Life lessons from a "dead" language

I think that today's status meeting was a reality check for the alpha Alpha Geek, when he realized how much actually needs to be done and how little isn't. He made the mistake of saying, "Let me know if there's anything we can do." I couldn't resist: "Hire ten more programmers...Well, you said, 'anything.'" He didn't seem to appreciate my lightning wit [eyeroll], so I added, "And I want a pony, too." Which is the point where I stepped into the generation gap between me and one of my co-workers. "So are you going to ride the pony for ten minutes every hour?" he asked, clearly puzzled by the failed humor.

The thing about being raised in the seventies is that what you watched after school (in the days when grade school didn't assign homework) was basically leftovers from the fifties and sixties. You were rather too young to appreciate quite how much frost and freezer burn the TV stations had scraped off before re-heating these relics. Thus, you had no defense against the ethos of decades past as "Petticoat Junction," "The Munsters," "Dusty's Trail," The original (as in Annette Funicello) "Mickey Mouse Club," "Father Knows Best," etc. became your touchstone for reality. And, within that ethos, there was no greater indulgence that parents could bestow on a pre-adolescent girl than her very own pony. Not that I had anything more than a passing interest in horses, mind you. But the pony was the ne plus ultra of parental indulgence. And that's all that mattered.

I drew a breath before trying to explain this to my nine-years-junior co-worker, then decided to just let it go. There are some things you can't explain in the forty-second walk back to your cubicle-pod, and this was one of them. Particularly as I would have slipped up and actually used the term ne plus ultra, which would have only made things worse.

There's another Latin phrase, sine qua non, which popped into my head as I weighed the viability of writing a blog post on ne plus ultra. "Sine qua non" roughly translates as "That without which there is nothing." At least "nothing" within a specific context. It's the life of whatever party is at hand--without it, everyone goes home, the chips grow stale and soggy, and the dip acquires extra colors/textures in the 'fridge.

But I thought that they're really two things that need to be defined when you're looking to branch out into entrepreneurship. Because unless you have a rich relative at your back, starting your own business is a lifestyle choice, among everything else that it is. It's critical to define your ne plus ultra, even when you think you have zero chance of meeting it. Because if you're wrong and you do, you're off the edge of the map--the locale of "Here there be dragons" (a.k.a. hic dracones sunt) In that place, dragons be the least of your worries. At least until you dedicate some introspection toward defining a new ne plus ultra, anyway. I believe that it's just as critical that the sine qua non--i.e. the minimum standards--is clearly and realistically established. Otherwise, what's the point? Seriously.

But what I think would be the most interesting part of an introspective exercise like that is to measure the distance between sine qua non and ne plus ultra. I can't begin to guess whether or not it's germane to the chance of entrepreneurial success, but I think that it might tell you quite a bit about the entrepreneur.

Disclaimer: College Latin kicked my backside but good. Both semesters. Which is embarrassing, considering that I should have learned my lesson during the first semester--the "lesson" being that having had both French and Spanish in middle and high school weren't enough to prepare me for the horror that is noun declension.