Summer Lessons

More than school, more than books, simply living can teach a person so much; through the course of this summer, life has been my most reliable and influential teacher. My blog has gone untended, the lack of updates more a reflection of a very busy schedule than days whiled away doing nothing worthy of discussing. That time, however, has been spent on other ventures, all worthwhile in their unique ways.

The State Farm Youth Advisory Board meeting was one of the greatest experiences of my life, proving to me that sometimes just sitting in a room full of incredibly intelligent people and listening to the discussions can teach you almost everything you need to know. I confess that a challenge of mine is quickly establishing trusting relationships with others, but there is no other group that I would rather work until 1:30 in the morning with, refining every aspect of the documents and presentations due the next day. We worked a 40-hour workweek in less than three days, but I would turn around and do it again at the drop of a hat: passionate people, no matter how young, are always a force to be reckoned with.

And sometimes, even when it seems all for naught, good things come of hard work you put forth. My high school schedule finally paid off; I will be entering college with over a year’s worth of credit, immediately beginning to take the introductory courses to my prospective major and minor(s). I have always known the possibilities to be endless, but I am now beginning to see the potential to capitalize on the opportunities.

Even at work, I am experiencing a sense of accomplishment. My summer assignment, albeit petty in scope, was certainly herculean when assigned, but I am now days away from completion. For the first time in my life, I have been receiving a paycheck to produce tangible results, and my current level of self-satisfaction in this regard has been tremendous.

Above all else, however, I have been reminded how a few days taken for myself can be truly beneficial. This post was typed while listening to the waves crashing, my body beaten from an earlier surf session. No internet, only books – plenty intellectually stimulated by Robert Greene and Malcolm Gladwell.

I graduated from high school with my life and my priorities askew, and this summer has been a quest to restore balance. I’m not there yet, but I am getting closer, considering every step to be a victory.

 

On a personal note…

I leave tomorrow for my first State Farm Youth Advisory Board meeting, which promises to be an incredible experience.  I get to spend the next few days with some incredibly motivated, very interesting youth, all highly accomplished individuals at a very young age, and I cannot wait to meet all of them.

On the plane ride, I will be reading James Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds,’ catching up on mainstream interest in crowd psychology/prediction markets only a year or so late.  While books are just falling off my bookshelf waiting to be read, I am still open to other suggestions upon finishing Surowiecki’s…. I have about fifty dollars in assorted gift certificates, and always appreciate direct recommendations.  I am aware of Ryan Holiday’s reading list, as well as Kevin Kelly’s ‘Books That Changed My Life‘ post (among others), but I am certainly not opposed to diversity in my life… even fiction can provide a nice breath of fresh air.

 

A Fast Approaching Conflict — Part 2

*This is a continuation of an earlier post*

I feel comfortable in assuming that everyone who visits my blog has, at some point in time, at least heard of Timothy Ferriss and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek.’

Reading about the man’s philosophy of ‘lifestyle design’ makes NOT getting excited about the prospects of streamlining one’s life and reducing outside stress very, very difficult. And indeed, Ferriss just happens to be one of the better known and more charismatic leaders of a rapidly-spreading counter current movement calling for less time spent at work and more time spent on ourselves.

The more one looks, the easier it becomes to find examples of people beginning to fight the system of the 40+ hour workweek with minimal vacations. CNN recently highlighted Edgar S. Cahn, referred to as a leader in “a national campaign that claims that speed kills. Its leaders say that Americans are so starved for time, our need for speed is destroying our health, families and communities.” And in response, a socially-concerned community-driven organization has emerged, known as TimeBanks USA.

Even on less dedicated fronts, many other blogs are joining in on the fight: in just the past two days, Get Rich Slowly analyzed bartering as a means of more efficient financial exchanges, and Newly Corporate shared “Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Your Vacation Time.”

At the moment, in and of itself, this still-budding philosophy is rather inconsequential. Followers of these blogs are predominantly young people still orienting themselves to the workforce, and they compose only a minority of all American workers. Nevertheless, they are fanning the flame, causing other to slowly adapt their thinking and become less hostile to actually taking time off in the interest of health and long-term productivity.

