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More Like It Was

Seth picks up the “future-of-(higher)-education” ball and runs with it in this post, which goes down nicely with this post.  I really think we’re approaching a big moment in the evolution of the American education system – and it’s more of a reversion than a progression of what’s already happening.

For my parents’ generation – as I’m reminded so often – degrees weren’t necessary for success in most fields.  Employers cared about whether you could do the job, not whether you went to the right school and studied the right major; if you seemed competent, you’d get a shot.  Then, as the industrial sector shrank and specialized office work grew, making the world more complicated and employee qualifications harder to suss out, employers started looking more to academic credentials as proxies for intelligence and competence.  And as a consequence, lots of Baby Boomers who never pursued higher education collided with the glass ceiling.

But it now seems like things are reverting, or at least becoming something that more closely resembles the old meritocracy than the credentialism that has dominated the last few decades.  Employers seem to finally be picking up on the disconnect between degrees and practical skills.  And just as there was a large portion of the Baby Boomer population that collided with the glass ceiling when employers shifted focus from merit to credentialing, so too will a large number of my peers when faced with employers more interested in what you can do than the name on your college education receipt (diploma).  Change always yields creative destruction in one form or another, and this will be no different.  I’m excited to see the creativity that will inevitably come of it.

So What

“My photos suck.”  “My blog posts are boring and obvious.”  “My short stories are trash.”  “I can’t dribble for love or money and my jump shot’s no better.”

So what.

If the rent check’s not riding on it, “I’m not good enough” is never an excuse for not doing something.  Do what you want anyway.  That you want to is reason enough.

Critics

Two types of people are called critics.  Only one deserves the title.

The first type offers insult without substance.  She’s the faceless heckler up in the nosebleeds telling you how much you suck.  This person is not a critic, she’s a troll, and can and should be ignored.

The second type of person, a true critic, offers specific insights into where a creator came up short in either design or execution.  This is a valuable service, though not nearly as enjoyable to be on the receiving end of as a massage or a haircut.  A thoughtful, erudite critic can help a creator identify and shore up weaknesses and produce better work.  For this, creators and fans alike should thank the critic; like the law, he should be loved a little.

Dismissing trolls is vital.  Doing the same to all critics is hubris.

Excuses vs. Explanations

There’s a difference between excuses and explanations.  It’s a fine one, often ignored in anger or washed away in obfuscation, but it’s there.

An excuse involves something that could have been accounted for with commonsense prior proper planning.  It’s a post hoc rationalization for laziness or sloppiness.  Excuses tend to piss people off, and rightfully so.

Explanations, on the other hand, involve circumstances that no reasonable amount of foresight or planning could have helped.  Explanations are rooted in the unavoidable, in the reality that humans have great but still limited control over our environments and the workings of cause and effect around us.  No good can come from finding fault with a person offering a legitimate explanation.

A good leader therefore punishes excuses, accepts explanations, and knows the difference between the two.  A person who doesn’t see a distinction is a tyrant.

The Holy Grail

Generalizing from me and people I know, the preeminent challenges in the lives of educated financially-stable folks are (1) finding sustainable true love, and (2) finding meaningful work.  Which of these predominates depends on the individual and what stage of life he or she is in.

As far as problems go, these are relatively “good” ones.  But they are problems nonetheless.  And solving them both – that is, finding meaningful work that allows one enough time to find, cultivate, and nurture a sustainable true love – is the First World Holy Grail.

I won’t sit here and say that I’m even close to having the path to the Holy Grail mapped out.  I don’t have the age or the track record to credibly make that claim.  But I do think I’ve figured out a few angles that make getting to the Grail more likely than if one were to just charge blindly into the hills after it.  Here are some of them:

• Learn and accept yourself.  And then be willing to share that self.  This is ~50% of the battle.

• Do it on the merits.  Nuff said on this one.

• Keep a loose grip.  On your goals.  On your ideas of who you are, who you’re supposed to be, and how life should work out.  On everything but your integrity.

• Acknowledge and accept tradeoffs.  Having it all is a crock.  Time and energy are finite resources, and devoting yourself to one thing means neglecting something else.  Figure out your values and priorities so that you can budget yourself accordingly.

• Take calculated risks.  Sometimes to get where you want to go you have to jump over a cliff.  Do it.  Just make sure you do the math on the distance and wind resistance and how fast you need to go and all that stuff first.

