Category: What To Do?


What would you do if you could live forever?

Filed Under: The Very Basics, What To Do? by apingel — View Comments
October 5, 2010

Many people — almost everyone, actually — when they’re trying to encourage you to dream big, asks you what you would do if you had one day (one week, one month, one year) left to live. This is supposed to take away your fear of failure, because if you’re going to die tomorrow (next week, next month, next year) you failure theoretically doesn’t matter. And if that works for you, awesome. Keep using that, because their point (that failure actually doesn’t matter anyway) is spot-on.

But I’ve never found it particularly useful. If I knew I was going to die in 1 (unit of time), I would stop planning for the future — and that’s clearly not a good idea. I would spend my last (unit of time) doing crazy stuff I’ve always wanted to do — blowing all my money for a trip to Nepal to climb Mt. Everest, riding all of the scary roller coasters at the local amusement park, or whatever, depending on how much “all my money” constituted. And since I’m not (to the best of my knowledge) going to die in the next (unit of time), it’s a better idea to keep my savings built up.

And what I certainly would not do is to set off on a course to change the world by teaching people how to spend less time working and more time doing things they care about. That’s a mission I’m not sure I can accomplish in my lifetime. I know I couldn’t accomplish it in a day/week/month/year.

So here’s the question that inspires me:

What would you do if you knew you would have a century?

What if you knew that you wouldn’t die for another 100 years? Or another 200 years? What if you knew that you would live forever?

Well, sure, you’d stop worrying about your cholesterol and you’d gorge on sugar and caffeine, just like if you knew you were going to die soon. And you’d do all kinds of crazy dangerous stuff, just the same. But what about after that? I mean, how long can you really enjoy a life of chocolate cake and bungee jumping? I bet you couldn’t last a month, but let’s give you plenty of time and say it takes a year to get all that out of your system.

Now you’ve got 99 years. What would you do with them?

    What problem do you see in the world that you would work to eliminate, but know that it’s too big a problem for you to solve?

    What people would you like to reach out to and help up, if only you could find the time?

    Where do you see troubles that you could ease, but in such small amounts that it’s probably not even worth bothering?

The problem I see is that most of the world is focused on employment to the exclusion of everything else, but

    a) employment is becoming less and less viable
    b) most people hate employment

I want to let people know that they have other options, and give them the tools to explore those options, before they launch headlong into a job that they don’t want and that won’t fulfill their needs. And even though I probably don’t have another century in which to do it, even though it may not be completed in my lifetime, I still choose to start.

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Using the time you have

Filed Under: The Very Basics, What To Do? by apingel — View Comments
October 2, 2010

Trent at The Simple Dollar posted today yesterday two days ago (It appears I’m behind on my RSS feeds) a story about a guy he knew in college, who had a dead-end low-paying job as an overnight cashier at a gas station. But when Trent went to visit him, he wasn’t bemoaning his sad situation: he was using his sketchpad and pencils to practice his skills drawing perspective, lighting, shading and so on. Now he’s a graphic designer.

I’ve been talking to one of my friends who’s in high school right now, and thinking how much of a waste (US) high school is. Since the teachers have to assume that students are only paying attention about 20% of the time, they repeat everything 5 times. Which means that there’s really no point in paying attention more than 20% of the time, even if you really do care. So out of the 6 hours of the day you have to spend in class, you only get about an hour and a quarter of useful information. The other 4.75 hours are just wasted. Unless….

What could you do in your situation?

My sister wrote her first novel in high school (the teachers thought she was taking notes). I practiced my writing (primarily in the form of satire, aimed at our teachers, but hey, practice is practice.) But you could also practice:

  • Focus Being able to pay attention to what you choose is a useful skill, and one that most of us lack. Don’t believe me? Play this game:

    1. Get a stop watch
    2. Hit the start button

    3. Think about lemons
    4. As soon as you think about anything other than lemons, hit the stop button
    5. See if you can get over 10 seconds.

So the next time you’re stuck in a pointless lecture or a useless meeting, practice your focus. Try to listen to what the speaker’s saying, and see how long you can go before you get distracted.

