You Got This: Cultivating a Culture that Celebrates Effort and Innovation

I enjoy traveling but I always love coming home to Silicon Valley. Recently, I had a particularly arduous trip with a flight delay and a late night return. Twelve hours later, I was back in Palo Alto beginning a run up the steep side of the Dish, a hiking trail tucked behind Stanford. As I began my slow ascent, a young couple jogged down and the girl shouted out, “You Got This!” I appreciated the shout out and support, but it hit me all over again a bit later as I took my 15 year old daughter on a long, uphill bike ride along the creek on Alpine Road. After a long rest where she chastised me for deceiving her about how long and steep the ride would be, we started coasting back downhill. As we came across another rider beginning his ascent, she yelled out, “You Got This!”

First, let me say I was a proud Dad of a young woman who instinctively offered support to someone about to take on a hard task. At the same time, I was really pleased to live in a place where the core cultural orientation is to cheer on effort and to hope for the success of others. I hope my wife and I have contributed to it in our kids, but I’m pretty sure my kids have picked up this sensibility in their neighborhood and schools. People have their complaints about Silicon Valley, but I honestly feel like we live in a community that lives this ethos.

Global Silicon Valley (thanks Michael Moe from GSV for coining the term) is an industry where one builds on the success of the people before them. We want and need others to take on new and difficult tasks, to try to create things that don’t look like they can work, and we celebrate when they succeed (whether or not we’re involved). Their accomplishments provide the platform (and failures are the fertilizer) for the next set of innovations. It is this unique intersection of technology and entrepreneurship with this can-do attitude that makes Global Silicon Valley such a collaborative, high performing and ultimately innovative place.

So good ahead, take your shot. You got this!