We live in an age that seeks quick fixes and easy answers. Sometimes leaders abdicate their thinking to others and accept "prevailing wisdom," which is often an oxymoron.

I grew up, like most, accepting many things at face value. It wasn't until I started giving important issues like leadership a second and third thought that I realized I'd been believing what turned out to be some serious leadership myths.

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Virgin Empire founder Richard Branson’s first job was selling Christmas trees. NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s first job was selling garbage bags. Las Vegas Sands Corporation CEO Sheldon Adelson’s first job was selling newspapers. Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky’s first job was selling carpets. And Elon Musk, the founder of Telsa Motors and PayPal, started his working life writing video games.

From their humble beginnings, all of these self-made billionaires have changed course scores of times. The infographic below, generated by San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders, shows just how many different businesses these legendary entrepreneurs launched.

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What where you doing at 15? What about at 19? Or 22? If you are one of these 12 entrepreneurs, the answer is: changing the world. Each of them was chosen as part of the 2013 annual Anzisha Prize, an event that supports social and business entrepreneurs between 15 and 22 years old. Each year, 12 finalists are chosen to share in US$75 000 of grant funding to invest in their businesses or projects. Out of 333 applications from 22 countries, 12 finalists were chosen.

These entrepreneurs will blow your mind, with businesses from renewable energy to education platforms, micro-financing and health care. These 12 entrepreneurs are set to make a serious impact in Africa’s entrepreneurial landscape.

The Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, or JFDI.Asia, announced the team of 10 international startups chosen to participate in their accelerator program, which kicked off today and runs until December 6. The successful and long-running accelerator, based in Singapore, takes teams of entrepreneurs from idea to investment in 100 days.

JFDI.Asia was the first accelerator in Southeast Asia to be accepted into TechStars’ Global Accelerator Network, and for good reason. They offer startups a $15,000 net cash investment, access to pristine technical facilities, office accommodations, investment mentoring, and introductions to more than 100 active early-stage investors.

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“A mook? What’s a mook?” asks “Johnny Boy” Civello, the fast-talking gambling debtor in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets.

For years, “mook” existed in English as an obscure slang term referring to “a foolish, insignificant, or contemptible person” (as Merriam-Webster’s Online defines it). According to one Scorsese biographer, Vincent LoBrutto, the term first appeared in 1930 in the work of S.J. Perelman, the well-known writer and humorist. Since then it has occasionally resurfaced—in Mean Streets, for example; and again, around 2000, to classify an emerging class of poor, angry white kids who listen to rap metal. But that particular monosyllable was rarely at the tip of anyone’s tongue.

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When starting a new business, planning for potential legal issues is essential. The last thing you need to be focusing on is damage control, particularly if you have a brilliant, game-changing idea that could be a thriving business otherwise.

To find out how to make sure your crazy startup idea isn’t going to get you into hot water, we asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council, an invitation-only organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, the following:

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Here's a guarantee: Come up with a problem involving systems, and technology innovators will seek to solve it. Make that problem the safety of passengers on airplanes, and the urgency those innovators bring to the table increases a hundredfold.

Using tech to augment how we watch for and catch terrorists and others who would do us harm before they board an aircraft is a process flush with options — and with challenges.

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While no one would argue that Steve Jobs was one of the most successful technological innovators of our time, many are starting to suggest that Elon Musk may soon be the next household name.

Some are going so far as to suggest that Elon Musk is better than the marketing mastermind who brought us Apple. Musk is not afraid of a challenge nor does he seem to fear failure. Despite the fact that his name may not be circulating through every household around the globe like Jobs, most of us know his products already. Musk co-founded PayPal in 1999 and forever changed the world of online transactions. He is also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, an electric car company. To top it off, Musk is the brains behind the hypothetical transportations system, Hyperloop, that would reduce travel time between New York and California to a mere 30 minutes.

As of May 2013, 70% of American adults ages 18 and older have a high-speed broadband connection at home, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Groups with the highest rates of home broadband adoption continue to be college graduates, adults under age 50, and adults living in households earning at least $50,000, as well as whites and adults living in urban or suburban areas.

Waves splashed in the startup world recently when Montreal-based indie game accelerator Execution Labs joined BDC Venture Capital's convertible note program. That's because it's just the sixth accelerator in Canada to join the program, which offers $150,000 convertible notes to select graduates of Canada's top-rated accelerators. (The other five are FounderFuel, Communitech Hyperdrive, Extreme Startups, GrowLab, and Launch36.)

