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Business Week’s America's Best Young Entrepreneurs 2007 Most finalists are banking on the Web, but some have broken into more traditional sectors such as publishing, manufacturing, and investment banking.

And what happened to our 25 finalists from last year's Best Entrepreneurs Under 25 roundup? Growth is the consistent theme, and highlights range from landing partnerships and securing rounds of venture capital funding, to fending off job offers from Wall Street hedge funds and other businesses.

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Albert Ellis, who in the 1950s founded cognitive therapy in the US, died July 25 (2007) at home in New York. He was 93. He gave his last interview to Jules Evans, whose portrait of Ellis in Prospect Magazine described a man who remained dedicated to the Stoic values that underpinned his system and to the teaching to which he devoted his life. In his later years, Ellis fell out with the trustees of the institute he founded, who tried to eject him from the board—yet he remained stoical about even this, describing the board members as “fucked-up, fallible human beings, just like everyone else.”

Below is what Jules Evans said about Ellis’s impact on politics in that article (edited for brevity and clarity), which throws light on why so few in Denver are willing to stand up to Mayor J-Hic’s tax/spend proposals on the current Denver ballot:

(Note: This explanation of Ellis’s approach below should be read with this warning in mind, posted as a comment to the Evans article in Prospect Magazine: There are large social forces encouraging us to be victims, and lots of profits being made. BUT what I don’t like about short therapies is that the alteration in our habits of perception can take a long time, and Diogenes et al saw it as a lifetime’s work, a way of being, rather than a quick fix. Satori may be instantaneous… but there is a path of learning involved, rather than a mere act of consumption. I call these large forces encouraging us to be victims Borg, from the Star Trek cyborg characters. It appears our Denver Mayor J-Hic has become Borg —is it too late to save him?  John Wren)

The assumption of both the psychoanalytic and the neuropsychological approaches is that your mental suffering is beyond your conscious control; it is the fault of your screwed-up neurotransmitters, or your dirty id. Albert Ellis's cognitive-behavioral approach is more humanistic. He declared that emotional disorders are often of our own making, the consequence of our conscious and semi-conscious thoughts and mental habits. We construct our own prisons, and we can free ourselves from them. And we can do it quite quickly.

Ellis said the heart of his cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) was a comment of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: "It's not events, but our opinions about them, which cause us suffering." We can train ourselves, as Stoics and Cynics did, to change our opinions, our mental habits, so that we become robust and self-accepting enough to withstand external events that used to cause us suffering, such as getting rejected by a woman, or getting fired.

What CBT does is update stoicism and apply it to specific mental disorders, like depression or social anxiety. This is, perhaps, its greatest achievement. In an era of postmodernism and neuropsychology, it has managed to put Greek philosophy back at the heart of western society—CBT has persuaded millions to follow the principles first discovered by Diogenes 2,400 years ago.

It is possible to say of CBT, as you can of stoicism, that it can lead to political quietism. You learn to accept and tolerate everything around you, and never get angry about the injustices you encounter. But actually, if you look at Stoics or Cynics through the ages, they have a distinguished history of standing up to tyrants, precisely because they are not afraid to let go, not afraid to die.