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Flawed Expectations
So yesterday I wrote about knowing what good and bad expectations for yourself were based on how much time you wanted to spend trying to achieve them. Not doing the work required in getting a perfect score on a test (like a reasonable amount of studying) would cause you not to reach that expectation, whether it be one you set for yourself or one someone else set for you. Today, however, I’m going to talk about what happens when you, let’s say, don’t learn from your mistakes.
A lot of people cite procrastination as a horrible flaw that they possess and wish they didn’t have. It’s a good New Year’s resolution sort of a flaw. “This year I’m not going to procrastinate” is usually met with the same exact resolution the following year. It’s an easy one to screw up, like eating too much chocolate or not biking eighteen miles to the gym and back every day. I know a good many procrastinators, and some are still very good workers despite all of this.
Why?
Because they are acutely aware at what it takes for them to get something done. They are not telling themselves that the expectation is to not procrastinate. They are telling themselves that their expectation is to get things done and do it. It might take them to the last possible second, which while not a great idea most of the time, is something that works for them. They have found a way to balance their lives with their work and, despite teachers warning about how awful it is to sit on your thumbs until the night before a due date, they do it and then get it done in a mad fever dash. Still, they walk away with their good grades and all is well. It’s not even that they want to put themselves in that kind of stressful situation of ‘oh boy, twelve hours till class and I got nothing” but they do it subconsciously and then power through the work. Sometimes it’s not even subconscious. It’s a very deliberate act, as though they know that trying to write a few paragraphs within that first few hours would be akin to trying to chop down a sequoia with a butter knife. Sure you would be doing something, but it doesn’t actually accomplish anything.
Accepting your productivity flaws and figuring out a way to work around them can sometimes be a little bit fiddly, like having to make your font a certain style and size before you type. That is not the kind of flaw I am talking about. No one is perfect, but knowing where your imperfections are and doing what you kind to circumvent them is a vital part of learning how to learn, even if it means having a social life until that Sunday night before your big class presentation. If it meets your goals, which I hope is to do more than to just pass a class for the sake of passing it, then by all means do what you have to do.
It is okay to fail sometimes, so long as that “big picture” you have in your mind about what you want to accomplish is still smoothly sailing along. The idea of “Graduating From College” is a goal comprised of about eight hundred million smaller ones. Pick and chose where to concentrate your efforts and don’t set flawed expectations of yourself in order to get there. If you’ve never gotten past page three of War and Peace, trying out for the eight consecutive January is probably not going to end well. Just because Charlie Brown tried to force his way through classic Russian Literature does not mean you also have to, watch the 1956 film instead. Three and a half hours in front of the TV is a walk in the park for almost anyone compared to a 1200 page novel…and I’d be hard-pressed to try and consider that a flaw.
Class dismissed.
Balance & Expectations
So let’s just say you have some big project,or a test, barreling down on you. Everything will be coming to a head the next morning, but you just can’t seem to pull yourself away from your favorite TV show, video game, or even group of friends. You are stressed, but can not seem to pull yourself away from any of these wonderful distractions to get actual work done. Let’s hope nobody expects you to do well without knowing that has a good chance of so very, very not happening.
Balancing your personal life with school is difficult, I know. Scratch that – balancing anything that isn’t school with school can be an incredible challenge. However, depending on the expectations you set for yourself (or sometimes get set for you by others), you may have a better chance at survival in these tough situations. Well, a survival of sorts, anyway…
Never give yourself a low bar to step up to. School (and life) is meant to be a bit challenging at times. Telling your subconscious that you aren’t going to worry about a test or a term paper because “screw it, I have friends” might sound like a fun thing to do for that one night or weekend, but it needs to spelled out to students in large block letters that mistakes at this level can become problems down the road. Yes, have a social life, but remember that how you chose to balance the ins and outs of your educational career determines exactly what kind of expectations you can set for yourself (if you are even allowed to set any of your own).
That’s right. Sometimes you don’t even get to have the last word when it comes to what your goals are, at least at that younger age. Parents, teachers, coaches, counselors…all these people can throw their own missions at you like it is some kind of game and lord over you and watching with a sardonic grin plastered across their lips. It’s fantastic if you succeed, but what they really want is to be able to be more in control, which comes with failure.
