that which he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, equality, harmony and freedom. Self-awareness is a good leadership skill. Madiba understood that leading his nation into a peaceful democracy meant that he had to be the change.

Change begins from the inside-out

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial and uninformed.

In a world desperate for civility, unity and hope, we need optimistic leaders who can bring innovation, creativity and bold, audacious ideas to bear on the problems we face. Here are 5 lessons about change from one of the most visionary and influential political figures the world has ever seen.

Stashed ideas

(Photo: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

This week, Nelson Mandela, affectionately referred to by his clan or family name, Madiba, would have turned 100. The legacy of this iconic leader lives on in the hearts of a nation and a global community who find inspiration and hope from the way he lived his life and led his country. To celebrate his 100th birthday we reflect on just a few of the things he taught us about leadership and change.

1. Passion Produces Perseverance

When you find a cause worth fighting for you become passionate and passion fuels the fires of perseverance. Opposed to the policies of his country’s white minority government, Madiba led a non-violent action against apartheid in South Africa. It was a choice that landed him in prison for 27 years. He emerged from incarceration and became South Africa’s first ever black president. It was the first time Mandela himself was able to vote in his own country.

As with most innovators, Mandela’s road to change was paved with enormous challenges, but he never gave up the fight. His passion for the cause was bigger than the bitterness and shame of his failures. He said, “The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.” If Madiba taught us anything, it was to build our lives and work around a noble cause. When you become engaged in something you deeply believe in, your energy rises and you become a magnet for people who share the same convictions. Adapt your strategies and tactics but remain faithful to the cause.

PROMOTED

2. Expect Change To Be Messy

Business is wrought with obstacles. Innovation and change rarely follow a nice, neat linear path. Driving change often causes sacrifice, misfortune and pain. If it were easy and didn’t require tremendous backbone, everyone would be doing it, right? But <a aria-label="just because you face difficulties and frustration doesn’t mean that what you are fighting for isn’t right." data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkevinandjackiefreiberg%2F2018%2F07%2F19%2Fmadiba-leadership-5-lessons-nelson-mandela-taught-the-world-about-change%2F&amp;text=Just%20because%20you%20face%20difficulties%20and%20frustration%20doesn%E2%80%99t%20mean%20that%20what%20you%20are%20fighting%20for%20isn%E2%80%99t%20right." dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkevinandjackiefreiberg%2F2018%2F07%2F19%2Fmadiba-leadership-5-lessons-nelson-mandela-taught-the-world-about-change%2F&amp;text=Just%20because%20you%20face%20difficulties%20and%20frustration%20doesn%E2%80%99t%20mean%20that%20what%20you%20are%20fighting%20for%20isn%E2%80%99t%20right." rel="nofollow noopener">just because you face difficulties and frustration doesn’t mean that what you are fighting for isn’t right. </a>

As a partner in the only law firm in South Africa run by blacks, <a aria-label="Mandela and Tambo" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandela_and_Tambo" dir="ltr" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandela_and_Tambo" rel="nofollow noopener">Mandela and Tambo </a>, Mandela could’ve carved out a comfortable life for himself. The firm was inundated with aggravated clients seeking restitution from acts of a government that was politically, economically, and legally against non-whites.

Solving a problem that really matters, change that is truly worthwhile is hard to come by. It requires nerve to push through the trials and ultimately make your vision a reality. This is why many change efforts that fail can be traced back to a “failure of nerve.”

Nelson Mandela with his old law partner and ANC President, Oliver Tambo. (Photo by © Louise... [+]

3. Forgiveness Is Key To Focusing Forward

When he was president of the United States, Bill Clinton had a conversation with Nelson Mandela when he was president of South Africa. Years earlier, Clinton woke his family up at three o’clock in the morning to watch the press coverage of the historic day Mandela was released from prison. As the television cameras pressed in, Clinton observed the sheer anger and hatred on Mandela’s face as he walked from his cellblock to the front of the prison. Then in a heartbeat, Mandela’s rage seemed to vanish. When Clinton asked the South African president about it, Mandela replied,

I’m surprised that you saw that, and I regret that the cameras caught my anger. Yes, you are right. When I was in prison the son of a guard started a Bible study and I attended. That day when I stepped out of prison and looked at the people observing, a flush of anger hit me with the thought that they had robbed me of 27 years. Then the Spirit of Jesus said to me, ‘Nelson, while you were in prison you were free, now that you are free don’t become a prisoner.’

Nelson Mandela’s emotions naturally gravitated toward anger and resentment. Whose wouldn’t? Until he recognized what was happening. Then, he made a different choice. Obviously, we are not totally free from conditions—tsunamis happen, leadership changes, employees are laid off, friends fall ill, and people die—but we are totally free to take a stand in lieu of them. Mandela didn’t “choose” to live in a world full of racism, but he was able to choose how he would respond to that world. He said, "We don’t have to be victims of our past, that we can let go of our bitterness, and that all of us can achieve greatness."

<a aria-label="Madiba taught us that at some time in our lives we are all victims of something, but we get to choose whether or not we will be victimized." data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkevinandjackiefreiberg%2F2018%2F07%2F19%2Fmadiba-leadership-5-lessons-nelson-mandela-taught-the-world-about-change%2F&amp;text=At%20some%20time%20in%20our%20lives%2C%20we%20are%20all%20victims%20of%20something%2C%20but%20we%20get%20to%20choose%20whether%20or%20not%20we%20will%20be%20victimized." dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkevinandjackiefreiberg%2F2018%2F07%2F19%2Fmadiba-leadership-5-lessons-nelson-mandela-taught-the-world-about-change%2F&amp;text=At%20some%20time%20in%20our%20lives%2C%20we%20are%20all%20victims%20of%20something%2C%20but%20we%20get%20to%20choose%20whether%20or%20not%20we%20will%20be%20victimized." rel="nofollow noopener">Madiba taught us that at some time in our lives we are all victims of something, but we get to choose whether or not we will be victimized. </a> No child is born to discriminate. We learn to hate. And, if we learn to hate people based on their gender, political affiliation or the color of their skin, we can also learn to love, even in the direst of circumstances.  If you doubt this, check out South Africa’s <a aria-label="Truth and Reconciliation Commission" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)" dir="ltr" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)" rel="nofollow noopener">Truth and Reconciliation Commission </a>. It is a wonderful example of the healing power of love.