For now, however, this whole set of ideals sets in direct contrast to the “game” I described earlier, in which I should be dedicating every waking moment to some sort of resume-boosting activity, the game I will only play on my own terms.

 

The benefits of listening to consumers

I feel like I am mimicking Seth Godin on this post, but I found the following article fascinating.

As I have said for some time now, no reason exists to declare the vinyl records completely extinct; retailer choice and availability have limited sales far more than consumer interest.  While the cassettes which first replaced vinyl, and later CDs and MP3 players are obviously superior in terms of portable music, vinyl remains an effective option for home usage.  It seems that while consumers may not have been passionate enough to look for vinyl in specialty and independent shops, when the product is in front of them, they have no opposition to purchasing it (thus serving, I believe, as the Lesser Fans in the ‘1000 True Fans model‘).

The fact that corporations and entire industries always express amazement when they realize consumers alone know what consumers want never ceases to amuse me.

But, what do you think?  Is vinyl just a passing fad, soon to be relegated to independent shops?  Will factors, such as rising transportation costs, make such a format too costly, or will strategies such as the packaging of digital files make the product worthwhile?

 

A Fast Approaching Conflict - Part 1

*This is an attempt at spacing out what I expect to be a much longer post into a series of shorter entries*

I am back from my college orientation program, where I spent thirty-six hours surrounded by fellow students all approximately as qualified as I am to attend my university. We of course all vary in our backgrounds and accomplishments: I met very preppy students from private academies and boarding schools, very down-to-earth students from rural communities, and a multitude of students from large public magnet schools very similar to my own. It was, by and large, a great group of motivated young people, all of whom I hope to meet at some during the next four years. Each person has his or her own story, his or her own passions, and I expect to learn as much from the community as from my courses.

In a few months, however, we will be forced to strike a careful balance of competitiveness and camaraderie. We all want great social lives, we all want to celebrate when we beat our basketball rivals, but most everyone wants entrance into the same internships, study abroad programs, and grad schools.

Though the economic forecasters on the nightly news seem rather abject when discussing our “recession,” we will truly graduate at a perfect time to enter the job market: as the Washington Post recently reported, my generation faces both incredible challenges and opportunities. We are relatively uniquely qualified, and despite a tremendous sense of entitlement, we are in an interesting position to deal with the changing economic landscape.

To get these job offers though, I’m supposed to be capable of doing everything, perfectly, without any more prompting than my own selflessness (or at least an ambitious self-interest). So far, I have refused to give in entirely to the game — I am attending a public university in part to keep costs down, I refused to worry and fret about my GPA and class rank, I only joined clubs because I was interested, not because they would look good on applications.

The times I have played the game, it has been on my own terms. I call my own hours on the project I’m interning with for the summer, I changed employment out of my own self-interest. The pressure, though, cannot simply be ignored, and it remains to be seen how effectively my generation will handle the strain.

 

Truly living off the grid

While I had heard of the “never-before-seen” tribe recently photographed on the Brazil-Peru border, I had not fully appreciated the images until I discovered Boston Globe’s The Big Picture, in which ‘news-worthy’ images are blown up to more striking and powerful sizes [Hat tip to Kottke].

Try as I might, I simply cannot imagine living in a totally isolated world. In Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond relates the story of the discovery of a tribe in Papua New Guinea in the early-twentieth century, in which, due to the dense jungle surrounding the community, members never knew that the world extended beyond their clearing. While I am not totally surprised that such “hold-outs” have lasted this long in modern times, I do believe that discovery of similar tribes is completely inevitable.

Whether they are encountered due to the clear-cutting of the rain forests to make room for corn fields or by conservation groups surveying the land, I fully expect that at some point in my life another incredibly isolated people-group will be exposed to the the surrounding world, literally shattering the reality they have understood for so many centuries. And no matter how we try and ‘preserve’ their culture and way of life, they will have eaten, willingly or not, from the Tree of Knowledge, and for them nothing will ever be the same*.

Interaction, of any sort, is hardly a simple question of right or wrong: from Bartoleme de Las Casas Tears of the Indians to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arguments over “spreading civilization,” colonialism, and imperialism are without end. People are expanding too quickly, globalization is becoming too powerful of a force; how we choose to deal with future contact with isolated tribes is a responsibility which weighs heavily on industrialized society, and one that must be considered with all the gravity we can muster.

