A Visit From Erik Hanberg

The other day, Erik Hanberg came in and talked to our class. He works for mostly nonprofit organizations, except for his wife's graphic design website MaryHolsteDesign.com. It was a really good presentation and he knew a lot about what he was talking about. He first talked about salary/hourly work vs. scalable work. Salary/hourly you have a fixed income that is consistent. Scalable work is completely different. There is no fixed hourly pay and it doesn't matter how many hours you put in or don't put in. You basically do something that will either make you a lot of money or it wont. Some of the examples of scalable work included real estate, commission, web design and stocks/assests.

Hanberg then transitioned into this idea of the internet being a "black swan." It means that the past doesn't necessarily predict the future. Hanberg's example is that he has written 9 novels and JK Rowling has written 7, but only she is a billionaire. Although I agree with most of what Hanberg talked about, and maybe I don't have the credentials to critique his work, but I felt like he had a biased opinion on the black swan. He kept saying, "It's all about luck" and "It's all about getting discovered by the right people at the right time." Yes, this is true, if you are in the right place at the right time you can get very, very lucky. However, when it comes to hard work and employment, I don't necessarily think it's about luck. I think if you work hard enough and really try to get people to notice your work it will pay off; that has nothing to do with being lucky. If I write an incredible novel, but don't try to get it published then nobody will know I have written something amazing. I agree that maybe JK Rowling got a little bit lucky. She was on welfare and someone just happened to pick up her muddy rough draft of Harry Potter, which made her millions and millions. But how do we know that if that wouldn't have happened that she wouldn't have tried to get it published anyways?

Overall though, I liked Erik's speech and I thought he did a good job at explaining working in a virtual world.