4. End Right vs. Being Right

In marriage, in social justice and certainly in business, you can focus your energy on being right or ending right. The former is often about ego and focuses on the past. The latter is future-oriented and focuses on what you are ultimately trying to achieve.

Strong-willed and determined, Nelson Mandela never cowered. He vehemently fought for what he believed in, but he was also humble and kind. “You mustn’t compromise your principles, but you mustn’t humiliate the opposition,” he said. “No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.” Madiba understood that you can’t make peace with your enemy if you aren’t willing to work with them and treat them with dignity. Here, he taught us about the power of collaboration and compromise:

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial and uninformed.

Whether it is an employee, customer or partner, when you engage in a debate is your motive to become closer? To have both sides emerge stronger? Or, to win the argument?

Imprisoned for 27 years and then vindicated. Who could endure that kind of oppression and not feel some desire for revenge? Yet, Madiba reached across enemy lines and extended a hand because ending right was more important than being right. By inviting his captors to work with him to bring about positiv e change he demonstrated an incredible level of integrity for the cause and a remarkable capacity to forgive.

In 1993, Nelson Mandela was<a aria-label="jointly awarded" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1993/" dir="ltr" href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1993/" rel="nofollow noopener">jointly awarded </a>the Nobel Peace Prize with his former adversary, president FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid leader. The two leaders were a symbol of collaboration and compromise for bringing a peaceful termination to apartheid and for laying the foundation for a new democratic South Africa. Mandela captured the essence of what happened this way:

The efforts of a small dedicated group of leaders working objectively and without any vested personal interest in the outcome, can help resolve what often seem like intractable problems.

Nobel peace prize laureates Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Frederik Willem de Klerk, on the... [+]

To be successful in business, politics or relationships of any kind requires the ability to give and take where all sides gain more. Madiba poignantly reminded us, the world can be a better place, but only if we work together to make it one.

5. Change Begins From The Inside-out

If there was a silver lining to his years of imprisonment, Madiba said it was to look in the mirror and create within himself that which he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, equality, harmony and freedom. Perhaps his most profound impact and greatest legacy was to teach us, through vivid, living, personal example, to be human before anything else.

Self-awareness is a sign of great leadership. Madiba understood that if he was going to lead his nation out of racial discrimination and into a peaceful democracy he would have to “be the change.”

Madiba understood that this difference starts with who we are and how we land on others as leaders. His joyful and infectious character sparked hope for millions of people who want to dream big and pursue their dreams without oppressive limitations, who want to live in a world of tolerance, inclusion and hope.

What constitutes a life of meaning and significance? How do we know that we have really lived? For what will we be remembered? Aren’t these the questions we are all asking? Here’s how Madiba saw it:

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

Great leadership is generative. That is, it is concerned about the care and growth of future generations, helping them live with dignity and raising them to new levels of morality and motivation.

On July 18, 2007, his 89th birthday, Nelson Mandela convened a group of independent global leaders and challenged them to “speak truth to power, raise the voices of the voiceless and offer hope where there is despair.” He called them <a aria-label="The Elders" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://theelders.org" dir="ltr" href="https://theelders.org/" rel="nofollow noopener">The Elders </a>. Mandela said, " Together we will work to support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict and inspire hope where there is despair."

Since its founding 10 years ago, The Elders have responded to Mandela’s mandate. Bolstering peace, responding to humanitarian crises, promoting climate change and nuclear disarmament, eliminating child marriage, upholding equal rights for women, reuniting divided communities and advancing the democratization of countries around the globe, The Elders have <a aria-label="pooled their influence" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://theelders.org/elders-10" dir="ltr" href="https://theelders.org/elders-10" rel="nofollow noopener">pooled their influence </a>to make the world better and Madiba’s legacy lives on.

Nelson Mandela stands flanked by ex-US president Jimmy Carter, former UN chief Kofi Annan,... [+]

Madiba Leadership: 5 Lessons Nelson Mandela Taught The World About Change

Though 1972’s Pong has often been credited as the first popular video game, the mantle goes to Tennis For Two, which was created by a nuclear physicist, William Higinbotham, in 1958.
The primitive game was a sideways view of a tennis court, with the ball moving back and forth, and the two players watching the five-inch cathode ray tube display and using a mechanical-electrical system filled with wires, and the world’s first joystick: a large cube with a button and knob.
The video game arcade era went mainstream in the 80s, also a time when the physicist was finally credited for his pioneering work.

The First Video Game

Leadership

History

It's a far cry from the immersive video game experiences of today, and it took a nuclear physicist to assemble, but 'Tennis for Two' was a milestone in gaming history.

Career

With its simplistic volleying of a tiny pixel between two vertical paddles, 1972’s Pong has come to represent the first generation of video game play. It was simple, it was low-tech, and it was addictive. But it wasn’t the first video game. That honor goes to a game that debuted back in 1958, the same year the hula hoop debuted and Leave It to Beaver was still on television. Its inventor? A nuclear physicist.

In the 1940s and 1950s, attempts to write software programs for amusement purposes were understandably primitive. Towering computer systems <a dir="ltr" href="http://www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg/video-game-history/timeline">sweat virtual bullets </a>trying to compete with human opponents in games like chess or Nim , which involved choosing matchsticks until only one was left for the loser to retrieve. Rarely did these systems have any kind of screen—Nim used flashing lights to signify moves—making the “video” component of the first video game a crucial missing piece.

Inventor Thomas T. Goldsmith came close, <a dir="ltr" href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a20129/the-very-first-video-game/">filing a patent </a>in 1947 for a proposed device that used a cathode ray tube, or CRT, as a display and allowed players to turn knobs that would control lines on the screen to “hit” paper airplanes glued on top of the glass. But Goldsmith’s idea likely never made it past the patent stage (no evidence of a prototype has ever been discovered).

Just over 10 years later, William Higinbotham had a <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php">different ambition </a>: Heading up the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the nuclear physicist thought that typical science fairs were too static. For their annual visitors day, Higinbotham wanted to create something that would make onlookers active rather than passive spectators.

Drawing on his college experience with oscilloscopes, which display changes in electrical voltage, and CRTs, Higinbotham spent three weeks cobbling together a system that used an analog vacuum tube computer that could manipulate curves on the tube. The instruction manual for the computer detailed how those curves could be made to resemble the trajectories of bullets, missiles, or bouncing balls. Higinbotham liked the idea of the latter and decided to replicate a physical sport on the screen. He called it Tennis for Two .

