Guest Post from Study Hacks
Some Advice for the Road
I’m leaving this afternoon to attend a college graduation: my second in three weeks. As you might imagine, graduating is on my mind, and, I would guess, on many of your minds as well. To celebrate the season I thought I would turn my attention to some advice for finding your way after college.
I want to share with you the unique law I use to guide my life. It’s a twist on the standard graduation inducements, but it seems, from my limited experience, to work the best of the various strategies I’ve watched my peers try on for size in their first years out of college.
The advice goes like this:
Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.
That’s it. Notice, I’m not talking about “avoiding taking yourself to seriously” or “always finding ways to give back.” I didn’t mention “the importance of a sense or humor” or why you need to “follow your passion, not money.” These are all reasonable words of wisdom, but they don’t necessarily direct you to a life that you’re happy to live.
My advice does.
Defining Lifestyle
What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle:
How much control do I have over my schedule?
What’s the intensity level of my job?
What’s the importance of what I do?
What’s the prestige level?
What type of work?
Where do I live?
What’s my social life like?
What’s my work life balance?
What’s my family like?
How do other people think of me?
What am I known for?
Using these types of questions to guide you, construct an image in your mind about the ideal future you. Notice, specific jobs don’t need to enter the equation. They can if they help you visualize, but they aren’t necessary. Add little details. Really get a sense for what this lifestyle would feel like. If the image makes you happy and gets you excited about the possibilities for your future, then you’ve hit on a good match.
Example Lifestyles
There exists an infinite variety of possible lifestyles. Here are just a few examples:
The Power Broker: You live in a big city in a nice apartment. You climbed the ladder fast in a difficult business. You wield power. You’re good at what you do. You’re well respected. Your job is intense but you are super-organized so it doesn’t drive you crazy. You’re surrounded by good, loyal friends, and when you have fun, you have fun hard.
The Serial Entrepreneur: You live in a nice San Francisco townhouse. You’ve started several businesses. Some more successful than others. You tend to alternate between an intense year or two growing a business followed by some extended time off for intense relaxation. You’ve got a network of good friends across the country and a bar down the street that you visit every Friday night to catch-up with your closest buddies. You use your off time to develop extreme hobbies and indulge in grand, hopelessly ambitious and wildly fun projects.
The Virtual Voyager: You live in your dream house in a cozy community-oriented town, surrounded by natural beauty. You work virtually for several technology companies; setting your own hours. Three or four light days a week is enough to take care of your expenses. You and your family spend a lot of time outdoors, barbecuing with the neighbors, and, in general, enjoying small town life. You travel a lot for the sheer adventure of it.
Working Backwards
Once you’ve developed a detailed, visceral sense for your ideal lifestyle, use this image to guide your early career decisions. It’s a rough guide, to be sure, but it can still prove surprisingly useful.
Imagine, for example, that you’re faced with two options as graduation approaches. One is an elite project manager position at Microsoft and the other is acceptance to some good computer science graduate schools. Both are interesting and challenging. What do you choose? The power broker would go for the Microsoft position. The serial entrepreneur, on the other hand, would go for grad school — a perfect place to develop her first marketable technology.
The Power of Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning
Starting with a dream lifestyle — as oppose to a dream job — opens up more creativity. When thinking only about jobs, you’ll find yourself considering the same artificially-narrow menu of options troubled over by most talented college grads (banking, consulting, law, non-profit…) A lifestyle, on the other hand, provides much more flexibility — letting you discover potential paths previously hidden from your planning process.
The main advantage, however, is that, in the end, the whole point of worrying about your career is because you want to feel good about your life. By cutting to the bottom-line — what would make me feel best? — and then working backward from this answer, you are maximizing your odds that you’ll actually get somewhere worth going.
As with any graduation season advice, take this with a grain of salt. This is what I have seen work, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that will. It can’t hurt, however, to take a moment to ask yourself: what lifestyle would suit me best?
