Sunday, June 5, 2016

Failure Is A Myth

Failure implies finality - you determine when something ends.


Failure is a myth; quitting is real.


Quitting always ends things.


Falling flat, coming up short, making mistakes - these are not endings, these are events you get to choose how to respond to.


As long as you are trying in earnest you are not failing.


You either succeed or you keep trying, but failure only becomes real when it is acknowledged by giving up.



Effort paves the road to success.

Saturday, June 4, 2016

The 3 C’s of Juggling Projects

Collaborate

The first trick to juggling projects is collaboration. This enables you to jump from project to project without losing momentum on any of them. Momentum is everything when it comes to seeing a project through to completion, so this is absolutely vital.
With that said, having no partner is better than having a bad partner. Choice carefully those you work with. Find someone who compliments your strengths and is skilled in the areas you are weak in.


Compartmentalize

Separate your projects. Block out your schedule and devote a certain amount of time to each. This will keep your mind sharp as you dissect the problems you have to solve. This is also another reason why collaboration is crucial - it lets you transition and focus on the task at hand because your partner is still stirring the pot.


Chip away

Assess what your long and short-term projects are. Do this by looking at them through multiple criteria. What projects require the most hours to complete? What are your hard deadlines? Which are your best opportunities in the present? If you don’t capitalize now, which chance will slip away or what connection might you lose touch with?

The longterm projects lack the immediate gratification, but even if you have to put them on the back burner in favor of the short-term projects, just continue to chip away. Remain consistent above all.

Friday, June 3, 2016

How to Survive as an Artist Working a “Real Job”

1 - Be selective about your work (if you can afford to be)

You have to pay your bills, but your time is valuable too. Consider whether or not your job gives you the flexibility to work on your art during your free time.


2 - Does your job drain you?

Only you can answer this. I’ve worked certain jobs that have left me feeling discouraged or empty at the end of the day, and I’ve struggled afterwards to manage to write a paragraph. I had the time, so that wasn’t the issue, but my creative energy was dissipating.


3 - Don’t make excuses

The moment you begin to believe you are too busy to create is the moment you’ve given up. There’s always time. You just have to find it or make it. If you only have half an hour each day to devote to your art use it wisely. Cut out the unnecessary. You don’t need TV, you don’t need video games, you don’t need YouTube videos, or much of anything at all, but if you’re an artist you need to create. Just do it.


4 - Are you moving closer to your dreams or diluting your energy?

Can you realistically see yourself getting ahead? If you aren’t creating in your spare time, you’ll be in a perpetual loop working to make someone else’s dreams come true.


5 - Create finished products

If you’re working in finance, but you want to be a screenwriter, write a script and shop it around in the time you aren’t working. Begin doing the thing you want to do. If you want to be a painter, make paintings. If you want to be a novelist, write a novel. Life is a verb - it’s all about action.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Redefining Love

Defining love is nearly impossible. To find a definition everyone agrees on is about as subjective as asking someone to define happiness - we have a general understanding of what it is, but the words we’d put it in are deeply personal.

What we do agree on is that there are many types of love and a range of intensities we feel. To attempt to find an encompassing definition that can fit the varieties and intensities of love we have to make it simple.

The definition I’m going to propose does not fit all contexts. If you apply it to marriage I’m not sure it’ll be a happy one, but this particular definition is honest and true because it’s rooted in the present. If you have to remind yourself why you love someone it could be argued that in lapse you were momentarily out of love. We often equate love with stability, and choice, so we think our way through these lapses for relationships to succeed. That kind of love is more like thoughtfulness and caring. An alternative is to equate love with truth - not truth directed towards another, but being true to yourself. 

If we don’t twist the definition of love to suit us pragmatically for the sake of our relationship’s longevity or for a socially practical definition then we can uncover its meaning. Think back to when you’ve been “in love." Forget happy endings or rewriting the narrative with an asterisk if it didn't work out - it was real - you thought about that person throughout the day and you cherished them - you were overwhelmed with feelings, overwhelmed by the thought of that person, and sometimes you didn’t know what to do with it.
This might sound like passion, so you can dismiss it if you’d like, but then is it worth its weight without a bit of madness?

Love is reverie with a dash of delirium.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The Problem with our Educational System

You’ve heard it before - teach students to learn. 
The implication is that it’s the educational equivalent of “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish, he’ll eat forever.” The idea being that the student is empowered to learn anything. This is a simple concept. However, the current structure the educational system is at odds with this philosophy.

Students are constantly being told their performance on standardized testing is indicative of their work ethic and, maybe less verbalized, their intelligence as well. Students prepare for these tests, memorize the types of answers they’ll regurgitate, show up, and jot them down…without actually learning anything that will be useful beyond trivia.

As long as students can succeed on formulaic thinking alone they have no reason to adjust. In order to teach students how to think, a teacher must force them to adapt - the student has to start asking his or herself, “How did I learn this?” If they can get by recalling merely what they learned then the teacher is not a teacher, but rather, a standardized performance supervisor. That sounds like a robot, right? It might as well be.

As a student I loved multiple choice and short answers because it was easy, but again, that’s only useful for trivia. Get your students to explain, and make the time to show them in return why their answer isn’t necessarily just right or wrong. 


Reward students for thinking - be an encourager and their passion for learning will grow exponentially. The problem with the US educational system is that we measure by test scores instead of student engagement and their love of learning. If we valued that above all else, the results will follow.

The Millennial Secret

Bill Gates has one of my favorite quotes -

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Older generations often view millennials as lazy. While I’m not ready to dismiss that notion entirely (I’ve seen it to and I’ve been it before), I’d argue that this quote is relevant to millennials and baby boomers trying to understand millennials because we are a generation obsessed with shortcuts. The result of this “laziness” is innovation. I’m not advocating or defending laziness in its true form, but my generation’s desire to find shortcuts will continue to lead to innovation in science, tech, and industry as we overtake the boomers as the generation who determines the next chapter of our history.

Much of this obsession with easier methods stems from growing up in the digital age. Machines are designed to make work more efficient; technology does the same for simplifying mental tasks. Millennials have grown up in a system of shortcuts enabled by and through technology, so that thinking is trained and reinforced by the age we live in.

Often, however, looking for shortcuts, which should be thought of as efficiency or divergent thinking, is instead mistaken for laziness. Sometimes laziness is laziness and it’s fair to call it what it is, but consider that shortcuts aren’t always such a bad thing. Catch yourself next time you scoff at the millennial idealism or the desire to “change the world” - don’t look at it as a reflection of narcissism, but as my generation feeling empowered by a system of increasing efficiency. 


Our full on embrace of shortcuts can appear to be a show of disdain for tradition and rules. It’s not. We crave innovation. Millennials are multi-tasking (at times distracted), efficiency-driven, divergents.

The Power of Omitting Coincidence From Your Language

We’ve all had those moments when it seems like everything is connecting or converging to a single point. It can even be unsettling how precise and well-timed certain things unfold - and yet, they do.
But It’s after they do, our first inclination is to think or say something along the lines of “What a funny coincidence” and chalk it up to that.

Instead, pay attention. Try to understand why things are playing out the way they are and how you can guide that energy. To dismiss it as coincidence is to ignore your own ability to converse with the universe. If you don’t buy into this, at least consider that it’s wasting potential and inefficient to lose track of the way your life’s energy is flowing.


You are traveling through your own life blinded skepticism if you let it cloud your intuition. Let those things you used to call coincidence point you in the right direction when you come to a crossroads.
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