When visitors to the Lab arrived on October 18, 1958, there was considerable curiosity over Tennis for Two , which featured a side view of a tennis court and a blurry little dot being lobbed over a net using knobs. The display measured just 5 inches, but it proved so intriguing that hundreds of people formed queues for an opportunity to try out what is considered by many to be the first video game introduced to the general public.

The following year, Higinbotham <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm">improved </a>on his concept by using a larger screen and giving players the option of adjusting the game’s "gravity," so the ball could travel as though the game were being played on the moon. While still popular, Tennis for Two was not perceived as anything more than a novelty: The device was disassembled and the parts repurposed for other projects. Because he was an employee of the federal government and didn't own anything he created during work hours, Higinbotham didn’t bother filing a patent.

It wasn’t until the flourishing video game industry of the 1980s began looking backwards that Higinbotham was credited with his early and pioneering work in the industry. Although there’s still some controversy over how to define the first video game—the oscilloscope wasn’t actually a video display, since it couldn’t convert electronic signals—it seems fairly clear that Higinbotham had conceived of an interactive amusement using a computer, a screen, and a program, a concept further refined by 1961’s Spacewar! and every game that has followed.

Although Higinbotham needed just three weeks to construct the first video game, future employees of Brookhaven needed a <a dir="ltr" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27328345/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/anatomy-first-video-game/">little more time </a>to duplicate his work. To recreate the game in 1997 and again for its 50th anniversary in 2008, a recreation team spent more than three months producing a replica system. If you want to get some sense of what those early adopters in 1958 experienced, another facsimile is on <a dir="ltr" href="http://www.museumofplay.org/blog/chegheads/2017/01/following-the-bouncing-ball-tennis-for-two-at-the-strong/">display </a>at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at <a dir="ltr" href="mailto:bigquestions@mentalfloss.com">bigquestions@mentalfloss.com </a>.

What Was The First Video Game?

In 2015, Discord offered the sprawling gamer community with a niftier option to connect via chat and voice, even when they were not playing their favourite multiplayer online game. 
The well-thought-out, customizable communication tools have since made Discord the center of the gaming universe with over 100 million active users.

Discord: The Gaming Community That Shaped The Internet

<ul>
<li>Discord was in gaming and gaming-related communities since the early days of the internet and even had an app on the Apple Store when it launched in 2008. </li>
<li>It has since pivoted multiple times, and has improved voice communication technology in its platform, showcasing its intent to be gamer-centric. </li>
<li>Long-time gamers understand that Discord gets it, and the community has thus exploded.</li>
</ul>

Pivoting Genius: Discord

Discord has worked hard on ensuring the lowest latency possible during a voice call, and that hard work is now paying off when they realize that it’s not just gamers who want sub-millisecond latency.
With so many communication tools available in various online platforms, Discord offers nothing new on the surface and feels like a mashup of Slack, Reddit, Zoom and similar tools. However, the way the tools are offered feels like people are hanging around and enjoying being connected passively, and are not working. The USP of Discord is the sense of play.

Communication Frankenstein

With decades of experience with the online communities, fickle gamers, and serious hardware and software issues, Discord has evolved as the place to talk about anything, and for simply hanging out with like-minded people on the internet.
While the other tools come with a purpose and a sense of urgency, the users and gamers at Discord are hooked to the casual, non-purposeful nature of the platform which resembles an online version of a college campus.

The Ultimate Pivot: A Place To Talk

Discord's founders just wanted to create a way to talk to their gamer friends. They created something much bigger.

Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends, so they used TeamSpeak or Skype to talk to their friends in-game. They mostly hated TeamSpeak and Skype, but they were really the only options.

Eventually, a lot of those gamers realized something. They wanted to talk to their gaming friends even when they weren't in a game, and they wanted to talk about things other than games. Their gaming friends were their real friends. As luck would have it, in early 2015, a new tool called Discord showed up on the market. Its tagline was not subtle: "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak." It had text chat, which was cool, but mostly it did voice chat better than anybody else.

Early users set up private servers for their friends to play together, and a few enterprising ones set up public ones, looking for new gamer buds. "I don't have a lot of IRL friends that play games," one Discord user, who goes by Mikeyy on the platform, told me. "So when I played Overwatch, I started my first community … to play games with anyone on the internet. You'd play a couple of games with someone, and then you're like, 'Hey, cool, what's your Discord?'"

Fast-forward a few years, and Discord is at the center of the gaming universe. It has more than 100 million monthly active users, in millions of communities for every game and player imaginable. Its largest servers have millions of members. Discord's slowly building a business around all that popularity, too, and is now undergoing a big pivot: It's pushing to turn the platform into a communication tool not just for gamers, but for everyone from study groups to sneakerheads to gardening enthusiasts. Five years in, Discord's just now realizing it may have stumbled into something like the future of the internet. Almost by accident.

Pivots are actually crucial to the history of Discord. It wouldn't exist without them. Before he was trying to reinvent communication, co-founder Jason Citron was just one of those kids who wanted to play games with his friends. "That was the era of, like, Battle.net," he told me (in a Discord chat, of course). "I was playing a lot of Warcraft online, dabbled in MMOs a little bit, Everquest." At one point he almost didn't finish college thanks to too many hours spent playing World of Warcraft.

Citron learned to code because he wanted to make games, and after graduating set out to do just that. His first company started as a video game studio and even launched a game on the iPhone App Store's first day in 2008. That petered out and eventually pivoted into a social network for gamers called OpenFeint, which Citron described as "essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones." He sold that to the Japanese gaming giant Gree, then started another company, Hammer &amp; Chisel, in 2012 "with the idea of building a new kind of gaming company, more around tablets and core multiplayer games." It built a game called Fates Forever, an online multiplayer game that feels a lot like League of Legends. It also built voice and text chat into the game, so players could talk to each other while they played.

Discord co-founders Stan Vishnevskiy (left) and Jason Citron. Photos: Discord

And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best thing about their game was the chat feature. (Not a great sign for the game, but you get the point.) This was circa 2014, when everyone was still using TeamSpeak or Skype and everyone still hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer &amp; Chisel team knew they could do better and decided they wanted to try.

