Part of the ethos of start-up culture is working around the clock to produce something, continually debugging it, and getting it to market before the competition. And whoever isn't devoting all of his or her efforts to the desired success isn't going to reach the finish line. In what might be called a cross between Vince Lombardi's "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" and Leo Durocher's "nice guys finish last", the super-exit has not only become the ultimate sign of success, but even the reason for doing something in the first place. Achieving that exit demands hard work, and hard work isn't for everyone. But alongside this ethos another, contradictory, one has developed.

A number of times in previous columns I've found opportunities to quote Neil Postman who in his 1979 book "Teaching as a Conserving Activity" noted that ten years earlier, when he and Charles Weingartner were writing "Teaching as a Subversive Activity", for just about every definitive pronouncement that they made in that book it was possible to see things from an opposite perspective:

For every idea we expressed as "true," we could easily think of its opposite, or at least of some alternative, as also true. It was as if we and our shadow were looking at the matter from opposite poles; our right was his left, his right our left. We understood which way we were facing but it was not hard for us to imagine others, or even ourselves, facing in another direction. As a consequence of this double vision, Charlie suggested early in our collaboration that the last sentence of each of our books should be "Or vice versa."