• Be process- rather than outcome-oriented.  If you enjoy and find value in the work itself, whether you achieve the desired result matters much less, which helps you keep going in the face of failure.  And speaking of failure…

• Use it.  Figure out what you did wrong.  Figure out how to correct it for next time.  Then move on to next time.

• Listen to Max.  He won’t steer you wrong.

Given the number of self-referential links in this post, I guess I’ve stumbled upon what this blog is about: the pursuit of the Holy Grail.

Or, to put it in more familiar, less-Dan Brownish terms, the Pursuit of Happiness.

Happiness as the Holy Grail.  Sounds about right to me.

Everything and Nothing

What you do in life means everything and nothing.

It means everything because as far as we know you only get one life.  That’s it, one bite at the apple and you’re done.  So if you waste it, and you don’t do what you want, you’ll never get a chance to do it again once your time is up.

But on the flip side, what you do in life means nothing because, to paraphrase Hugh’s landlord, one day you’ll be dead and none of this will matter.  That time you peed your pants in 5^th grade, or you won the state championship, or you bombed a test, or you got that promotion, or your business failed, none of it will matter because you’ll be gone.  And eventually so will everyone else who remembers that stuff too.  And then you’ll really be gone.

So don’t let your personal myth delude you into inaction.  Don’t waste days and months and years capitulating to fear and doubt.  Very little damage done in life is irreparable, few paths are true dead ends, and nobody is that interested in what you’re doing.  Nobody will remember your big flop or your grand embarrassment in fewer years than you’d probably care to think about.  The only person your time here really matters to is you because we know for a fact that you will run out of it.  Don’t let that happen before you get what you want out of this place.

What Could Have Been But Never Will

In one of my all-time favorite essays, cartoonist Tim Kreider names and examines The Referendum: the “phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.”

Drawing on personal experience, Kreider explores in precise, poignant prose the cross-cutting tensions (internal and otherwise) and melancholy that comes with trying to figure out if the grass on the other side really is greener, and if so how much.  A few money quotes:

“Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.”

“Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.”

“Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.”

It’s a fantastic piece and well-worth saving and coming back to periodically.  This is especially true for most of the people reading this blog, as I think that The Referendum tends to come well-before midlife among educated big-coastal-city types by dint of constant exposure to diverse lifestyles and opportunities.

Note that The Referendum is a direct manifestation of the Kundera Principle, and when properly sublimated becomes the basis for much great art.

The New Schoolhouse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what an ideal American education system would look like.  I’m not alone on that.  People are questioning our current system’s value at all its levels, from elementary school through higher ed.  Given the sea change that’s happening in the American economy right now – globalization, recession, etc. – this makes sense; if the way the world does business is changing, it stands to reason that we’re going to have to change the way we educate our citizens if we’re going to stay competitive.

With that in mind, here are a few off-the-top-of-my-head improvements that I think would do us some good:

• Start teaching kids informal logic in middle school.  Add in statistics in high school and emphasize that math over the more-complex-but-less-practical maths that don’t make sense for kids who won’t use it later.  The idea is to make sure that young adults can navigate the 21st-century data deluge and reason between conflicting arguments by the time they leave high school.  We want people to be able to think critically and synthesize and manipulate ideas and spot weak points and nuance.  Being able to do these things is critical to being an informed and engaged citizen in a modern society, which is what every educational system should aspire to produce.
• Beef up old-school home economics and make it mandatory for high schoolers.  Courses should include personal finance and light micro- and macroeconomics.  There’s no reason kids should be taking advanced calculus but graduating without knowing how credit cards work or why interest rates matter.
• Make vocational training (at the high school level and beyond) a viable and attractive alternative to standard college-preparatory curricula.  College isn’t for everybody, and there are plenty of jobs that can’t be outsourced: mechanics, chefs, nurses, plumbers, etc.  These are all good jobs that need doing.  The danger here is tracking kids into these programs based not on interest and ability, but on socioeconomic status or behavioral history.  More and better trade schools will obviously cost money – public/private partnerships with big companies that need skilled workers?  That dovetails nicely into…
• Practical learning – internships, apprenticeships – should be an integrated part of the curriculum starting in high school: just a small part starting as juniors in high school, gradually increasing in proportion to classroom time until senior year of college or vocational school, when class time is basically nil.  A student’s first taste of the “real world” shouldn’t come after graduation.  Plus the work experience will help kids decide what majors are worth the money/time investment.
• On that same note, high schools and colleges should look to incorporate more project-based group work into the curriculum in preference to rote learning and test-time regurgitation.  Emphasize leadership and entrepreneurial skills.  There’s not much demand in the market for memorizing trivia, but leadership, initiative, and creativity are always in short supply.  And luckily these are digitally transferable.  Which is why…
• Universities should encourage people to pursue online degrees.  Though these were once the object of much mockery, there’s no reason online higher education can’t be viable for most majors.  Online courses allow people to get quality instruction for a fraction of the cost of going away to school, while conferencing tools allow for the interactivity that might otherwise be lacking.  Plus then schools could downgrade on physical real estate, keeping only those buildings necessary for practical application learning (labs, libraries, smaller classrooms for group work).  Win-wins all around.
• And last but certainly not least, that popular refrain: more math and science.  But don’t gut the arts, though.  That’s not cool.