It was a painful transition. Hammer &amp; Chisel shut down its game development team, laid off a third of the company, shifted a lot of people to new roles and spent about six months reorienting the company and its culture. It wasn't obvious its new idea was going to work, either. "When we decided to go all in on Discord, we had maybe 10 users," Citron said. There was one group playing League of Legends, one WoW guild and not much else. "We would show it to our friends, and they'd be like, 'This is cool!' and then they'd never use it."

After talking to users and seeing the data, the team realized its problem: Discord was better than Skype, certainly, but it still wasn't very good. Calls would fail; quality would waver. Why would people drop a tool they hated for another tool they'd learn to hate? The Discord team ended up completely rebuilding its voice technology three times in the first few months of the app's life. Around the same time, it also launched a feature that let users moderate, ban and give roles and permissions to others in their server. That was when people who tested Discord started to immediately notice it was better. And tell their friends about it.

Discord now claims May 13, 2015, as its launch day, because that was the day strangers started really using the service. Someone posted about Discord in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit, with a link to a Discord server where they could talk about a new expansion pack. Citron and his Discord co-founder, Stan Vishnevskiy, immediately jumped into the server, hopped into voice chat and started talking to anyone who showed up. The Redditors would go back, say "I just talked to the developers there, they're pretty cool," and send even more people to Discord. "That day," Citron said, "we got a couple hundred registration[s]. That kind of kicked the snowball off the top of the mountain."

The early Discord team, circa 2015. Photo: Discord

One user, who goes by Vind on Discord, was among Discord's earliest cohort of users. He and his Battlefield 4-playing friends ditched TeamSpeak for the app, right as they were also starting to do more than just talk about Battlefield. "We were moving away from being purely about the game to being more about a general community." Discord let them set up different channels for different conversations, keep some order in the chaos, and jump in and out as they wanted. But Vind said one feature particularly stood out: "Being able to just jump on an empty voice chat, basically telling people, 'Hey, I'm here, do you want to join and talk?'"

Almost everyone I talked to picked that same example to explain why Discord just feels different from other apps. Voice chatting in Discord isn't like setting up a call, it doesn't involve dialing or sharing a link and password or anything at all formal. Every channel has a dedicated space for voice chat, and anyone who drops in is immediately connected and talking. The better metaphor than calling is walking into a room and plopping down on the sofa: You're simply saying, I'm here, what's up?

Add that to the list of things about Discord that turned out to be unexpectedly powerful. In retrospect, of course, it feels obvious. Vishnevskiy describes it as feeling like "a neighborhood, or like a house where you can move between rooms," which is a radically different thing than most online social tools. It had no gamification systems, no follower counts, no algorithmic timelines. "It created a place on your computer and on your phone," Citron said, "where it felt like you friends were just around, and you could run into them and talk to them and [hang] out with them." You open up Discord and see that a few of your friends are already in the voice channel; you can just hop in.

From a technical perspective, none of this is easy. "It definitely requires a different way of architecting the system," Vishnevskiy said. Discord spent a long time working on making it easy to be in a voice channel on your phone, then seamlessly switch when you open Discord on your computer. And it continues to work on latency, the enemy of every real-time communications developer.

More recently, the company has added video chat to the stack, believing that was the next level of high-fidelity conversation Discord needed. The team wanted to build a way to screen-share during a game, basically creating a small-group or private Twitch that would let users stream games with their friends watching. Doing that in 4K, at 60 frames per second, was hard enough. They weren't sure how to add it, either: Should they add a separate channel for video, or would users have a hard time choosing between voice and video? They eventually added it into the voice channel, turning it into an incremental step up from voice rather than a separate thing.

There's not much that Discord does that users strictly can't do elsewhere. On one hand, it's a lot like Slack, blending public channels with easy side-chats and plenty of ways to rope in the right people. It's also a bit like Reddit, full of ever-evolving conversations that you can either try to keep up with or just jump into when you log in. (In fact, a lot of popular subreddits now have dedicated Discords, for more real-time chat among Redditors.) It uses simple status indicators to show who's online and what they're up to. But by putting all those things together, in a way that felt more like hanging out than doing work, Discord found something remarkable. Everybody talks about the notion of the Third Place, but nobody's come closer to replicating it online than Discord.

Beyond just making sure things work right, flexibility is key to Discord. The ladder of communications, from text to voice to video, has always been important to get right. Communities can decide who gets access to certain tools and design their space however they want. But it goes even deeper: If you're in a video chat, for example, you can choose whose video you're seeing, not just whether yours is on or not. You can also be in multiple chats at once, blending one into the background while focusing on another. "It's supposed to all work in harmony," Vishnevskiy said, "but not focus you on something specific like a Google Meet or a Zoom. Doing it passively is also a core feature." When users say Discord just feels better, that's usually what they're talking about.

While Zoom, Teams and others focused on building teleconferencing features — breakout rooms, Q&amp;A, integration with work tools, transcripts, that sort of thing — Discord has continued drilling down on quality and latency. "We invested a lot in integration with GPUs and stuff like that, really deeply," Vishnevskiy said. "Voice was solved long ago at scale, but we wanted to solve it with 1,000 people in a voice channel … and they could be all talking at sub-millisecond latency. That's not important for people on a teleconference call." Turns out, though, it was important for a lot more than gaming.

Video chat is one of Discord's more recent features, and it seems to fit right in. Image: Discord

As Discord grew, so too did some of its communities. And pretty quickly, many of them took on lives outside of games. Vind found himself running a pretty large community, about <a dir="ltr" href="https://discord.com/invite/racing">all things Formula 1 racing </a>, not long after he joined Discord. "I was actually not the creator of it," he said. "Someone else created it and then basically abandoned it immediately." Vind joined at the very beginning, in 2016, when there were only 50 or so people on the server. He checked to see who owned the server — and thus had complete control over it — and found it was a totally uninvolved Discord user. Vind eventually tracked him down on Reddit, and asked him for admin privileges so he could add some new features. "And then he just gave me ownership," Vind explained. The guy was focused on creating a Formula 1 group on Kik, which he thought was going to be the better platform. (Whoops.)

Vind's goal was to build a big community, but not around any particular game. Or even necessarily around racing. "I wanted to build something that was more of a general community, where people feel welcome and just share the interest of Formula 1."

