Month: November 2022

Review of Cash In On Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuck

For this week’s blog, I will be reviewing one of my favorite books that I read during middle school : Cash In On Your Passion by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck.  For those unfamiliar with Vaynerchuck, he is a colorful media personality and speaker who started from humble beginnings as the child of Belarusian immigrants and went on to grow a multi-million dollar wine business. Vaynerchuck, who is notorious for vulgar, but powerful online messages about the importance of hard work and determination to accomplish your personal goals, shares his wisdom in a more sound way through this book. As someone who was extremely interested in business and entrepreneurship during my middle school years and looked up to Vaynerchuck as the idealization of the “American Dream”, I was thrilled to read his book. Throughout the book, Vaynerchuck builds upon the premise that there is a market for basically anything in this world and anyone has the potential to make money doing what their passionate about.

One thing I really enjoy about Vaynerchuck’s book is that it is not presented as a “get-rich-quick” scheme and, in fact, does not really focus on getting rich at all. While Vaynerchuck admits that wealth is the fruit of a successful business or brand, it can never be a starting point. Instead, Vaynerchuck encourages us to each reflect upon what makes us passionate: the activity which we could do all the time, would never bore us, and has the potential to be valuable to other people. Whatever the activity, Vaynerchuck argues that we have the potential to capitalize upon it and manifest a career that involves doing what we love rather than work a job we hate. Vaynerchuck gives examples of his young days where, rather than working a minimum wage job, he mastered the art of buying and selling baseball cards for profit. Through hours of studying, attending events, and collecting rare cards, Vaynerchuck was able to make thousands of dollars doing an activity that he actually enjoyed. Vaynerchuck encourages each of us to search for our own “baseball card trading” and utilize our own creativity and innovation to make a career out of it.

Even as one who has moved on from my entrepreneurial obsession phase, Vaynerchuck’s book remains an influential aspect of my mindset. As with Vaynerchuck, I would dread having a career that involves something I don’t like and deeply desire to have a job I actually enjoy. Vaynerchuck inspired me to have a mindset open to the possibility of having a truly fulfilling career if I am willing to have the effort, patience, creativity, and discipline necessary. For anyone interested in entrepreneurship or even just some great life advice, I cannot recommend Cash In On Your Passion enough!

History of a Public Controversy Brainstorm

I think that tracking and documenting the history of a public controversy will be a really intriguing project that will allow me to learn a lot more about a specific aspect of American culture. I have a few ideas for public issues that are highly contested and have had significant enough developments over time to form the basis for a documentary plot. My first idea, which is particularly relevant in light of the recent pandemic, is to investigate the history of vaccine mandates as public health policy over time. Obviously, I could start by covering the period where major vaccines (such as polio, smallpox) became prevalent in medicine and note the initial public reaction to mandates of such vaccines. I could similarly dive into the origins of the “anti-vaxx” movement including what people/groups advocated for it, what reasons they had for advancing their movement (including whether these reasons were rooted in fact or fiction), and how the movement has evolved over time. A significant portion of the documentary could focus on the unique situation of the Covid-19 vaccines, especially considering the accelerated timeline of their development and their exhibition of novel “mRNA” technology.

Another public controversy that I believe has potential for an intriguing documentary would be the history of gun legislation in America. All the way from the founding of America, I could demonstrate how the role of guns in American public life went from being a commonplace to a contentious political controversy. I could especially focus on the increase in prevalence in mass shootings in the past 20 years and how that has prompted the “gun control/gun safety” movements and reciprocating anger from gun rights activists.

Review of Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer

For this week’s blog I want to look at a book that is particularly unique, Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer. This book first came to my attention during my freshman year in High School when I was taking Biology and fascinated by the complex molecular machines necessary for life to function. Specifically, I was amazed by the capacity for DNA to order the construction of proteins, the fundamental components to sustain cellular metabolism, through the processes of transcription and translation. If you’re anyone like me, who is unsatisfied with just accepting things as they are, you might wonder, “how did this degree of cellular complexity arise in the first place?” And while we covered a few popular origin of life theories in class, most of them were unsatisfying answers that seemed like cover for uncertainty. Consequently, after searching for additional resources, I was lead to the work of Stephen Meyer who takes a unique position. In Signature in the Cell, Meyer delves into why all current typologies of origin of life theories fail and eventually proposes an “out-of-the-box” solution.

Meyer begins with his experience investigating the origin of life at Cambridge for post-graduate thesis. He first realized a distinction between the “historical sciences” and “experimental sciences”. While the “experimental sciences” investigate how natural laws and phenomena affect us in a consistent manner, the “historical sciences” seek to explain a distinct event in the remote past, such as the origin of life. Drawing upon the work of great scientists such as geologists Charles Lyell and even evolutionist Charles Darwin, Meyer determined that evaluating a hypothesis in the “historical sciences’ requires analyzing its casual adequacy, or ability to explain the event in question. Meyer then demonstrates that the two main types of origin of life theories, those relying on chance and those relying on chemical necessity, do not have casual adequacy to explain the origin of life. Meyer argues that the chance hypothesis is not reasonable because the probability of forming even a single protein or nucleic acid by chance is unimaginably small given the probabilistic resources available, even if the primitive earth contained the necessary “building blocks” for life. He then refutes the idea that chemical affinities or “necessity” could explain the origin of the first life since the arraignment of proteins and nucleic acids is necessarily irregular. Our experience with chemical laws demonstrates that they almost always produce regular, predictable patterns, which is exactly opposite to the composition of DNA and proteins.

In the end, Meyers advocates for the “Design Hypothesis” or that the work of an intelligent agent is the most reasonable explanation for the origin of biological information. While understandably seaming like creationism, Meyer demonstrates that this framework of viewing science is not novel, but was shared by great scientists such as Kepler, Newton, and even Galileo. For anyone interested in biology or chemistry and want a book that explores how these topics relate to deep philosophical questions, I highly recommend Signature in the Cell.