I don’t know the answers. I wish I did.

*See the phenomenon of “cargo cults” for a fascinating example of the impact interaction with industrialized society can have on indigenous groups.

 

Predictions and Reality

In 1993, author Michael Crichton predicted the demise of mass media within a decade, claiming that traditional outlets would be “vanished, without a trace,” by 2002.

It took a bit longer than ten years, but his prognostication is finally coming to fruition, so sayeth Slate.  And based on my own readings and observations, I support his argument.

Yes, his proposition for a method which scans the Net and automatically assembles a front page filled with content tailored to the reader’s interests certainly sounds like an RSS feed reader.  Beyond predictions of technical development, however, his analysis of the problems facing American media THEN definitely reflects issues of NOW.

Poor product quality results, in part, from the American educational system, which graduates workers too poorly educated to generate high- quality information. In part, it is a problem of nearsighted management that encourages profits at the expense of quality. In part, it is a failure to respond to changing technology - particularly the computer-mediated technology known collectively as the Net. And in large part, it is a failure to recognize the changing needs of the audience.

Whether you read Thomas Friedman, who demands that the American education system change in order to prepare future workers for changing economic times, or agree with Jeff Widman’s call for “wall-able” content, there is no question that a burgeoning need for quality productions exists.  A simple list comprising examples of modern responses to Crichton’s article would be endless… everything from studies of the Entrenched Player’s Dilemma to Seth Godin’s argument that marketers should actually understand their audiences would fit perfectly.

I find it most interesting though, that while Crichton continues to expect the emergence of a high-quality news source, folks such as Robert Scoble keep calling for more noise.  Personally, I want that source Crichton dreams of, but I don’t expect it to go mainstream in the near future.  We like escapism too much, even (especially?) when it comes in the form of political coverage and current events.

No doubt though, mass media is becoming increasingly democratized… and it’s up to us to control the content, to choose to make a lot of noise or produce something of substance.

 

Making do with what you have

My parents and I went down to our condo over Memorial Day weekend, a break from reality which I desperately needed. My RSS reader was replaced by books I had been intending to read for months, I walked on the beach instead of commuting to work, and hours in a cubicle translated into hours in the sun. I’m a bit pinker for the experience, but the time off was necessary.

My family refers to the beach we visit as the “Redneck Riviera,” an old Southern coastal town where Confederate flags and oversized pick-up trucks absolutely coat the local ocean-front camping site. During the summer, however, families from across the nation come to this beach, looking to force “bonding time” by sitting out in the sand for days at a time. I have no idea if they leave happier or closer together, though they certainly return home a good deal redder than when they arrived…

While attempting to endure the elements and each other, the moms and dads out there provide all sorts of entertainment for their precious darlings, from toss games which make horseshoes pathetically outdated to setting up a full-size trampoline. Trying to take a walk while avoiding fishing poles and fire pit remnants oftentimes proves difficult enough, but the amount of junk that the kids have to play with is just completely over the top. Whatever happened to using a pail and a shovel to make castles? Or, better yet, using your hands until you’re so coated in sand that you actually have to get in the water (cold as it may be) to wash off?

One family, though, served as the pièce de résistance – at the end of the walk, completely disheartened about the future of a generation just a few years younger than myself, we found a group of children huddled together, playing some sort of game.

“Excellent!” I muttered, as I observed some buckets set up in a diamond-like structure. “Baseball on the beach… that’s some reliance.”

Then we drew closer, and I noticed that batter was swinging around a rusty horseshoe spike.

“Not too bad,” I thought, though I took a few steps to ensure that I was well outside the path of the metal rod.

And then the pitcher threw something which was definitely not a ball, which made a very distinct “Squish!” when it connected with the “bat.” And then I realized the kids were tossing around the carcass of an eviscerated sand shark.

And so the mutilated creature went flying, body one way, entrails another, and so the children cheered as the batter rounded the bases.

But they had found something to do, and they had managed to do so completely on their own.