My love dwelt in a northern land
A dim tower in a forest green
Was his, and far away the sand,
And gray wash of the waves were seen,
The woven forest boughs between.And through the northern summer night
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, silver white,
Came gleaming through the forest gray,
And fled like ghosts before the day.And oft, that month, we watch’d the moon
Wax great and white o’er wood and lawn,
And wane, with waning of the June,
Till, like a brand for battle drawn,
She fell, and flamed in a wild dawn.I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle gray,
I know not if, the boughs between,
The white deer vanish ere the day.
The grass above my love is green,
His heart is colder than the clay.
-Andrew Lang
“A musicians job is not to entertain. Our job is to soothe souls and melt hearts with harmonies and arpeggios which make you turn to another world or dimension… while you loose your expectations and let imagination run wild only for a moment … and when silence resounds your heart expires… and only after that the harmonies break with applauds.”
While I walked down these stairs
I heard the sound of silence call
Pitch pipe on my hand
Portfolio on the other
I stand up to you
And stand toward my brothers
I smile and you laugh silently
As the room fall still
The pitch breaks the silence
As I stand still…
A triad sounds as I place the pitch on the stand
Wave my hands
And a melody resurges
As the phoenix from the ashes
The sound fills the chapel
My hands flicker round
I see him smile
Into the background
As I dictate the triplet
A piano and forte sound
I close it with a cadence
The 6th chord closes
I nod in acknowledgement
You smile in reply…
I stand in front
While applauds break the harmonies that were given
A memory,
As well as a career, and a passion
Has been born
José Angel Clavell Acosta
December 2010
(This is a guest post from Scott H Young’s blog) http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/
I have a pet theory about discipline:
Discipline can help you become good at something, but it can’t make you world-class.
If you want to be in good shape, it’s not unreasonable to expect success if you put in enough hard work. Same is true if you wanted to be a decent guitar player or a better-than-average writer. Show up, put in the hours, be patient. You can win because most people aren’t trying very hard.
What if, instead, you want to be one of the world’s best guitar players or athletes? Discipline matters, but it’s merely a prerequisite. But now your benchmark isn’t the unfocused majority, but the <1% of the people that are also obsessed, focused, driven and passionate.
When your aim is not to be good, but the best, the logic of “try harder” doesn’t work, because the people you need to try harder than are also following the same approach. Discipline switches from being the key to success, to a mere precondition assumed before you start.
Sink or Swim?
I started thinking about this idea after talking with a family friend. His daughter is around 13 years old, and engaged in competitive swimming. The conversation reminded me of being that age and competing in swimming, except she was actually really talented at it.
This girl was competing in national and international swim meets for her age group. She obviously had a gift, but what struck me was the amount of time she spent training. Up at 5am most mornings to swim for a few hours before classes, and not home until 7-8pm to keep training after school.
The amount of discipline and passion for the sport she possessed was incredible. Much of her life revolved around swimming and she was barely a teenager.
However in this environment, of international competitions, her level of dedication wasn’t unusual. And considering her parents are relatively well-adjusted (unlike some child athlete’s parents who aim to live their ambitions through their children) she may even be a bit less disciplined than her competitors.
If being completely obsessed with the sport and training hours every day while going to school full-time doesn’t even separate you from a crowd of tweens, how can “being more disciplined” possibly make you world-class?
You Can Be Good at Many Things. You Can’t Be the Best at Everything
Last week’s post about the reality of trade-offs in lifestyle decisions sparked a lot of reader comments. Many people disagreed with me, pointing out supposed examples of how people can excel in many different areas of life without having to sacrifice one or the other.
I don’t disagree with them, but I think it depends on how you frame the issue. If you want to be good in several major areas of your life, you can probably accomplish it.
Right now, I feel almost all major areas of my life are good or great. My business is doing well, I’m in decent shape, I’ve been traveling and although recently moving has flipped up my social life again, I’m confident that will be rewarding too.