People that succeed gain responsibilities that take the action of being a, well, babysitter away from those above them and throw it out the window. Nobody cares what the rough-and-tumble workaholic is doing at his desk because it’s probably work. He’s fine (even if he secretly isn’t), but the guy who can’t seem to get through a chapter of his reading assignment needs a little bit more eye contact from his superiors. They have expectations of both the hard worker and the lazy worker, but only the lazy worker really knows it – mainly because it’s being drilled into his head every conceivable chance they are afforded.
Create your own expectations. You should know your weaknesses and flaws better than anyone else. By building them yourself, you can give yourself the chance to succeed and show that you can get things done if you just set your mind to them. The fact that you are creating your own artificial deadlines and are sticking to them good or bad shows that you are willing to do what it takes to get to the next level, even if right at that very moment it is far out of your reach.
Have your fun, of course, but recognize when things need to get serious and then get as serious as you can. I expect nothing less.
Class dismissed.
“How To Be A Student” (not really)
I’ve been sitting on this for two weeks or so. I have notes and some confusion as to what exactly I am going to do with them. What I can say for now is that this post in particular is not going to be the same sort of long-winded rant I usually give. Instead of trying to dig through my notes and create something that is both coherent and concise, which I will admit upfront is nigh impossible, I am going to instead attack myself a little bit for your general amusement.
I Am A Hypocrite.
I understand, very clearly, that someone who did not use the system to its fullest is perhaps the last person that should be showing anyone how to use it properly. The problem arose early on in my high school career when I realized just how awful the system was and had no way to combat it. It was a case of being absolutely stuck in the assembly line and being forced to either ride it through to the end and meet whatever fate was there or simply jumping off the line and being well worse off in the eyes of the world than I would otherwise. This is not to say I am pro-dropouts. In fact it is fairly obvious to see that I am as far in the opposite camp as I probably can be. I want people to succeed at knowledge-infusion, but I also want to do it in a way that other people might not exactly agree with – and that is by ripping down and rebuilding everything.
Actually, scratch that. It isn’t that I want to destroy everything. I’ve been out of the system long enough that there could be good things happening that I’m not aware of. Sure, I might have my doubts that is the case, but when I look over my notes I have moved farther away from my issues with the system and closer to issues with the student population itself. Hence the title of my little project. Students don’t always know how to be students, either to get the best outcome from the system or to get the best outcome from themselves.
Yes, I do have problems with what I experienced as a teenager. But I also know I did myself no favors in utterly ignoring it. Again, a little hypocrisy, as I doubt my own stubbornness and disappointment would have allowed me to do anything other than what I did, which is why I feel somewhat indebted to trying to fix the problem. I most definitely hit a wall of simply wanting to pass and escape rather than do any semblance of learning, which is entirely the wrong way to go about one of the most important things you do in your life (especially up to that age) and is something I have talked about here before.
Hypocrisy be damned, though, and I will continue on down the path of figuring out just how to be a better student. My goal, which will no doubt come off as incredibly mission statement-y, is to teach kids not just how to be the best student they can be but also how to get the most out of not only the system (or any learning situation) but also themselves. There really is no reason to be considered “apparently smart” when you are able to prove it consciously, fully, and repeatedly that there is nothing apparent about your abilities. I do not have that luxury, nor may I ever, but that is not going to stop me from trying. For now…
…class dismissed.
Just A Question (Part Three/Conclusion)
I guess I do need to wrap this thing up. I want to go back to that original question and once again ask if school really matters to you. For all the malaise most students imbue when faced with it, it seems almost silly to hear those same people as adults chastising the system, even if just for financial reasons. Everyone wants to give money to education. They want to make what garbage they were given better. Everyone is always screaming about improvements, even if they have no real idea what exactly could be done to improve anything. Just giving teachers more pay is not the answer (although it is still undoubtedly deserved in most cases) and simply screaming about test scores has about as much the same effect as screaming at a tree to get it to move out of your way.