 

Engendering Unexpected Behavior

I have never understood why, given my fascination with human behavior, I disliked Lord of the Flies as much as I did when I tried to read it a few years ago. Part of me thinks that I should try harder next time and make it just over the point of no return (more than half-way through), but I so thoroughly did not enjoy the book when I was fifteen that I feel hard-pressed to pick it back up.

Maybe I just prefer my tales of the collapse of behaviors we deem ‘civil’ and ’socially-acceptable’ to be of the non-fiction variety.

Though I have not had the opportunity to read the official report of The Stanford Prison Experiment — Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect — I studied the event quite thoroughly earlier this year while drafting an essay on restorative justice’s impact on juvenile behavior.  In a nutshell, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo took a twenty-four volunteers in 1971 and “imprisoned” half of them, giving the remaining twelve the authority of “prison guards.”  And from that point forth ran a terrifying and emotionally-traumatizing trial which exhibited just how easily man’s darker side can be brought to light.

I was reminded of The Stanford Prison Experiment while reading Eliezer Yudkowsky’s article pertaining to the 1954 Robbers Cave Experiment.  Though research study qua summer camp never thrust the young boys into authoritarian positions or allowed them to succumb to sadistic impulses, it provided groundbreaking insight into realistic conflict theory, serving as a microcosm in which group dynamics and power struggles played out as they would in any organized state.

Even as self-improvement material and management-style books become increasingly focused on maintaining an individual identity and enhanced independence, one cannot forget that day-to-day lives are still led as members of numerous large, hierarchical bodies.  Understanding interpersonal relations is key: while a network of successful people is a tremendous asset in career orientation, but one must first achieve affable relationships before they can expect anything more.

 

On Conflicts

As my courses wrap up for the year, I have been intensely reviewing my notes and textbooks in order to prepare for finals.  A bit of a social science buff, I took several history courses this semester, and while I have always enjoyed history, this has been the first time I have begun making the connections between major events, noticing trends, and actually applying what happened THEN to what is happening NOW — in other words, I finally began gaining more from school than potential Jeopardy answers.  I have no doubt that my time spent reading Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene (as well as numerous other blogs; my blogroll has some other great sites listed) has influenced my manner of thinking tremendously, so to them I must send my thanks.

So what, exactly, am I beginning to think?  Nothing is terribly innovative — in fact, I discuss many of these issues on a relatively regular basis; the difference now lies in that I am acknowledging there is really nothing new under the sun, but I am finally figuring out how to personally summarize and explain the trends that I read about and see for myself.

Changing times, flexibility, adaptability.  Such are themes I discuss time and time again here, but I would be remiss should I fail to note my generation is hardly the first to deal with such paradigm shifts in politics, business, communication, and social interactions.

Looking back through history, almost every major conflict (save for those fought over essential resources) has amounted to a struggle between liberal and conservative forces.  While liberals (considering a broad definition of the term) have agitated, revolted, and fought for reform, better representation, or some upset in the standing social order, conservatives (considering an equally broad definition of the term) have generally resisted, suppressed, and done all that they could to maintain the status quo.

For some revolutions, the general consensus of historians declares them necessary, something positive, something which advanced mankind: The American Revolution, the ascent of William of Orange to the throne in exchange for allowing for a Bill of Rights, states in Eastern Europe winning independence from the USSR in bloodless rebellions in 1989.

Other revolutions seem far darker, bloodier, and, whether corrupted from the inside or too easily put down by the conservative powers, futile in their own time: The French Revolution, or the Protestantism-inspired German peasant revolts of the early-1500s, in which Luther himself called for the bands of roving soldiers to be put down with force.

Individual successes or failures in their own time, however, amount to very little.  The simple fact that these conflicts do not cease if one fails matters far more; the French may have wound up with Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte by the end of their Revolution, but that did not stop the Revolutions of 1848 a half-century later.

Along with a myriad of other “inspirational” posters hanging in her classroom, my government teacher used to have a sign above her desk which read “Change in inevitable.  Growth is optional.”  Whether we like it or not, that saying is absolutely true.  The world of today exists as it does because at some point in history some liberal forces triumphed over more conservative powers and managed some meager reforms, temporarily disrupted the status quo.  Those ready to accept the shifts were the most flexible, the most ready to adapt, and they succeeded.

What are you doing to learn how to adapt and grow?