The Eleven Learning Blog

It will come as no surprise that we at Eleven Learning like the number eleven. When we have our weekly meetings, we rate our progress on a scale from 1 to 11. It’s good silly fun. Heck, we named ourselves after a joke in a movie.

So when we looked at our calendars and realized that 11-11-11 was coming up, we suspected that this was a rare event: a quick consultation with a mathematician friend confirmed that it only happens once a century. Some folks in the Valley have declared it Nerd New Year and are throwing a block party.

A different 11-11-11 that happens every year is Veterans Day. (There is no apostrophe: ‘Veterans’ is attributive, not possessive.) Our government likes to mess with the dates of holidays so we can have long weekends. Veterans Day is important enough that it escapes this fate. Here’s why: in 1918, the First World War ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. After 1567 days, a conflict that killed somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the planet’s population was finally over.

About a decade ago I was walking through a midsize college town on my way to a meeting. The churchbell started ringing on the hour, and I began to hurry because I was running late. But it didn’t stop ringing, and I realized that everything in the downtown area had. just. stopped.

For one minute.

Like many entrepreneurs, I’m blessed with a healthy ego, and I tend to look at a lot of things and think, “I could do that.” I have a ton of respect for the people who do things that I know I cannot. To them I wish a happy Veterans Day.