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  • Proactivity Another highly-useful skill — the #1 habit in Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — is the ability to decide what to do, instead of letting other people and events dictate it for you. Whether in a dead-end school or a dead-end job, look for places to do stuff on purpose. Ask your teacher or your boss for permission to do something different — a different focus for your assignment, or a video blog instead of an essay, or something more advanced than what you’ve been doing. Even if they turn you down every time, you’ll still get the benefit of having learned to think and choose for yourself, which will serve you well when you get out of here. And you’ll be surprised by how many times your proposal gets accepted.

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  • Vision Questing This one takes some outside work, but may be one of the most useful things you can do. I wrote a while back about our culture’s lack of a vision quest or initiation to adulthood: we’re graduating high school, college, grad school, our first job, our second job, our last job… without ever learning what we could offer the world, and what we would like to offer the world. Nobody helps us identify the talents and skills that would help you find a successful niche. Nobody gives you the opportunity to think about what “success” means to you and how to achieve it. Nobody asks you what your goals are. Of course we all live lives of quiet desperation!

    But you could start. The process will take years, so you’d best start quickly. Brainstorm stuff you like to do, and stuff you find easy to do, and stuff people ask you to do. Jot down connections between them. See if any vocations suggest themselves to you, and test them out to see if you really like them as well as you thought. Journal your findings. Brainstorm some more. There are no easy answers, but if you keep asking the questions, you’ll find that the answers eventually take shape.
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  • Courage I’ve written about the need for courage already, so I won’t bore you by repeating it again. But no matter where you spend your days, there are opportunities to increase your courage. Ask a cute member of your preferred sex for their phone number. Speak up in a group discussion when you don’t agree with the direction the conversation is going. Stand up to the local bully on behalf of someone else. Don’t act like everyone else around you, just for a few seconds.

    Don’t be irresponsible

    Please note, I am not advocating doing these things at the expense of what you’re supposed to be doing. You really are going to have a hard time if you graduate high school without knowing basic math, and you’re getting paid to do the work your boss gives you. So do what you have to do.

    All I’m saying is…if there’s some time left over after that… don’t let it go to waste.

    The link to 7 Habits is an affiliate link. If you’re interested in buying the book (which is an awesome book, and I would recommend it to everyone), and if you have found my blog interesting and/or helpful, you can help me out by purchasing the book through that link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it helps me keep posting stuff despite my dead-end, low-paying job. Plus you give a boost to world literacy. What more could you ask? Learn More.

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    I Still Don’t Know What To Do

    Filed Under: Philosophy, The Very Basics, What To Do? by apingel — View Comments
    June 16, 2010

    The last 3 posts have been part of a series aimed towards developing a modern vision quest: a way to figure out what your talents and mission are, so you can become an active, productive adult member of society.

    I’ve told you why I think it’s necessary, how to start identifying your talents, and how to start establishing a mission. But odds are pretty good that you still feel lost and confused.

    The problem is, we’re not describing something that is quantifiable. I can’t tell you how to measure your mathematical capability, or your spacial reckoning, or your athleticism. And even if each skill were measurable, I couldn’t tell you which skills to measure, for there are an infinite number of possible skills and talents. So even though I’ve asked you to write them down, they aren’t actually the kind of thing you can really write down.

    So unlike the annual planning series, you won’t leave this one feeling like you really know what you’re doing. But at least you’ll be thinking about the right things, and moving in the right direction.

    Let’s start a conversation about what else needs to be included. What have you found helpful in your search for a mission?

    Resources For Further Reading
    What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? A Stupid Question

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    What Do You Want From Life?

    Filed Under: Philosophy, The Very Basics, What To Do? by apingel — View Comments
    June 14, 2010

    This post is part of a series aimed towards creating a modern vision quest: how to develop your unique talents, circumstances, and personality into a role for yourself as an adult in society.

    Two days after I started writing this series, a friend gifted to me a book called The Rhythm of Life. The book begins by pointing out the quiet desperation with which most of us live our lives, and argues that the way to avoid that lifestyle is to become the best possible version of yourself.