It bears repeating – school matters. Underline that in your brain at least twice. People actually do understand how important it is and how most of it is probably wasted just playing babysitter for a generation of people so that the previous generation is able to do all the other work that needs to be done in the world. We are given a finite amount of time to shape ourselves into whatever it is we (or our parents/guardians/teachers) wish. We have a defined starting point (well, two if you count something like preschool) and endpoints based on whatever we decide our goals are (dropout to ‘i may never stop going to school’). Those without goals, or with goals that are not clearly defined, tend to float along to whatever seems appropriate, and this is how one ends up being two years into college with “Unknown” as a major on all of his or her records. Two years away from the real world is not when you decide where to slot yourself. Yes, it might work out that you get everything perfect even at that point, but more than likely you will find yourself coming home at night from some other random job to a diploma you might never be out of debt from.
Start early. Start as early as you possibly can. Even if you give yourself a “top five” and work from those, that’s fine, just do something before the eleventh hour tolls on your oh-so-important education. I can not scream that from my soapbox enough. The resources exist to show you exactly what you need to succeed. Use them. Don’t end up with an education you’ll never use and a life you never wanted. You do not want to be five or ten years removed from school and look back on those two questions with “No, because I didn’t let itmatter” as your final answer.
Once more with feeling…
Let School Matter.
Class dismissed.
Just A Question (Part Two)
Now, I’m not trying to create a whole bunch of stress here in either direction. I promise. Worrying too much that you are wasting time in some classes while not doing enough in the classes you care about is not where I want your focus to be. Even if everything went my way, there would still be time out of your day spent doing those things you might not exactly enjoy. I’m not trying to be some kind of torturous whip-loving headmaster and I am definitely not trying to be hypocritical although it may be coming across that way. It is just that there is an entire universe that is absolutely meant to be discovered and experienced and if you want to get as much of that sponged into your brain as possible you might have to look in directions you never would have though of before. You have nine months a year for twelve months of your life, at least, to be a captive audience toward a hardcore, non-stop information stream. It’s amazing to think about. Maybe you love things like Star Wars but never thought that a physics class could show you how much technology has advanced to make the possibilities of laser weaponry or even interstellar travel much more of a possibility than the grandiose boosts of science fiction could drown you with. The best thing about that, though, is that there are people out there doing that kind of thing for a living.
The problem with this information stream comes in multiple layers and flavors, but they all are mostly just distractions. You know, all of that social high-school drama stuff that clogs up your maximum brain time. I can’t tell you to turn that off. Trust me, I tried quite a few times in my younger days to ignore those kinds of things and it just did not work nor will probably ever work. Life doesn’t work that way. The only thing I can say for sure, and I’m sure most of you have heard it before, is that you are not the first nor the last that will survive those issues and, suffice to say, they almost never matter as much as you think they do when trapped in that moment.
It truly amazes me just how much time a teenager will spend worrying about a big date, a bad hair day, or a dropped text message conversation while paying relatively little attention to their own (hopefully) bright future. I know, I know, school is an every day thing no matter what but that dance is once in a year, if you not once in a lifetime! Everything has to be perfect! I can admit that one harsh grade among dozens of high scores is nothing to fret over, at least not on the level of a zit on the forehead or a bad first date… … …Sarcasm aside, that low grade might not matter, but I use it to create a mental picture of just how much students care about the stuff that may never affect them again, but staying out of focus from the wonderful world of knowledge can hurt over time and you may not even realize it until it is way too late.
Am I implying here that you should live without emotions or personal connections? Nope. Personalities are built on that stage, looking out into an audience of your peers for approval. Just remember to keep it all in perspective. You would be surprised how much insanely important drama you forget over the years. I feel like I’m being hypocritical again, or maybe just confusing. It is just not enough to proclaim “BALANCE” as an answer when everything should be swayed more to the side of just, well, figuring out your life. Yes, you do have a while to get that all squared away, but this is a pretty good warning that time ticks faster than you think. Eight years I have been out of school and I feel like I could do it all over again tomorrow. I am more a student now than I ever was when I was supposed to be, and I am dismayed that no second chances exist so that I can pay more attention to what I missed the first time. It may be just a matter of hindsight as 20/20 now but the reason people like me talk like this is to clue you in on what we see from here in your future that you can not or will not see from your present. There is quite a bit of haze wafting out in the front of you on the walk of life, no question about that, and it takes a lot of guts and hard work to fight through it and come out at the right place on the other side…
Part three coming soon. Class dismissed.
