LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Wyly. His coauthor—son Andrew—is also a

      true Texan by choice, but one who hails from

      California, which is a state that serves as a counter-

      example to the Texas model.

      Sam has grown six different companies to

      billion-dollar valuations, so he realizes that the key

      to the Texas success story is providing fertile ground

      for entrepreneurs. We all know that Texas has been

      an energy pioneer ever since 1937, when the

      companies that became Chevron and ExxonMobil

      began drilling offshore. Today that tradition contin-

      ues with Texas as a pioneer of the shale-oil boom

      and of wind farming. But Texas was also a birth-

      place of the microchip. And that tech tradition

      continues to flower now that Austin has become the

      hot place for start-ups that connect creative think-

      ing with technology.

      In our times, the word trailblazer has become

      such a cliché that we pay little heed to what it

      means. Texans, however, have bred into their per-

      sonalities the legacy of the true trailblazers:

      those cow herders of the Texas plains who blazed

      new trails and roads in order to get their livestock

      to markets.

      This business and entrepreneurial mind-set also

      led to a tradition of political leaders who were not just

      professional partisans but who instead knew how to be

      dealmakers, in the tradition of Bob Strauss. In Califor-

      nia, 80 percent of state legislators consider that role

      their full-time occupation. For folks in the Texas legis-

      lature, that figure is less than 2 percent. They tend,

      instead, to be farmers, fire-fighters, car dealers, oil-

      field workers, and business owners. In addition, Texas

      politicians come in all stripes: progressives, populists,

      libertarians, right-wing firebrands, and occasional rev-

      olutionaries. The one thing most of them have in

      common is that they are colorful.

      The Wylys also celebrate—rather than stoke fears

      about—the great migrations that have made Texas a

      “majority-minority” state, one in which Hispanics,

      blacks, and Asians make up a majority of the popula-

      tion. In praising the largely Hispanic border area, the

      Wylys write that it “is the most richly Texan of places,

      because the people who live there know that opportu-

      nity resides in what unites us and not what divides us.”

      Even if you think that not everything about Texas

      is perfect, and even if you love your own home state

      more, this book is valuable. Colorful and fun, it is

      bursting with little facts and big ideas. It all adds up

      to an important celebration of the spicy mix of ingre-

      dients—and the exuberance—that has made Texas

      successful over the years. The state’s can-do spirit and

      love of independent thinkers, innovators, and entre-

      preneurs is something that could help kick up our

      whole economy.

      TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

      9

      I went to college at Denison University, a

      small liberal-arts institution in Ohio with

      only a few thousand students. One year

      I invited my schoolmate, a guy from

      Newark, Ohio, to come with me on a

      visit to Dallas to see my dad. Driving

      from the airport, I noticed that my

      friend kept looking out the car window

      with a perplexed look on his face.

      “Where is the desert?” he asked.

      “What desert?” I replied.

      Like many people visiting Texas for the first time,

      my friend assumed that the state looked like some-

      thing out of an old Western movie, a place where men

      wore ten-gallon hats and boots with spurs, and the

      landscape was all tumbleweeds and oil wells. But here

      we were in a teeming, modern city filled with people

      of every age and race, and bustling with commercial

      and cultural activity. Given all the mythology sur-

      rounding Texas, I guess it’s not surprising that

      outsiders might still harbor some old-fashioned notion

      about the place and its inhabitants, but the disconnect

      between fantasy and reality never ceases to amaze me.

      I’ve got an interesting perspective on the Lone

      Star State. Growing up, I split my time between Cali-

      fornia and Texas. Shortly after graduating from

      college in 2004, I decided to leave Los Angeles and

      move to Dallas. It was a career decision as much as a

      personal one: Sure, California had a great climate

      and nice beaches, but the business environment,

      even in those prerecession years, felt stagnant, bur-

      dened with some of the heaviest taxes in the nation

      and some of the most restrictive regulations. Texas,

      by contrast, felt vibrant, alive with opportunity.

      I also couldn’t believe how much cheaper

      it was to live in Texas. Actually, it was

      cheaper to do almost anything here,

      including starting a business, which is

      what I did in 2007, establishing a film-

      production company in Dallas in

      order to pursue my dream of making

      movies. The fact that I started a career

      as a film producer after leaving Los

      Angeles says a lot about how much more

      attractive Texas is than California for young

      entrepreneurs.

      I found that out the hard way when it came time

      for me to start making my first

Скачать книгу