    Early on, the author tells the story of speaking to a class of high school seniors before they graduated. He looked out at the class, full of eager, hopeful faces, ready to go out into the great big world and become part of it, and asked them, “What do you want from life?” He got in response:

    • Uncertainty as to whether the question was rhetorical,

    • Vague answers probably instilled by society rather than from actual desire, like “I want a million dollars” or “I want a beautiful wife.”
    • Some pretty good answers like, “I want to be a doctor so I can help people, reduce suffering, and make money.”
    • One really good, fully-thought-out answer, from a young man who hoped to be president, and had a plan laid out for college, law school, military service, local campaign involvement, and internships on Capitol Hill.

    Most of us have no clear answer to that question. And so you end up living a Jimmy Buffet song:

      “It seems I have a problem in my present-day career:
      My ship she has a rudder, but I don’t know where to steer.”

    Of course we feel lost and confused; we are lost.

    What does that have to do with my work?

    During her year-long happiness project, Gretchen Rubin discovered a principle she labeled the first splendid truth: To be happy, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” People like to make progress; we don’t like to do things that don’t accomplish anything. But one of the most common reasons for feeling like you’re not making progress is that you haven’t defined what constitutes “progress”.

    And it’s not a quick and easy answer; success is different for each person.

    Example 1
    I recently spoke to a software engineer describing a conflict within his company: marketing wants them to build on successful past projects, developing new material for programs that they know sell. Operations wants to build brand-new stuff with inspiration and elegance. Marketing says, “I just want to make you guys rich.” And it’s a compelling argument, because following that advice would make all the programmers rich.

    But for most of the programmers, being rich doesn’t count as success. Oh, they’d all like to be rich, and they’re certainly hoping to find a middle road that will allow them to be rich. But almost none of them, if they’d gotten rich by re-hashing old material, would feel successful. They know they can do better work than that, and they would be ashamed to sell anything less than their best.

    Example 2
    I’m about as introverted as you can get, and am fully satisfied with the circle of friends that I have. I’ve no objection to meeting new people, but I don’t feel any particular urge to seek it out. But I just spent the weekend with some friends who love people. They love to meet people, to learn about people, to spend time with people. And I believe that if, on their deathbeds, they could look back at their lives and say, “I made as many friends as possible” they would count themselves as successful.

    There’s nothing wrong with being rich, or having a beautiful wife, or being a CEO. But please don’t believe that those things will automatically make you successful. Only you can define what will make you successful.

    OK…So Now What?

    Chapter 2 of The Rhythm of Life ends thusly:

      Put this book aside now — and before you read on, spend five minutes or five hours answering the question for yourself. What do you want from life?
      Maybe you have already thought long and hard about this question but have never written it down. On the other hand, if you have never taken the time to seriously address the question, don’t pretend that you have. Take the time. Think it over. Write it down.
      There are no right or wrong answers. Write quickly. Don’t think too much. Don’t analyze or edit yourself as you make your list. Write everything down, even the ones you feel are foolish. Your answers don’t have to be definitive. They will change over time. That’s okay. In fact, some of them will probably change by the time you finish this book. But it is still important to write them down now. It will help you as you read through the rest of this book, and as you venture through the rest of your life. So write your list, and when you are done, date it.
      ….
      Stop reading. Put the book down. What you are about to write on that paper is infinitely more important than anything else I have to say in this book.

    Like defining your talents, this is not a one-shot, no-problem exercise. In fact, like every other part of the vision quest, this is an ongoing, never-ending exercise. Start now. You’ll never be done, but you still need to start.

    Resources for Further Reading
    The Power of Clarity
    A refinement of my happiness formula
    The Rhythm of Life

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    Talents and Skills

    Filed Under: Philosophy, The Very Basics, What To Do? by apingel — View Comments
    June 11, 2010

    Many times on this site, in discussions of how to decide on a business or what you want to do with your life, I talk about your talents and skills. Since most people use these terms interchangeably, I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss what I mean by them.

    Talents

    I use talents in the same sense as First, Break All The Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, and Strengths Finder 2.0. That is, a talent is an inborn ability or tendency to respond in a given way. (Actually, they say, your talents are set at a young age. But since I assume anyone reading this post is more than 5 years old, you can think of them as innate.) Some people, faced with someone else’s distress, will automatically try to calm them down; these people should go into medicine or counseling. Some people, faced with someone else’s distress, will automatically tell them to quit whining and get back to work; these people should go into coaching or the military. Getting these two groups of people mixed up will do no one any good: the “coach”‘s patients will feel terrible and the “therapist”‘s platoon will be ineffective.