The Formula 1 server now has more than 5,700 users. The history of the internet says that groups of that size almost inevitably devolve into some kind of messy chaos, making moderation and community-building hard to keep up with. Vind said there have been challenges, sure, but for the most part things have worked OK. Discord's moderation bot, named CarlBot, does a pretty good job of automatically deleting problematic messaging and alerting the mods. "And then if that happens, we ban them," Vind said. "We don't want anyone who uses that kind of language in the community." Those are the rules. When users join the Formula 1 server, they have to read and agree to those rules before they're allowed to post.

Not everyone has it so good. Discord's troubles with problematic content are <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/discord-chat-startup-braces-for-the-alt-right">epic </a>and <a dir="ltr" href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-white-supremacists.html">well-documented </a>. It has at various times been a home to members of the 4chan and 8chan crowd; a number of "Kool Kids Klub" servers that are only barely disguised KKK groups; and countless examples of online bullying, hate speech and other kinds of awful behavior. It pops up everywhere. What happens on the platform isn't necessarily meaningfully different from, say, what happens on Reddit or Facebook, but experts have said they worry about Discord because its semi-private nature and small team make it harder to police. Since Discord's users skew young, there are even more challenges.

Discord employees now admit they noticed this too late. The problematic content on the platform only became an urgent issue after the deadly protests in Charlottesville in 2017, which had been planned and discussed openly on Discord for a long time before the event. Before that, there was no Trust and Safety team at Discord; Sean Li, who leads that team, joined the company about a month before Charlottesville. And for too long, the company thought its job was just to keep the worst stuff — the porn, the racial slurs, the flagrantly illegal content — off the platform. It turned a blind eye to the rest, figuring that because it wasn't a public space, what was the harm? Just don't join the server, and nobody can come after you.

Now they see it differently. "Discord is like a country with 100 million inhabitants, living in different states and towns," Li said. "We make the rules on what is allowed to help shape the society at large, and we empower server moderators and admins to help us enforce and expand upon them based on the needs of their communities." He wants to help moderators create whatever kind of community they want, and Discord's also getting better at giving moderators the tools and knowhow to do so, but only within the boundaries set by the broader platform. Those didn't exist for too many years. Now, Discord's trying simply to be clear and forceful about what's acceptable and what isn't, and to enforce those rules consistently. It's investing in bots and other automated mod tools, but the Trust and Safety team now makes up more than 15% of Discord's staff. While there's still plenty of bad stuff on the platform, progress seems to be strong.

Discord has more rules than before, but it still leaves much in the hands of moderators. Photo: Discord

Meanwhile, the other thing Discord has had to figure out is how to make money. This is a significantly less urgent problem: The company has raised nearly $400 million, including $100 million this past summer that valued the company at $3.5 billion. <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/30/discord-was-once-the-alt-rights-favorite-chat-app-now-its-gone-mainstream-and-scored-a-new-35-billion-valuation/#8951f07b6b2e">Forbes estimated its revenue </a>at over $120 million this year. Point is, Discord has plenty of runway. But there's not often a clean exit path for a huge communications platform with a spotty reputation for moderation (just ask Twitter and Reddit). Eventually, the company's going to have to make real money. And Citron and Vishnevskiy both adamantly say they don't want to sell ads or user data.

Users have long made businesses out of Discords. Mikeyy, for instance, eventually graduated from playing Overwatch to running <a dir="ltr" href="https://discord.gg/xkz3Zy">a big server </a>for people who play FIFA, and particularly those who like to play its addictive Ultimate Team mode. Mikeyy and his team of moderators and admins run a VIP server inside the larger community, where for $13.99 a month they offer exclusive trading tips, guides and more. Everything runs through PayPal and similar services, though, and Discord doesn't see a dime. Over the last couple of years, Discord has become a place where lots of streamers, influencers and others chat more directly with their fans — Discord has official integrations with Twitch, Patreon and more — but it doesn't get a cut there either.

So far, Discord's main source of income has been Nitro, its $10-a-month premium service that lets users change their username, use more emoji and get both video and voice in slightly higher quality. But Discord always had bigger plans. One plan seemed obvious: Sell games to gamers! In 2018 Discord launched the Discord Store, with a hand-selected set of games available for purchase. Done with beating TeamSpeak and Skype, Discord was coming for Steam. Except that didn't work. Users didn't come to Discord to find games, they came to hang out with their friends. The Store only lasted a few months, and Nitro Games, a Netflix-for-games service that sounds a lot like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Now, didn't last much longer.

The Discord Store's failure was an eye-opening moment within Discord. And it caused another pivot: Discord had to be less about video games and more about becoming the place for people to hang out with their friends. It was now in the era of Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox and so many other games where being together was far more important than the activity on the screen.

People had used Discord for non-gaming things from the early days of the service — as many as 30% of servers were about something else — but the team had never paid them much attention. Starting last year, they did. They ran focus groups and user studies, trying to figure out how millions of people were using Discord. One question they asked was, "What's the biggest misconception about Discord?" The overwhelming answer: "It's for gamers." People who wanted to have their study group/knitting club/origami lessons/sneaker-shopping crew in Discord were having trouble getting others hooked into this kooky app with the alien logo and all the in-jokes about TeamSpeak.

In early 2020, as Discord was embarking on a big redesign and rebranding exercise designed to help it appeal more broadly, COVID happened. Suddenly, stuck at home, everyone's social life turned to the internet. Discord's user numbers increased by 47% from February to July, and all those newbies discovered what millions of gamers already knew: that having a place to hang out with their friends is a powerful thing, and that Discord did it better than anyone. Study groups started using Discord; teachers used it for class; friends used it to hang the way they normally would after school or on the weekend.

At the end of June, Discord's rebrand was complete. Its new tagline was "Your place to talk," and its homepage was mostly free of gaming jargon or confusing instructions. (Though the nods to gaming do persist, from the controller-alien logo to the .gg at the end of every Discord server's URL.) "As we look back at the last few months," Citron and Vishnevskiy wrote in <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b" rel="noopener noreferrer">a blog post </a>announcing the redesign, "it's clear that as people spend more and more time online, they want online spaces where they can find real humanity and belonging."

