It’s all relative

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there are people that don’t have to be working. Spouses, teens, and those past retirement age are just a few. While quitting a job may lower one’s absolute income, it can also raise one’s relative income. Absolute income is the ones and zeros on paper and relative income is the amount you actually have time to spend.

Consider this example:

Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2,000 for each of the 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1,000 for each of the 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income, John is four times richer.

If you can quit your job and still have income (other spouse, parents, pension, etc.), maybe you should. If you’re an individual, maybe you should take a lower paying job if it allows you to have a higher relative income.

In either case, the assumption is that your job isn’t fulfilling. Perhaps you took it because your parents made you, your spouse made you, or, often the case, you just don’t know what to do with your time.

The modern school, which was created in the Industrial Age, trains us to be task-doers. The teacher gives you homework, you do it. The teacher tells you to memorize  words, facts, or equations , you do it. Classrooms are organized in efficiently into columns and rows and there is only one foreman. Courses are taught to  standardized tests, like the SAT or APs, and performance is only measured by the results of these tests.Never mind that these tests only measure two of the seven intelligences (or eight or nine).

So it’s no surprise that we show up to jobs, even life, expecting tasks. We’re task rabbits. It’s how we’ve been conditioned.

But the world is changing. There is a Renaissance brewing on the web that is eradicating scholastic methods. Pioneers of the New Rich, like Tim Ferriss, are demonstrating that there are other paths. Autodidacts aren’t fringe, they’re cool.

If you’re in a position that’s unsatisfactory, change it. Explore other options. “Think,” said Dante, “that this day will never dawn again.”

Rethinking routines

When most people think of habits, they think of some repetitive action that needs to be broken. Why? Habits and routines are good, or at least they can be.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4HWW and once a neuroscience major at Princeton, “doesn’t  believe that it is possible to do more than 4 hours of good creative work per waking cycle.”

Let’s assume this presupposition to be true (and I believe that it is) and define what a habit is. A habit, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is a behavior pattern acquired by frequent repetition or physiological exposure that shows itself in regularity or increased facility of performance.

The importance of (good) habits is that they become involuntary and free your mind to use its four hours of creative power elsewhere. It would drain your creative reserves if every morning you had to think up a new breakfast, map out a new route to work, come up with a new workout regime, et cetera.

Routines are good. Just be sure they’re beneficial when establishing them. Use your creativity on something meaningful. Come up with a marketing strategy for your own personal brand, write a manifesto, or make a viral Youtube video. Do something.

Real learning

Edupunks are growing in number everyday. Their DIY approach is gaining traction as many realize that the current model of higher education is not scalable. OpenCourseWare, YouTubeEDU, iTunes U, Wikipedia, and Google are just a few of the resources used in the edupunk curriculum. I spent yesterday at a programming challenge put on by the University of Memphis. Coming from a “good” high school, it was interesting to see how other students had learned to program. Many used the sources that I just named. While he didn’t participate in the challenge, the most impressive guy there was a young African-American boy. He was very inquisitive and displayed a broad knowledge of various programming languages. He was remarkable because he’s in middle school. He told this at the end, along with how he had taught himself everything that he knew. It is a fallacy to believe that you will learn everything you need to at traditional institutions. The bulk of the learning in your life, regardless of the field, will be on your own time, outside of school.

Oh, and I won first place in the mobile category. I learned Java at school, but I learned Android on my own time.

Developing billion dollar systems

When Richard and Maurice McDonald started a little road-side burger joint in San Bernardino, CA in the 1940s, they didn’t do anything revolutionary. The White Castle hamburger chain had already implemented the protocols that would later become the basis for all modern fast-food restaurants.

Some fourteen years later, Ray Kroc came onto the scene and designed the system that has enabled McDonald’s to grow to more than 33,000 locations worldwide. Because of Kroc’s system, an entry-level position at McDonald’s can be had by the brightest or the most incompetent of persons. Why? Because it’s an incredible system.

Systems allow for vast amounts of people, resources, information, et cetera to be moved and managed. With the internet serving as a barrierless threshold, one only needs know how to design and implement such systems to make an impact, whether in his own life or society, in today’s increasingly interconnected world.

Not interdisciplinary, intercollegiate

An interdisciplinary studies program seeks to synthesize two or more institutionally separated programs e.g. computer science and philosophy. An interdisciplinary degree is custom and finely tuned based on an individual’s preferences. The student (customer) wins by studying what he wants.

In the age of mass customization, why not have an intercollegiate degree? Why can’t I study marketing at Penn, computer science at Stanford, and philosophy at Yale? After all, a bachelor’s degree is just a collection of 130 credits. A diploma is just for potential employers’ sakes. Technology such as OpenCourseWare is making the lectures, quizzes, and tests of world-class professors available to the masses for free.

I believe that higher education is moving towards a hybrid model that incorporates both traditional class time and online learning. Some have already started. Imagine an underprivileged student that attends community college being able to access the same material as Ivy-League students. The orthodox model of college is then flipped on its head. Learning takes place offline and reinforcement/correction takes place in the classroom. That’s fairer. That’s American.

We just have to figure out accreditation. Then an intercollegiate degree will be possible. Then the student wins.

What Google can’t find

Success.

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent developing the complex algorithms that power the search behemoth, but that fact doesn’t help you one bit.

Today’s school system is built upon the Industrial Age tenets of efficiency and speed. It’s exponentially more efficient and more faster to Google an unknown term, concept, or person than it is to ask a teacher or crack open a book. The problem is retention, or lack thereof. Link leads to link and before you know it you’re watching “Charlie bit my finger” on Youtube. Even if you don’t “stumble upon” unrelated pages, you probably won’t remember four days later what it is that you looked up.

That’s why a strong liberal arts education is more important than ever. Developing strong reading, writing, and critical analysis skills now will separate you later from those that just Googled their way through school. Like Allan Eagle, who works in executive communications at Google, said, “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

Why Every High School Student Needs To Blog

1. It improves your writing. Since I started blogging last year, my writings, whether relating to business, school, or personal matters, have become more succinct.
2. You leave a digital footprint. A personal brand is more important than ever in today’s increasingly-interconnected economy.
3. You learn how to synthesize material.
4. It polarizes you. Your ideology starts to take a concrete form. Sharp, opinionated people are infinitely more interesting than “well-rounded” individuals, which the school system aims to mass-produce.
5. You meet interesting people. There’s more out there than just what’s in your 30-mile radius.
6. It looks good on college applications and résumés. There are tens of thousands of club presidents, honor roll students, and other commonly-awarded titles on applications. But there are only a few bloggers.
7. You learn how to argue with tact.
8. You increase your repertoire of conversational subjects.
9. You might learn a little marketing. 

You have a voice, you have a platform (the Internet), and you have a list of nine benefits. So get to hashing out some thoughts.

Simple. Concise.

I’m finally transitioning from MuseShark, a loaded, Tim Ferriss-style blog, to something simpler. Something more personal. Although MuseShark was a lot of fun and a breeding ground for my writing over the last year, I’m letting it die. The honeymoon is over and I’m no longer connected  to it, which by its title sounds like some kind of how-to site. This is my new home.