Notice that I’m cherry picking here.  That’s the blogger’s pleasure: I can pick and choose what I want to deal with and leave the heavy lifting – charter schools, interdistrict school choice, funding – to the wonks.  Let’s hope they’re not so persnickety.  And more competent.

So what about you?  What measures do you think would improve the American education system?

Hat tip to all the friends I’ve discussed this stuff with over the years, and to the education policy tank I worked at for part of a summer and quit.

Shawshanking Your Great Escape

Many a working stiff dreams of a Great Escape – a way out of the daily grind and into the life he or she spends all day fantasizing and surreptitiously Googling about. But how does one bridge the gap between daydreams and reality? As in all things substantive, Shawshank has the answer.

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Sodomy, institutional cruelty, male bonding (unrelated to sodomy), good works, and throat-lump-inducing-old-man-suicides ensue. I refuse to give any more exposition than that because you should have seen Shawshank by now. Which is why I won’t bother with a spoiler alert before telling you that Andy escapes in the end.

And what a glorious escape it is. See, Andy had an Evil Plan. Over the course of two decades, Andy tunnels his way through his cell wall using only a tiny rock hammer. He deposits the debris from his labors in the prison yard every day and hides the hole in his wall behind posters. Using his plum position in the warden’s office, he steals bank account numbers and clothes and everything else he’ll need on the outside. When the time finally comes, Andy doesn’t hesitate – he does exactly as he’s planned, climbs through his tunnel and 500 yards of human waste and finds himself celebrating his freedom under a roaring stormy sky. Behold.

Andy’s escape is informative. Learn from him in planning your own.

1. Andy had a plan. Don’t just sell everything and head out West with the idea that you’ll figure it out when you get there. Winging it in 21st-century America is not the move.  While you’ve got the security of your current job you should be doing as much homework as you can on the career you want to move into: who the players are, how they’ve gotten where they are, how people make money doing what you want to do, all that nitty-gritty stuff. Do as much work in the field as you can squeeze into your schedule to develop the skill set that will let you hit the ground running when you make the transition. If that means doing it for free (which it very well might), then so be it. And you need to network in your soon-to-be-new field. And get your money up. The point here is to have as much infrastructure in place as possible before you make the jump to minimize transition friction.

2. Andy was patient. Andy waited twenty years to make a break for it. Twenty years of hard time. Twenty. Years. Why? Because he wanted to get it right. He knew he only had once chance to get away so he took his time and put all the pieces in place so that when it came time for the actual escape all he had to do was follow through. If fictional Andy Dufresne can do twenty years in a sweaty fictional jail, patiently executing his Evil Plan, then you can handle a few months more of filling out TPS reports for Bill Lumbergh while you get some practice doing whatever your thing is. Because you don’t want to go out half-cocked and end up having to crawl back to the hamster wheel. That’s just soul-crushing. Be patient, do it right the first time, and then never again.

3. Andy was willing to get dirty. The man climbed through 500 yards of convict poop. You ever seen convict poop? All the bad cafeteria food those guys eat? Turds like muddy roadkill. I draw that simile to illustrate for you that, even with the infrastructure in place, things will probably be hard. If you’re starting a business or going back to school or carving some other new life path for yourself, it will be disruptive and difficult in ways both imagined and unforeseeable. You will have to work hard, you will have to adjust your lifestyle, and you might fail a few times. Expect to be surprised. And when you are, stay the course. You planned for it. You prepared for it. Now live it. Find the fortitude to live it. Because the truth is that what often separates the winners from the washouts is nothing more than pain threshold – who’s willing to crawl through the smelliest poop the longest.

I won’t promise you’ll get to Zihuatanejo. You can do everything right and still fall flat on your face. But if you plan well and crawl long enough, even if you do fall flat you might stand up and realize you like where you ended up.