“Not all of them were smart, not all of them were funny, not all of them were cool…actually only a few of them were. But what they all had in common was that they consumed massive amount of information.”

And so was the main point of this week’s speaker Ryan Coonerty.

In the quote, in case your wondering, Ryan talking about the people he worked with in his time in Washington. In his years he has noticed that successful people always read and learn as much as they can. He encouraged our students to read the New York Times, read blogs, and watch the TED talks. Here at the PIE we highly encourage this too.

Ryan covered a point that most of our speakers cover…their lives. However he warned us. ” I’m not telling this because you would be particularly interested, but because I believe you could learn some things from my path.”

We would review his life here – it is a very windy and enlightening one, but you can read all about it on his Wikipedia entry. The gist of it was that Ryan graduated college, traveled, went to grad school in London, worked in Washington DC, came back and ran for Santa Cruz city council and won.

He finished up his talk describing his ideas of the new way of working in America. He believes in the creative class of individuals and thinks that, while people will still do it, the age of working at a big companies is long gone.

If you want to hear more, come to our Friday speaker series, and we’d love to have a discussion around the future of work. Until then thanks Ryan and we’d love to have you back.