Just A Question (Part One of ???)
Two quick notes:
1. What follows is part one of what will at least be a two part piece. I have not as of yet completely worked my way through it but should have it complete in the coming days unless it really gets out of control. The genesis of it was wondering what exactly I would say to my 9th grade self about the school years ahead, and this is what was born out of it.
2. If you enjoy what follows, or anything I have posted on this site in the past few months, it would be amazing if you gave me a little word-of-mouth advertising to all of your various social networks or anyone else who might get a kick out of reading my rants and opinions. There are various ways to share content, all done through buttons at the bottom of each post. I am definitely not at any kind of level where paid advertising would do me any good, but maybe in a few months or a year I will find myself there. I would just appreciate some kind of readership base. That may be asking way too much of the people that do visit this place at my insistence, but I am also aware that many people find this site through Google and other search platforms. I love all of that and do not want it to stop, but I would love to see this grow. The more I see that people care, the harder it will push me to create. Thanks in advance.
———-
I begin with little more than a question –
“Does school matter to you?”
Oh, and another question — “Why?”
…
The way a person answers that question says a lot about them, especially if they are still in school. As I am no longer in school, I can admit that school only mattered to me because I was told it was supposed to matter. “Graduate, go to college, get a job” they all said as though this apparent assembly line process was so streamlined that failure was a complete impossibility. The sad truth is that I really did want an education. It just so happened that what I was being offered did not always mesh with with my expectations. I spent numerous hours in and out of classrooms learning, studying, and being tested on information that I knew would have absolutely no bearing on my existence. And guess what? All of that information is gone, or at least is so buried in my subconscious so as to never be recalled even with a gun to my head. I can not even give examples; that is just how far gone it all is. It simply did not matter.
That right there changes the question though. It is not about the school itself, right? It is about what is actually being taught that does or does not matter. How many people care about all those niche sciences, carpentry, metal work, and brain draining high-end mathematics? Are you still taking a least some of those classes? Of course, because you are told to – you have almost no choice. Your fates were determined long ago that in order to move forward in life you had to complete those classes no matter what – by any means necessary.
It is about now where you might look at me and notice a little bit of bitterness. Yes, that might be true. Even when I was a student I felt like what I was doing was not worth my time or effort. I was a disenfranchised with a system that labeled me as smart and then chastised me for not “applying myself” when all I did was pass what they told me to. I was not happy, and I realized that “C or better” got me to the end just as much as 110% did. Looking back on that, I see how awful a choice that was. Still, I would make it today just the same if I was thrown back into that situation. The problem is that I would still be completely, utterly wrong. A little bit of conscious effort could have given me the education I dreamed of, or close to it, without sacrificing years of my time to all of those undesired pursuits.
First, I should have looked at what I was interested in. That’s a pretty good starting point for using any time and energy that you consider important. Then I should have looked at what exactly I was good at, and prayed there was some sort of overlap between those two categories. From that overlap, or at least those two separate categories, I could have gotten a much better snapshot of my potential future. In fairness, I loved computers in high school, but one college level programming class left me with a giant wound in my heart after I realized just how unfit I was for that profession. It took me way too long to look at writing and more abstract creativity as I think I could maybe possibly kind of do, and I’m still paying for that now. Things could be very different if I would have noticed that in the ninth grade instead of the fourteenth.
That is why school really does matter. I may not like the system but it served as a great laboratory of all sorts of subjects that I may never have come across otherwise. It also, for better or worse, can give you plenty of time to realize what you may be darn good at and might want to look into as to what type of life you could make for yourself with your cache of newly discovered skills.
Let’s face it, I’m in no way trained to be a teacher, but that is what I would teach if I could – how to engineer the brightest possible future. I do not want my students to see their entire childhood as a raging gauntlet of information bent on destruction. Yes, there is a never-ending supply of information ready to be swam through, but the right navigational tools can turn that great, wide open ocean into a picturesque river of success…
That’s a pretty lovely piece of writing that I will end this section on. Part two of some as of yet unidentified number will be up in the near future, probably within 48 hours. I hope you come back and check it out. Until then…
…class dismissed.
Google+ is Apparently Social
“Already Invited? We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.”