    In this sense of the word, we obviously all have talents — it’s not just restricted to artists and athletes. And since talents are not trainable, it’s important to make sure that your talents are matched up with the job you’re doing. You may have dozens of talents to a greater or lesser degree, but you probably have 3-5 that really stand out, things that you do or handle or learn much better than most people.

    My talents, for example, are

    • understanding relationships between things
    • memorizing data (especially what I’ve heard, as opposed to what I’ve seen or read)
    • communication

    Skills

    Skills, in contrast, are things that you have learned. Although they will often complement your talents, they aren’t things that you were born knowing how to do. You had to learn them, and you could probably figure out how to teach them to others.

    Almost any talent can be learned as a skill, although some are more difficult than others. My cousin is enthusiastic as a talent: given a situation, she will automatically start looking for reasons it’s good, and for ways she can jump in and participate. I’m learning it as a skill, by practicing every day, in every situation, to ask myself “Why is this a good thing? What can I do to be part of this?” My boyfriend has adaptability as a talent; he just isn’t bothered by even dramatic changes. I’m slowly learning it as a skill, building contingency plans into my strategies and reminding myself that nothing is set in stone.

    And some skills aren’t talents for anyone. Nobody’s born knowing how to ride a bike or balance a checkbook. A talent for athleticism or precision may help you learn them faster, but you still have to be taught.

    For example, I have skills in using Microsoft Excel (greatly assisted by my talent for understanding relationships), test taking (aided by my talent for memorization, public speaking (aided by my talent for communication) and building a business (not particularly related to any of my talents).

    Knowledge Skills

    Knowledge skills are a special category of skills, things that you “know” rather than things that you “know how to do”. The primary difference is that knowledge skills are easily transferable. For example:

    If you know how many free throws Michael Jordan has successfully made in his career, you can easily put that knowledge in my head: you tell me the number, and now I know it. That’s a knowledge skill.

    If you know how to successfully shoot a free throw, it’s much harder to put that knowledge in my head. Actually, you can’t do it directly at all. You can help me discover it on my own, by making recommendations on my technique and advice as you watch me try, but you can’t put “how to shoot a free throw” in my head. That’s a skill.

    Knowledge skills are things that you know that you could write down or easily communicate to other people. They’re encompassed more in data or information than in how-tos or understanding.

    Most skills have a host of related knowledge skills that come along with them. So most people who know how to create a trial statement of cash flows can also tell you what a cash flow statement is. But someone who knows what a cash flow statement is doesn’t necessarily know how to make one.

    So what?

    There are several ways that knowing your skills and talents can help you. The first and most boring is in applying for jobs. Although most HR departments want a traditional resume rather than a list of talents and skills, knowing your talents and skills can help you to communicate them more clearly to the hiring manager. And knowing what your talents are (and are not) can help you avoid jobs that you’ll hate.

    Knowing your talents is also helpful in starting your own job, or starting a business. In order to succeed, you’ll need to offer something of value, preferably in a way that your competitors can’t duplicate. And your talents are a great source of non-duplicable value; by definition, they are something that you do better than most other people, and so they point towards things that others cannot or will not do for themselves.

    Having a current list of your talents and skills is also helpful in planning for the future or deciding what course to take. What do you want to do with your life? Your talents point towards things that you’re likely to enjoy and be good at. Once you’ve selected something you might like to do, determine what skills would be needed. Any skills that you need but don’t have, start work on acquiring them.

    What Next?

    Unfortunately, life doesn’t have a source code where you can go to get a list of your talents and skills. There are lots of sources for coming up with ideas, but ultimately you’ll have to decide what terms and definitions fit you best.

    The Talents and Skills Worksheet can help you get started. Sit down and brainstorm areas where you have natural talent, and related skills that go with them. Go through past resumes and professional certifications for ideas on your skills; look for repeating themes in your skills and your work history to get an idea of your talents. Sit down with trusted friends, family members, or coworkers and ask their opinions.

    Keep this sheet handy, and jot down ideas as they occur to you. Over weeks, months, and years, you’ll start to get a feel for what you have to offer.

    Resources for Further Reading
    Multiple Intelligence Theory
    Disc Communication Styles
    Is Your Genius at Work

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