In the months and years to come, Discord has plenty of work to do, particularly on continuing to improve moderation tools and make sure the communities on its platform operate the way the company hopes. And as it keeps adding more features — eventually, VR and AR and so many others will be on gamers' and everyone's wish lists — it'll have to figure out how to do it all without adding the kind of complexity it has so far avoided.

But five years in, it's clear that Discord has done something remarkable. It's built a space that feels unlike any other on the internet. It's not quite group chat, it's not quite forums, it's not quite conference calling. It's all of those things and none of them. It turns out, in that messy middle, is a place that mirrors what it's like to be human, and interact with other humans, more closely than just about anything else on the internet. (For better, and sometimes for worse.) That's not what Citron, Vishnevskiy and their team were going for, but it's what they have now. And they're not pivoting anymore.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet

<ol><li>Do not immediately jump to questions focusing on the topic at hand.</li><li>Coax, don't hammer. There will be times that the interviewee will have a hard time answering some questions.</li><li>Make some questions open ended.</li><li>Ask what you don't know.</li><li>Let the interviewees wander a bit, but always be in control.</li><li>Tell the topics and subjects you wish to cover but don't send advance questions.</li><li>Do not ask the questions that were already asked on previous interviews.</li><li>Listen.&nbsp;They key is to pay close attention to what is not answered and make on-the-spot judgements on why that area was skipped or glossed.</li><li>Try not to ask a question that your subject has already answered. It discloses that you really weren't listening after all.</li></ol>

Conducting Great Interviews

In my career, I have conducted thousands of interviews, been interviewed hundreds of times and as a media consultant, I have also observed thousands of interviews from a neutral seat. There are a few tips that have worked consistently well for me and perhaps they will help you. I write this [...]

9 Tips on Conducting Great Interviews

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 13 million copies in six weeks, making it one of the most popular games of modern times. The universal, de-stressing nature of the game contrasted with what 2020 unleashed at the same time in the month of March.
One of the first marketing lessons that Nintendo, the developer of the runaway hit game provided was that timing is everything.

Marketing And Product Development Taught By A Blockbuster Game

Money & Investments

The way Nintendo worked on the issues, glitches and other problems it encountered and solved it quickly provides us another lesson: Listening to the end-user and prioritizing the features or the changes based on user feedback.

Listen To Your Customers And Act Fast

Nintendo restricted players who have bought the ‘Switch’ console which plays the hit game, to only be able to create one island. This has been a controversial restriction, but has enabled more sales of the console.
The lesson here is to provide something for free but add revenue-creating restrictions to your business model.

Don’t Give Everything Away For Free

There's no secret recipe for overnight success—but there are ways to give yourself a fair shot. And while you're likely not trying to create the next viral video game, we can learn a lot from everyone's favorite quarantine game: Animal Crossing.

There's no secret recipe for overnight success—but there are ways to give yourself a fair shot. And while you're likely not trying to create the next viral video game, I think any small business can learn a lot from everyone's favorite quarantine game: Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons took the world by storm. It sold <a dir="ltr" href="https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/07/animal-crossing-new-horizons-has-sold-11-77-million-copies/?utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier" rel="noopener noreferrer">over 13 million copies in the first six weeks </a>, and to this date, it continues to bring people in. Here we'll look at a few reasons the game is so popular—and how its success can become a recipe for yours.

If you've been living under a rock, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a video game that allows you to design your own island town, populated with up to 10 adorable anthropomorphic villagers with strong personalities, and slowly pay a mortgage you didn't know you were signing up for to a friendly tanuki. You also get to fish, catch bugs, and plant flowers, all in real (and happy) time.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out on March 20, 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. It was a tough time for a lot of businesses, big and small—but not for Nintendo.

The game is simple. Since it was designed for a young audience (three years old and up!), it doesn't require you to perform any mental gymnastics unless it's related to creating rivers or turnip exchange. The timing of releasing a simple, nonlinear, and plain ol' cute game while the world around crumbles seems almost like a setup, especially given the <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/11/animal-crossing-new-horizons-delayed-to-2020-e3-2019?utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier" rel="noopener noreferrer">initial delay in release </a>. After all, what better way to de-stress than designing your own island and hopping around catching butterflies?

Whether or not you believe it was just lucky timing, there's a lesson to learn here: timing matters. Don't wait for another pandemic, and please don't try to capitalize on other people's bad news, but look at what's happening in your community and the world at large, and see how you might tie your product or service in at the right time.

For example: Can you coordinate a campaign with Small Business Saturday? Does your city hold any local events that you can sponsor? Think about your industry too. There's a holiday for everything, so take advantage of Hot Sauce Day or International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day with the right hashtag and you can reach a wider market.

Listen to your customers—and act quickly

Since the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there were some issues—a few that were pretty major. There was a duplication glitch that allowed users to clone some items in the game, a glitch that allowed users to place items on the fourth level of the cliffs (which shouldn't be possible and could potentially crash the game), and a walking-on-water glitch.

Nintendo resolves these issues quickly and regularly—and they <a dir="ltr" href="https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/49112/~/how-to-update-animal-crossing%3A-new-horizons?utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier#v121" rel="noopener noreferrer">put out patch notes </a>so players can review them. They also prioritize the fixes well: they quickly resolve issues that could potentially corrupt users' saved files or make the gameplay unenjoyable. But they wait on issues that could be potentially engaging for users, like the duplication glitch.

The takeaway: listen to your users and prioritize based on their response.

If you have a SaaS product, you'll likely get tons of customer support emails requesting tweaks. That's natural. Track that feedback, and prioritize the issues. You'll never be able to fix everything at once, and things that bug one customer might be a plus for another, so it's all about putting your efforts toward the right issues.

The same goes for other products and services. If you run an eCommerce business, you'll get reviews with feedback on your products. Don't write them off, but before you put resources toward addressing negative feedback, make sure it's a pervasive issue and not just one person's opinion. Making product decisions based on a sample size of one isn't good for your business or your customers.

You can automatically track feedback and respond more quickly to customer emails with automation. Here's how one small business <a dir="ltr" href="https://zapier.com/blog/automate-customer-support-notifications/">automated their customer care </a>with Zapier. Take a look and then read more about <a dir="ltr" href="https://zapier.com/how-it-works">how Zapier works </a>.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is not without its controversies. The one that took the internet by the storm is the fact that you can only create one island per Switch.