But all those things are issues of being “good”. While being good at anything isn’t easy, and it requires a fair bit of work, it is a qualitatively different challenge than being world class.
Choosing To Be The Best or Just Good Enough?
The discussion from this and last week’s article bring up two questions in my mind:
As for the first question, being the best has both high rewards and high costs. High rewards because being #1 often pays disproportionately to being #2. As Cal Newport explains:
“In other words, both Florez and Pavarotti are exceptional tenors, but Pavarotti was slightly better — the best among an elite class. The impact of this small difference, however, was huge. Whereas we estimated that Florez was well off but not wealthy, when Pavarotti died in 2007, sources estimated his estate to be worth $275 to 475 million.”
But with the high rewards come high costs, as the competition becomes just as smart, fierce, talented and, yes, even as hard-working as you are. Discipline and ruthless focus switch from being decisive factors in winning to mere entry fees just for a chance to play the game.
Therefore, it makes sense to aim to be the best at a tiny minority of your life, perhaps even one sole pursuit.
Is Polymath a Dirty Word?
I think it’s certainly possible to be good, if not great, at several different skills. I know people who are decent artists, musicians, history buffs and make a good living with happy personal lives. Talents often support one another, so being good at one enhances your skills in another.
I don’t believe polymath pursuits are a bad thing. If you have multiple interests, why not try them all out? Learning new things is part of what makes life interesting. Even if your guitar lessons don’t lead to a record deal, that doesn’t mean they were a waste of time.
But my sense is these polymath pursuits, and indeed how well you master the multiple areas of your life, are deeply connected to how you answer the first question. If you decide to be the best in a fiercely competitive field, you either need to make heavy sacrifices with no guarantees of success, or be lucky and talented enough to get away without needing them.
If, in contrast, your answer of which pond you want to be “the best” at is not swimming with sharks, you make it easier to succeed in life’s other pursuits and decrease the chance that you’ll drown.
One way to do this would be to select a pond that is small enough that you can succeed without becoming a slave to your ambition.
Perhaps a better way is to creatively redefine the ponds, so that you can succeed (often on the strength of multiple talents) because nobody realized you could swim there.
Redefining the Game
My friend Benny has been enjoying a lot of success from his blog. In speaking eight languages fluently, he certainly deserves it. But as Benny explains, as far as polyglots go, he isn’t unusual. As part of his guide he interviewed people who speak 30+ languages to varying degrees of fluency.
In response to this, he explained to me:
“My goal isn’t to have the most languages, but maybe to be the best extrovert polyglot.”
Instead of trying to be the person with the most languages (a nearly impossible task) he redefined his mission to focus on the speaking, travel and social aspect of the languages which makes his job of being unique and world-class much more achievable.
Discipline is a necessary ingredient. But, in aiming for something remarkable, perhaps success owes less to the brunt force of effort, and more to guiding that effort in an uncommon direction.
AOL Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Vivendi Universal, and Sony are the media giants who rule our nation. Does it surprise you that these are the ones that control everything? They control 25% of the US music sales, the entertainment Industry, and basically our society. Have you heard the lyrics that are in the top 20 of the Billboard charts? Most of these lyrics talk about mind control, war, suicide, secret societies, and demonic possession. What saddens me is that parents, the most important figures in children’s lives are permitting that they hear, buy, and “worship” artists such as Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Hanna Montana, among others. Today’s music, fashion, and propaganda have a great influence on society by shaping its opinions, molds its tastes to the point that it’s turning individuals into robots. But who noticed these effects in the first place?
In 1928, Edward Bernays (E.B), an American pioneer in public relations wrote “Propaganda” a book in which he stated that in order to assist clients, the public relations counselors use social psychology, sociology, among other sciences to fully understand society; thereby, they scientifically manipulate public opinion. I agree with Bernays when he stated that those who control and manipulate society are an unseen government who are the true rulers of the world. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.” Propaganda by E.B. The unknown government knows which levers to pull and buttons to press, for they understand the mental process and social pattern of the masses what we buy, share, hear, and accept. What do you think of when the term “collective unconscious” comes into mind?
Founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung wrote on his most important and misunderstood book “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” that “in addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical to all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually bit is inherited.” This collective unconscious is what the media successfully manipulates and controls; thereby, controlling society itself. How does the media gain control? By constantly bombarding our subconscious with subliminal messages; the best case example is none other than the 9/11 incident and why everybody took for a fact that it was Iraq was the culprit and that it had weapons of mass destruction. Even though there are millions conspiracy theories, why did everybody blame Iraq? That unknown government, which consists of only a handful of people had manipulated the media so that the American society believed that said nation was the culprit. Another way of manipulating media is by using subliminal messages on T.V commercials, music and music videos.
Subliminal perception is one of the many techniques in which the media uses to control and subdue society. The concept of “subliminal perception” is attributed to US market researcher James Vicary in 1957 who said that to increase popcorn and Coca Cola consumption at the movies one must flash said messages on screen for a short time, a technique that the Cinema business still used today. Another technique is the famous “sex sells”. Although some sources claim that this is ineffective, there have been many studies that states that the use of this technique is used frequently and proves its effect if the message is a negative one. Some examples are the word sex on axe bottles and on skittles bags; pictures of oral sex on Coca Cola ads; the world rats on ex-president’s Bush advertisement against Al Gore in 2000, among many others. Another method and personal favorite is desensitization.
Desensitization is when a subject or a train of thought is not accepted by society and is slowly, gradually and repeated introduced in movies, music videos, or news. After many years of exposing the theme to the masses, the media exposes the concept and it is passively accepted. An example of this are today’s music videos and artists such as the rapper Jay-Z and his song “Run This Town”, Shakira’s “Give It Up to Me” and most of Lady Gaga’s songs such as “Telephone”, “Bad Romance”, and “Paparazzi” which all talk about mind control, civil wars, and demonic possession. The problem here is that parents do not pay attention to said lyrics and instead reinforce their children or teenagers to continue listening to the songs thus letting the younger generation think that the younger generation that what they see and hear is good for them. This is exactly what the media wants and gets.
As stated before, they are five media giants that rule the United States of America. As Confucius once said “Symbols rule the world, not words nor laws”, this is how the media controls society by using occult symbols or hidden messages on the radio, television, movies, newspapers, magazines, books, video games, and the internet. Nobody likes the idea of being controlled by anyone, so we have to rebel against these monsters and fight. How? By not promoting the artist who are getting paid to spread the message and maybe create a better world without getting sucked on the media crazed and not doing what Shakira sings and “giving it all up to them”.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while I’ve been very busy with a lot of college work. The life of a music major is not easy specially when the juries/recitals/concerts are near. Ill post in this week, I hope. God bless and stay tuned!
When I first saw you, I fell in love
You asked me last summer
but I couldn’t tell you that
When I fisrt saw you
I saw your raw pure talent
The one that now you see
after all those months of thespian-sy
When I first saw you, I fell in love
so hard it made God cry
And now I’m so stupid
That I could follow you stupid
to the end of the world and back
on a balloon ride to never land
When I first saw you , I fell in love
so scared now I would cry a river and ride back
to the land my heart sank
where you told me …. you love me back
I’m a College student in his 3rd undergraduate year and i got the brilliant idea that, since i like the English language so much I’d do a minor in it. This semester I’m taking the ENGL 224 class aka Grammar and Essay writing for English Majors and my professor is Dr. Montero (who has a PhD in Linguistics and that ROCKS) and for the end of the semester I have to make a research paper on How the media plays a role in shaping the society’s opinion (when i read it i thought of the evil hanna montana [please kill her]) Here’s a link to “How to write an A+ Research Essay”
From: http://www.aresearchguide.com/1steps.html
Comment on how you would do it
The art of musical poetry 