Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, founder of Geoloqi, TED speaker and the Sunday keynote at SXSW Interactive. Here, she shares with the TXSW blog how she found mentors by reading biographies and encourages us all to ignore statistics.
Amber Case on Mentorship
All my life I’ve made up mentors, picking people from history or biographies I read as a kid. I’d copy aspects of their lifestyles, their thoughts and opinions and how they approached life.
Don’t miss what will surely be a provocative keynote from Amber – 2 p.m., Sunday, March 11.
Reading about Richard Feynman reminded me to be less serious and have fun.
Paul Erdos reminded me to have an intense amount of energy.
Carl Sagan encouraged me to take difficult subjects and explain them to a wider audience, no matter how much it might bother academia.
I tend to ignore statistics, too.
For instance, the percentage of people who raise venture funding at a certain age might be very small in reality, I tend to make a model in my mind that everyone has already done it, and that I’m very far behind.
This helps to make it seem like what I’m doing it perfectly normal and not a big deal.
Don’t miss what will surely be a provocative keynote from Amber – 2 p.m., Sunday, March 11. If you are in Austin for SXSW Interactive, we’d love to have you at the Tech Superwomen panel on March 10!