Once you've designed your island, spending weeks moving buildings, decorating, and introducing new characters, you're going to want to do it again. You know, see what else you can come up with. That means you have two choices: delete what you have and start fresh, or buy another console.

We don't recommend this kind of extreme restriction, but it points to something worth remembering: you shouldn't be giving your entire product or service away for free. You're running a business, and in order to continue helping your customers, you need revenue. So you can give people something for free, but make sure you're charging in the right spots.

You might start simply by creating an add-on to your existing product or service. For example, if you own a gift shop (online or brick-and-mortar), you might do free shipping but charge a fee for gift wrapping. If you run an app, maybe you offer <a dir="ltr" href="https://elasticemail.com/marketing-support-comparison?utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier&amp;utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier" rel="follow noopener noreferrer">tiered support </a>that people on a higher subscription level get. There are a lot of ways to do this that work.

Your product or service probably won't have Animal Crossing: New Horizons levels of success (sorry to break it to you). But whenever something takes the world by storm in such a pervasive way, it's always important to give it a second look and ask yourself—which of these strategies might work for my business?

This was a guest post from Anna Wybieralska, Content Creator at <a dir="ltr" href="https://elasticemail.com/?utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier&amp;utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier" rel="follow noopener noreferrer">Elastic Email </a>, an email marketing platform with over 10 years of experience. They create all the email marketing and delivery tools you need to communicate with your customers. Want to see your work on the Zapier blog? Check out <a dir="ltr" href="https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-blog-guidelines/">our guidelines </a>and get in touch.

Hero image by <a dir="ltr" href="https://unsplash.com/@stereophototyp?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText&amp;utm_source=zapier.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=zapier" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sara Kurfeß </a>on Unsplash.

What Animal Crossing can teach us about marketing and product development

There is a high degree of skepticism around the idea that entrepreneurship can be taught in a classroom. 
Numerous successful entrepreneurs never went to business school or graduated from college. The abstract analytical models of a typical business school curriculum is generally in conflict with imagination, disruption, and counterintuitive action needed for entrepreneurship. Still, many schools feel there is a place for formal education when looking at entrepreneurship.

Criticism of teaching entrepreneurship

Three Top North American MBA programs developed their own philosophies in teaching entrepreneurship:
<ul>
<li>The first approach focused on instilling an appreciation for the value of real-life experience in an &quot;operating theater&quot; classroom setup where the professor pokes and prods on startups.</li>
<li>The second approach is focused on &quot;rewiring&quot; students to take action instead of falling into analysis paralysis. This approach invites students to accept a certain amount of risk.</li>
<li>The third approach emphasized the types of resource and risk optimization that is offered by the more conventional business school. This philosophy may help more mature startups avoid common pitfalls, but it is less useful for entrepreneurs dealing with extreme uncertainty.</li>
</ul>

Approaches in teaching entrepreneurship

The current pandemic shows the importance of preparing entrepreneurs to face the increasingly complex and uncertain world. 
Future leaders should be educated to see the uncertainty of our future as a reality to be embraced. The next generation of entrepreneurs should be empowered to meet these challenges.

Embracing an uncertain future

How some business schools rewrote the script.

In early April, a Thai student in our entrepreneurship class saw a shortage of high quality, low cost hand sanitizer across Thailand. To support the Covid relief effort and generate revenue, he quickly shifted his family’s medical supply company to sanitizer production. Closer to home, when Dollaride, a business incubated in NYU’s Future Labs, recognized that the pandemic had eliminated demand for their shared commuting van business in New York, they refreshed their business model to leverage their existing vans, technology, and routes to support burgeoning package delivery demands.

Neither entrepreneur followed a typical business school approach when deciding to pivot their business: they didn’t conduct a long-term market analysis, develop a business plan, or weigh various alternative approaches. In fact, had they done these analyses, they might have concluded that the short-term gains wouldn’t justify the retooling investment, or they might have gotten stuck trying to figure out how to estimate the duration of the pandemic or how soon global manufacturing might recover. Instead, they simply took action based on the resources at their disposal.

This approach to entrepreneurship is called “<a dir="ltr" href="https://www.effectuation.org/?page_id=4055&amp;principle=bird-in-hand">effectuation </a>, ” or leveraging what we know, who we know, and who we are in order to take action. Business schools don’t generally teach this approach, as they tend to focus more on lengthy risk and return calculations. But as we face an increasingly uncertain, complex future, schools must adopt new teaching philosophies designed to forge agile, entrepreneurial leaders.

Can Business Schools Teach Entrepreneurship?

While modern MBA programs offer a host of entrepreneurship programming ranging from formal coursework to startup competitions and incubators, there is <a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/2010/12/does-an-entrepreneur-need-a-co">a great degree of skepticism </a>around the idea that entrepreneurship can be taught by academics in a classroom. Countless successful entrepreneurs never went to business school — many didn’t even graduate from college. Moreover, developing the penchant for imagination, disruption, and counterintuitive action required for effective entrepreneurship doesn’t generally fit into a typical business school curriculum defined by abstract analytical models and precise calculations.

Nevertheless, many schools feel that there is still a place for formal education in the world of entrepreneurship, and have taken steps to update their offerings to meet the needs of today’s students. In a <a dir="ltr" href="https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amle.2019.0201">recent study </a>, we looked at three top North American MBA programs to better understand how they are approaching this challenge. In an industry where programs are prone to mimicking one another, we found that these programs broke the mold and developed their own philosophies in teaching entrepreneurship.

The first approach we observed focused on instilling an appreciation for the value of real-life experience with an “operating theater” classroom setup. The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management converted their entrepreneurship classroom into a medical-school-style operating theater, where students sit in a large auditorium and watch as a professor performs surgery not on a human body, but on a startup. In Rotman’s <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.creativedestructionlab.com/">Creative Destruction Lab </a>, a panel of established entrepreneurs join the professors in poking and prodding at these startups, helping students absorb the intuition that entrepreneurship skills can only be developed through experience. Other business schools have adopted similar programs, such as NYU Stern’s <a dir="ltr" href="https://endlessfrontierlabs.com/">Endless Frontier Labs </a>, which shares Rotman’s focus on experiential learning.