I’m getting sick of seeing that note every single time I head over to Google Plus. Sure, I asked them with a mouse click to keep me notified and send me something helpful when they decide to add more room, but since it has been a few days I find myself almost frothing at the mouth at the idea of whatever it is about this network that is supposed to be ‘social’.
Sure, people are using it. I have not exactly gone out of my way to find reviews or anything, but I despise the fact that I can not just run headlong into it and actually explore. Their interactive tour is incredibly bad, giving me almost no information for which to base my decision about whether or not I could actually see myself using the site in the future. The one thing I can say is that the “video hangout” idea is enough to make me at least want to experiment with it – however I am unable to because Google decided to open a social network with only a select number of seats available. It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Internet Socializing. Open it up, Google! The longer you wait to let people in, the less people are going to be willing to even look at it because their interest peaked and then collapsed into a giant pile of Buzz.
Competing with Facebook is hard. Brain Surgery to a two-year-old hard. Squandering interest in a product is probably the last thing you want to do when getting into a market with only one major competitor who completely owns the turf you are trying to step foot on. In all honesty, Google might have a shot at making a dent in Facebook’s numbers. I doubt they will win, if only because Facebook is already engrained into people’s everyday workflows and internet usage, but based on the awful website tour I can at least see some potential. Granted, this potential could be easily pirated and adapted by Facebook (video, separate privacy ‘circles’, group chatting) and as a downside it would appear from the outside that Google has very little in the way of tertiary reasons for its usage because all the normal Google-y functions. Facebook’s gaming network is one of its main driving forces. People literally do nothing else while there but play them. They care not about pictures, video, and only desire friends if they can help them in their pursuit of gaming glory (well, okay, they might enjoy the pictures).
“Social” has a much broader meaning than just being able to connect with people, at least as far as Facebook is concerned. They want people to live on their site just as much as Google wants people to live and work on their site, never leaving except when a search happens to send them astray. Facebook doesn’t have Web Search, which is Google’s Prime Directive, but while it can be quite easy to lose a few hours in a day to farming or cooking or whatever other gaming one can do around Facebook, I am not exactly one to be firing up the search engine any more than a few times a day at most. Google is also pretty much all I use for search as well, unless I want to specifically look up something on Wikipedia, and yet I still do not consider that something worth joining another Network for.
Give us something, Google, and we will come. We might not exactly stay and redecorate, but at least we will tread across the carpets a few times and mess about with the lights and garbage disposal. In the grand scheme of things, that might not be exactly what you want. I get it. But until you open your doors nobody will ever be sure they even want to drive into the neighborhood, let alone move in and actually live there. Stop being apparently social and start, well, being Facebook. After all, that is all anyone really wants.
Class dismissed.
You’re Doing It Wrong
So it has been over a month since I got anything up here, mostly due to hand surgery and general real life intervention, but now I feel like I might have something at least semi-relevant to talk about. There is, depressingly enough for all the gurus out there, no one right way to live. Of course there are morally correct actions and ethically correct actions, but thanks to the loving randomness of reality it is impossible for everything to have a concrete step-by-step solution. Such is life.
I hate to have come upon this realization, because it means I have to try way harder just to make it through the day. It has created in me a pinch of uncertainty that makes general existence much more troubling. As an analyst, I like knowing that eventually I will come upon some kind of answer, or a string of questions tied together by lesser answers that will soon enough get me to The Answer. Random Existence has decided to throw a wrench into that idea and force me to understand just how unable I am to look into the future any farther than a few nanoseconds. One look into my past is a pretty good example at how bad I am at predicting my own path through life.
So, does this mean that I am living my life wrong? Maybe on some levels I am. Maybe one some levels absolutely everyone is. I have come to terms with the fact that it is hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that being 25 or 30 years old still puts you below the half-way point of your lifespan, statistically speaking. Everyone has goals, and a lot of them involve some sort of success at a place in their life where they will potentially get the most use of it. Nobody wants to find success and wealth and never get to wallow in it like a pig in a mud puddle. That’s just common sense. Am I doing life wrong because I haven’t found that success? Again, statistics would say that I am a normal everyday person, as the ratio of celebrity to normal is quite in favor of the normal. Am I doing life wrong because it bothers me that I could potentially not be successful in the ways I pine for? Depression is built on a foundation of this. Mid-life crises exist because people think they lived that first half of their life (which they usually only have real, honest control of just over half of) in a horribly messed-up fashion. Buying a motorcycle, speedboat, or supermodel might fix that! Or not. Happiness is as subjective as success. No one really needs success to be happy, but almost nobody would turn it down if it became an opportunity. I can say with no remorse that I equate the two way more than I should, but I have no one to blame for such a thought process occurring.