Everyone cheered at the news, but it seems that few actually understand exactly what BDC's convertible note program is. So we reached out to BDC to settle the score once and for all.

By the time Deena Varshavskaya had hired six people for her social shopping startup Wanelo she knew she'd need a bigger office -- soon. That's not an easy task for a young entrepreneur in a city as crowded and expensive as San Francisco. So she turned to one of her most important resources: the First Round Capital network. She logged on and posted her question to the CEO forum, a network of 150 CEOs of companies funded by First Round. Within the hour, the CEO of a startup just two blocks down posted that his company was moving and his space was available. "It was 98% perfect!" she recalls.

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Everybody complains about incompetent bosses or dysfunctional co-workers, but what about irritating direct reports? What should you do if the person you manage drives you crazy? If the behavior is a performance issue, there's a straightforward way to address what's irking you — but what do you do when it's an interpersonal issue? Is it possible to be a fair boss to someone you'd avoid eating lunch with — or must you learn to like every member of your team?

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Despite the economy, young people today aren't totally turned off by work. They're actually excited about getting fulfillment from their careers--especially if they can help others.

We're not exactly willing to turn on, tune in, and drop out. We came of age as deregulated financial institutions stumbled and took housing, bank accounts, and jobs with them. The bailout helped those industries bounce back, but what about a generation's collective sense of security and purpose?

If I didn’t know several people who fit this trend, I wouldn’t believe that many millennials are completely uninterested in driver’s licenses and owning a car.

I listened to an interview this morning about how car makers are trying to change this attitude.

Noah Nelson of Turnstyle News and NPR’s Sonari Glinton talked with technologists from several car makers about how they are changing cars to fit young people’s expectations of technology.

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Everyone recognizes the Golden Gate Bridge. Even if you’ve never visited it in person, you’ve seen it in hundreds of movies and photographs.

But I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the Golden Gate Barrage.

That’s because it doesn’t exist yet. But as the atmosphere warms, ice sheets melt, and the unruly oceans slosh past their historical shores, the barrage may replace the bridge as the most famous engineering marvel spanning the tide-scoured entrance to San Francisco Bay.

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I’m starting to get the feeling that Silicon Valley is Hollywood for entrepreneurs – that there should be a bare hill with a giant floodlit SILICON VALLEY sign enticing would be entrepreneurs.

It seems everyone here has a business plan they are raising capital for – that this process is a rite of passage, which includes the ‘google’ eyed just-landed immigrant (that includes anyone from the East coast), to the surfie waitress at the local cafe. The language seemingly just rolls off the cuff; ‘this is just a fill in job whilst I’m seeking some seed capital for the cloud-based start-up I’m launching’ - or - ‘we hope to have our Series A closed by the end of September for $2 million and then I’ll quit and go full-time’ – or - ‘I’m just in the Valley for a week to court some of the Sand Hill Road VCs for when we do a raise next year.‘ It’s the Hollywood equivalent of the big break. Yet if Los Angeles is the city of broken dreams for actors, then are the collective Sans of Frisco and Jose the valleys of unrealised tech hopes?

In the late 1970s, universities convinced lawmakers that if they could monetize discoveries made with taxpayer funding, they would need less taxpayer funding and better help the private sector.

Congress agreed and in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was passed. The law made it much easier for research findings made by academics to be patented and commercialized, or licensed by companies. 

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At some point after World War II, U.S. migration patterns underwent a cataclysmic shift. Public intellectual Richard Florida calls it the rise of the Creative Class. Florida detailing evidence of the transformation:

According to research by Christopher Berry of the University of Chicago and Edward Glaeser of Harvard, in 1970 human capital was distributed relatively evenly throughout the United States. Nationally, 11 percent of the population over twenty-five years old had a college degree, and that figure ranged between 9 percent and 13 percent in fully half of America’s 318 metropolitan regions. In Washington, D.C., 18 percent of the residents had finished college; in Cleveland, only 4 percent had finished.

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Giant clusters of crescent-shaped sand dunes found not just on Earth but on other planets in the solar system might emerge when large dunes give birth to smaller ones, researchers say.

Crescent-shaped dunes known as barchans sprawl across vast deserts everywhere from Morocco to Mars. Typically 3 to 30 feet (1 to 10 meters) high, they can be up to some 3,300 feet (1,000 m) long in the direction the wind blows. Barchans can form on the seafloor and on ice as well — indeed, anywhere fluid (like air or water) might flow across grains of matter (like sand) that rest on top of hard, flat surfaces.