The second approach we observed focused on “rewiring” students to take action instead of falling into <a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/2013/11/stop-worrying-about-making-the-right-decision">analysis paralysis </a>. We all have a voice in our heads that says, “What if this goes wrong?” or “How do I manage this risk?” Imagine the power of an education that helps you quiet that voice and instead say, “What if it goes right?” The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is the birthplace of <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.effectuation.org/">“effectual” entrepreneurship </a>, an approach that invites students to recognize their existing entrepreneurial resources and accept a certain amount of risk. This mindset is antithetical to a more conventional business school approach that emphasizes minimizing risk. Additionally, while the business world is often known for its cut-throat, fiercely competitive nature, Darden’s program instills in students an appreciation for the <a dir="ltr" href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sej.20">power of collaborative innovation </a>by encouraging students to share ideas openly with their peers and tap into diverse insights and perspectives to co-create entrepreneurial ventures.

The final program we observed took more of a traditional business school approach. Our research suggests that the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School continues to emphasize the types of resource and risk optimization approaches that are more characteristic of the rest of the business school world. This approach is grounded in the idea that business schools should teach entrepreneurship in a similar way to how other subjects are taught: by providing students with analytical models and tools from published academic research on new venture creation. While this philosophy may be helpful for more mature startups, as well as for helping founders avoid common startup pitfalls — such as choosing the wrong co-founder, accepting poor venture finance terms, or making suboptimal product decisions — it’s less useful for entrepreneurs dealing with extreme uncertainty.

Educate MBA Students to Embrace an Unknowable Future

The current pandemic illustrates the importance of preparing entrepreneurs to face an increasingly complex, uncertain world. We must educate these future leaders to view the uncertainty of our unknowable future not as a problem to be solved, but rather as a reality to be embraced.

After all, in the unknowable future, all leaders will need to be entrepreneurs: visionaries that can imagine, adapt, and act nimbly to address whatever challenges come their way. Business schools should not delay in adopting new teaching philosophies that empower the next generation of entrepreneurs — as well as all business leaders — to meet these challenges.

<a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/search?term=ashish%20k.%20bhatia&amp;search_type=search-all">Ashish K. Bhatia </a>is a Clinical Associate Professor of Management &amp; Entrepreneurship and the Academic Director of the B.S. in Business, Technology, and Entrepreneurship Program at NYU Stern School of Business. See Ashish’s faculty bio <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/ashish-bhatia">here </a>.

<a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/search?term=natalia%20levina&amp;search_type=search-all">Natalia Levina </a>is the Toyota Motors Corporation Term Professor of Information Systems at NYU Stern School of Business and Director of the Fubon Center for Technology, Business and Innovation. See Natalia’s faculty bio <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/natalia-levina">here </a>.

Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught in a Classroom?

Multiple income streams can add up to be equal or more than a full-time salary.
Your career does not have to be a linear journey to be successful, nor do you have to be confined to just one type of work.

Portfolio career

The full-stack freelancer has proven to be a new kind of stable where the smart thing to do is to have a diversity of income streams.
You don&#39;t have to use the same skill set in all the work you do. You can mix and match the different ways you want to work, how you want to spend your time, the clients you prefer, and the frequency in which you want to get paid.

Diversify the way you work

<ul>
<li>Ensure you have a stable income stream before you take attention away from it.</li>
<li>Let your audience, customers, and fans tell you what they want. If you can understand when your market wants something from you and if they are willing to pay for it, creating other revenue streams will naturally develop.</li>
<li>Testing ideas is essential.</li>
<li>Not all projects should be monetized. Some will pay you back in other ways like creatively energizing you or letting you experiment and fail, that may be valuable.</li>
</ul>

Your business model

Working hard and a lot to make more money is a myth. Each pool of income requires different amounts of effort, and the income can fluctuate from year to year. 
Creating a pie chart can help you see where to put more energy into the work that aligns with your goals.

Create an “income pie”

The idea of a diversified portfolio is to have different kinds of active and passive income.
Passive income is investing time and money up front to help earn money continually even while you sleep. It can take many forms, including digital downloads, e-books, selling stock imagery, licensing your artwork. However, passive income sources still require varying levels of upkeep.

The quest for passive income

<ul>
<li>When you&#39;re fully self-employed, you&#39;ll need to earn more because you&#39;ll need to pay both employer and employee taxes, pay your own health insurance, fund your retirement, and cover your operating overhead.</li>
<li>You can find incremental ways to make the transition to self-employed. Negotiate with your employer to go part-time or remote for some time while taking on a side gig or creating content.</li>
</ul>

From full-time to multiple income streams

A guide to a less traditional approach to earning a living.

A guide to a less traditional approach to earning a living. We grew up learning about traditional jobs and career paths. None of us was encouraged to juggle wearing many hats and taking on different projects. This idea of multiple income streams that add up to be equal or more than a full-time salary, or “portfolio career” (a concept we explored through <a dir="ltr" href="https://99u.adobe.com/articles/66015/love-it-or-leave-it-how-to-be-happy-at-work-samantha-clarke-book-club">“Love It or Leave It” </a> by Samantha Clarke), is more common than it once was. We talked to experts who are living proof that your career does not have to be a linear journey to flourish, and that you don’t need to be confined to just one type of work forever.

*** Productivity expert Tiago Forte of <a dir="ltr" href="https://fortelabs.co/">Forte Labs </a>explored the idea of a new kind of working through his piece “ <a dir="ltr" href="https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-rise-of-the-full-stack-freelancer/">The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer </a>.” When he published it in 2017, this idea was seen as edgy and experimental, but now this kind of working has proven to be a new kind of stable where the smart thing to do is to not have all your career or financial eggs in one basket, so to say.

You no longer need to use the same skill set in all the work you do. Having diversity of income streams means you can mix and match the different ways you want to work, how you want to spend your time, the clients you want to work with, and frequency in which you want to get paid. And this can evolve as your priorities shift. “As a freelancer, you never want to have only one client or the majority of your income coming from one client,” Forte says, noting that otherwise being a freelancer isn’t that different from someone who is working remotely.

Financial expert Paco de Leon of <a dir="ltr" href="https://thehellyeahgroup.com/">The Hell Yeah Group </a>was laid off from her first real job, “I think that trauma of having my income taken away in an instant really colored my perspective,” she says. She also knows that she gets bored easily, so a style of working where she’s a jack of all trades, master of none suits her better. (She also knows when to hand things off to people who have that focus to take her ideas to the next level.)

Rylee