I may feel, wholeheartedly, that I have done things in my life that I could and usually do consider failures. I can go to sleep every night with that twinge of depression soaking into the back of my brain stem because I made a bad decision ten years ago and while I may have stopped feeling the effects of that decision nine and a half years ago my spirit is still telling me to dwell there because I have no idea if changing that one decision could have changed my entire life. This is some Mr. Destiny level stuff here. You hit that home run and you become the hero. It’s not hard to watch that film and wonder what actions in your past could have done completely different, and what sort of domino effect would transform your life for better or worse.
I might not have hit that home run. I might not have punched out Biff Tannen. I might not have caught that subway just in the nick of time. I might have gotten to that drug deal just a few seconds too late. Run, Run, the future is what you make of it, and no amount of doors getting in the way of your destiny will cause you to live life wrong. The only way to live your life is how you live it…maybe for better or maybe for worse, but never right or wrong. Always keep that in mind.
Class dismissed.
Dialogue Your Future
When I started planning out this post, I had a plan involved for starting to discover that “first step” that I spoke about yesterday. After taking some notes and racking thoughts around my brain, I began to realize that David Allen of Getting Things Done had already shown me a grand place to start, just in an entirely different concept. In his books, talks, articles, etc. David mentions the Horizons of Focus. Without getting into immense detail, it is basically a breakdown of how you view everything from the big picture of your all-encompassing goal in life and existence all the way down to what it is a person should be doing in the next twenty-four hours. In between those two extremes, David asks his users to look into what sort of hats they wear on a daily basis (parent, student, spouse, employee), what your vision is for the next five years of your life (good employee interview type stuff), and how what you are doing today is helping to reach those goals and is correlated to a hat you wear.
So when I look at an entire generation of high school students, especially those that fall under that apparently smart umbrella, it really comes down to dialoguing your future. Focus is a great tool for getting things done, and David knows this just as well as anyone with half a brain knows it once they are aware of how the two correlate. The choices a person makes on where to place their focus are based almost entirely on their current situations and thought processes. This is important: these are variables and it is absolutely alright if they change over time, as new information and new experiences can affect those thought processes and create new situations that might be way more important to focus on than what you were focused on a week ago. It might be related to flip-flopping or indecisiveness, but who cares? This is not all about locking down at a decision at the age of fifteen that you are going to be forced to live with for all eternity. Get that out of your head right now.
There are three keys:
- Asking the “right” questions.
- Asking all the questions.
- Accepting all positives and all negatives.
There is a problem among imaginative thinkers where he or she will decide to focus on every possible outcome of a given situation and, almost always, will focus on the negatives far more than the positives. It is a harbinger of procrastination and hides creative work behind fear. I know it exists and I still allow it to effect me. It is a battle that is tough to fight and nearly impossible to win for any longer than it takes to actually get something done. Thankfully that is all that is truly necessary, especially when it comes to simple productivity (which broken down to its core is nothing more than just creating something, period). In this exercise, though, it is important to accept all of those outcomes, but also to accept that only one of them, or perhaps none of them, can happen.
But before all of that, you ask questions. You ask yourself questions. You sit down and break down your life and your potential and you ask every possible question that could affect the rest of your life. It can be as focused as what kind of car you want to drive and as open-ended as your eventual retirement or even, scarily enough, the type of person you want to marry. Of course, like previously stated, these things are going to change. If you always think about driving the same car and marrying the same woman that is fine. If it works, fantastic. But remember that from fifteen to twenty to thirty, whatever, those ideas will change. On the negative side, these changes could come after you are already driving a car or are already married to someone that might have fit what the eighteen year old you wanted but the twenty two year old you is beating their head off the wall because you are stuck living with a decision you thought was correct four years prior. This may or may not explain the divorce rate spike, I’m not trying to make that correlation at all, but I am sure there is some percentage it could apply to.
