Hello All,
Happy New Year! I hope 2024 is going well for you!
Our annual Avantax conference was in Chicago. What a great excuse to visit one of the best food and culture cities in America! As you would imagine, I read multiple guidebooks before departing, extended our stay to include a visit to the home of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield and stopped by some fabulous museums.
This year our keynote speaker was Ozan Varol. A rocket scientist, bestselling author and expert on creativity and critical thinking with a NY Times best selling book Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Ozan shared about his upbringing in Istanbul, Turkey in a middle class family, having an illiterate yet wise father and how his dreaming big (moonshot thinking) was not embraced by most of the people in his life who would respond by saying that people of his social class could not achieve lofty goals. Luckily for us, Ozan did not listen to them. Moonshot thinking is basically turning something seemingly impossible into the possible and is precisely what Ozan has accomplished.
We also enjoyed listening to Walter Isaacson the author of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci's biography. The common traits all of these men shared was questioning conventional wisdom and being willing to explore new ideas.