Ask all the questions. Try to ask the right ones first, but then allow yourself to float to the outliers of interrogation and force yourself to mentally live out your life from the place you are in now, knowing that it is almost meant to change, but does not absolutely have to. What is a right question for one person may be an outlier for someone else, but they are still needing to be asked. By living out your life mentally first, it can allow you to design a “physical” road map to get to the places you want to go. By creating flexible, flowing goals that are achievable from where you are now but can be modified to fit your desires.
I originally hoped that this sort of experience could be good for any level of student, but I soon decided that the middle teens years are much better suited for this particular exercise, mainly because I have yet to discover a good, clean, actually usable method to help a child design their future from that young of an age. I think the elementary school age group has numerous other problems with the systems they live with, and by changing those systems it may in fact make implementing this system much easier when the time comes, but that is a rant for another time. All you have to know for this is to follow those three keys above, look for any pursue-able answer even if it is not the so-called ‘right’ answer, allow your mind to wander mentally through your future, and accept changes when they come. Hopefully, and I say that with a hint of prayer, this will begin to help people that are stuck in that position of having the world expecting great things from them and having absolutely no idea what to do next.
Class dismissed.
What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do
If I could say my writing is about anything, or if I could focus it down into what I want it to be about, it is this. I was never given this pertinent piece of information. I am not sure if someone was supposed to tell me or if I was being left to my own devices to discover it. If it was the former, someone really dropped the ball. If it was the latter, then those in charge underestimated the ability of the apparently smart to figure out a puzzle that a large chunk of adults haven’t themselves solved.
Maybe that is the point. Maybe they do not have any answers to give. Maybe they feel we should not be given information as teenagers that they were either not given themselves or did not get until much later in life. It is as though they would be committing some sort of heinous crime against humanity if those secrets were let out – if they even are out there in the first place. That is quite the conundrum. One I hope to eventually unravel.
Nobody knows what information is good, bad, helpful, destructive, or anything else. There is a fear of making things worse for our next generation by providing them with faulty intelligence. The problem this creates is that by withholding everything, they are in effect making things worse by not even providing options. No one is willing to take chances on a level that could promote real change. Honestly, I’m not trying for grand social change here. I am only looking for that first step – something I can share with everyone who is like I was, knowing nothing about what to do when knowing what to do is almost impossible.
There exists a framework, an infrastructure, a skeleton of some kind for building anything and everything. Yet, even with all of that, it seems no one has sat down at developed a skeleton for building a future. Sure, there are all kinds of hopeful game-plans that are all about what to do once a student, an adult, anyone is passed that first step. They know where they want to be but not how to get there. What about all the people who can not even put one and one together to know where they even wish to be in five years? in a year? in a month, even!? Your parachute can be any color it wants and you can glide it all throughout the blue sky, but you have to know where to land to best take use of the environment. Where is that map? I have never seen it, never even sniffed it. However, I feel like I am getting closer.
It’s not luck. It’s not family. It isn’t even skill exactly, not at this level. Not on the entry-level. Skills help you move from one rung of the ladder to the next. They do nothing for you when you are digging around in the basement for the ladder to climb. I feel like I am coming off in a similar vein to all of the various productivity gurus and speakers, but I am not worried about what is being produced (except for producing great starting points in people). This is why I talk about education, and why I long for as unique experience as possible in the classroom. If we are all unique and special flowers, and I agree that we are, then as many unique situations would be created, and when it comes to the educational system, that breaks down quick. This is really going to become my dead horse, especially since I have yet to design any sort of reasonable replacement. There has to be one out there though, as if what we have currently is the best we can do then we are in serious trouble. Oddly enough, it is those so-called apparently smart folks that are in the most trouble, because they are expected to know. They have more expectations hoisted on them than people who have already proven themselves because they are supposed to be on that level and for whatever reason just are not there yet. It’s numbing.
This creates a mental debt that may never be paid back, all because of expectations that the student was almost completely unaware they were contracted to reach. So what to do when you don’t know what to do? Let’s find out, together.
Class dismissed.
