Graduating from the Artificial Bubble

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College classes are an artificial bubble. Students emerge from that bubble upon graduation—often without realizing it. After a few months, they feel frustrated at not making progress. 

In college, they had clear tasks, clear deadlines, and a clear payoff—grades and new classes. That’s all gone outside of academia. As new employees, graduates are likely to start at the bottom of the ladder, be assigned tasks lacking clear instructions, and produce inferior work. 

Here’s the good news: Knowing this is coming will blunt the repetitive grind. Knowing this depressing condition is only for a time will make it easier to keep going. By letting go of former expectations, graduates can fully embrace the new way of life.

Stephen Goforth

Poison to the Soul

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What a strange thing bitterness is! It breaks in on us when we need it least, when we’re down and in desperate need of all our freedom, ability, and energy to get back up. And what strange things bitterness can do to us. It slowly sets, like a permanent plaster cast, perhaps protecting the wearer from further pain but ultimately holding the sufferer rigid in frozen animation. Feelings and responses have turned to concrete. Bitterness is paralysis.

A young man, falsely accused, condemned and penalized by his high school principal, turns sullen, angry, bitter. His faith in all justice and authority dies. He will not forgive.

A girl, betrayed by a fellow she trusted, is forced, becomes pregnant, then turns bitter and withdrawn. Her faith in all humanity ends. She cannot forgive.

A woman, deserted by her husband, left to be both mother and father to their two sons, turns angry at life- at the whole universe. Her faith in God and everything good has ended. She did not forgive.

Bitterness is such a potent paralysis of mind, soul and spirit that it can freeze our reason, emotions and all our responses.

David Augsburger, The Freedom of Forgiveness

Success may be sweeter, but failure is the better

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Failure is a better teacher than success. I know of nobody who hasn’t had a string of failures before their success. What kind of people go out and the first thing out of the shoot is a success and they continue on successfully. I never met anyone like that. 

Uninterrupted success is less satisfying than success intertwined with failure.  

A University of Colorado study drew data from satellite launches and space shuttles and concluded that success may be sweeter, but failure is the better teacher. 

There’s a tendency for organizations to ignore failure or to try not to focus on it. There are vital lessons for the future overlooked in the rush to put on a brave face, to cover the disappointment. In the adult world, we are success-crazed. We tolerate diversity better but we don’t tolerate failure. There is a big social stigma attached to failure that causes people who have failed to go into denial. 

Most people have either come up the hard way or had to overcome periods of chronic self-doubt. You’ve heard the life stories: JK Rowlings’ mountain of rejection slips and Churchill was miserable in school. Could any of them have achieved the success they did if their lives had been an effortless progression from triumph to triumph.  

American physician and broadcaster Dean Edel 

19 Articles about Getting the Most out of LinkedIn

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The Illusion

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Self-evaluation involves interpretation. We’re all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella.

Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments. Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves – to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Activity is not Accomplishment

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John Henry Fabre, the great French naturalist, conducted a most unusual experiment with some Processionary Caterpillars. These caterpillars blindly follow the one in front of them. Hence, the name. Fabre carefully arranged them in a circle around the rim of a flower pot. So that the lead caterpillar actually touched the last one., making a complete circle. In the center of the flower pot he put pine needles, which is food for the Processionary Caterpillar. The caterpillars started around this circular flower pot. Around and around they went, hour after hour, day after day, night after night. For seven full days and seven full nights they went around the flower pot. Finally, they dropped dead of starvation and exhaustion. With an abundance of food less that six inches away, they literally started to death, because they confused activity with accomplishment. 

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

The Next Small Victory

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In training camps, we don’t focus on the ultimate goal — getting to the Super Bowl. We establish a clear set of goals that are within immediate reach. 

When we start acting in ways that fulfill these goals, I make sure everybody knows it. I accentuate the positive at every possible opportunity, and at the same time I emphasize the next goal that we need to fulfill. 

When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. 

Former NFL coach Bill Parcells in the Harvard Business Review

The Reverse Bucket List

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Many self-help guides suggest making a bucket list on your birthday, so as to reinforce your worldly aspirations. Making a list of the things you want is temporarily satisfying, because it stimulates dopamine. But it creates attachments, which in turn create dissatisfaction as they grow.

I’ve instead begun to compile a “reverse bucket list,” to make the ideas in this essay workable in my life. Each year on my birthday, I list my wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas Aquinas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I would actually hate and never choose, like a sailboat or a vacation house. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, most of which—I’m embarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work.

Then I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace, living a life of purpose and meaning. I make another list of the forces that would bring me this happiness: my faith, my family, my friendships, the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.

Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

Our strong intuitions about happiness are wrong

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Our minds lie to us. We have strong intuitions about the things that will make us happy, and we use those intuitions to go after that stuff, whether it’s more money or changing circumstances or buying the new iPhone. But a lot of those intuitions, the science shows are not exactly right — or are deeply misguided. That’s why we get it wrong. I know this stuff, but my instincts are totally wrong. After a busy day, I want to sit and watch crappy Netflix TV shows, even though I know the data suggests that if I worked out or called a friend I’d be happier. But to do that I have to fight my intuition. We need help with that, and you don’t get it naturally, especially in the modern day. 

We’re fighting cultural forces that are telling us, “You’re not happy enough; happiness could just be around the corner.” Part of it’s all the information out there about happiness, which can be hard to sift through, but a lot of it is a deeper thing in our culture that seems to be leading us astray.

Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, quoted in the New York Times

Let their words fall to the ground

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If I start insulting you in another language you feel nothing. The words don't mean anything to you because it’s you who has to put the meaning into it. I know what it means but it doesn’t matter. Take their words, take away the value of their words and drop them to the floor. If you take that away they fall to the ground. They never get to touch you. They are nothing. 

Salma Hayek

The Ultimate Adventure

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Time spent in the neutral zone is an opportunity for inner reorientation. There’s no time limit on your stay and no certainty of what the “goal” is while you remain there. More than a readjustment to the “new you,” it’s where the real business of transitions takes place. Most people don’t recognize it for what it is but will look back later and see there was significant transformation taking place. It is a time of greater sense of self and lesser sense of what’s going on around us, what all the circumstances mean. We become more acutely aware of what’s going on the inside more than on the outside.

Even Jesus needed a retreat into the desert to gain a sense of who he was – and thus, what he was here to do. It is in these “moments of discovery” that we are mostly likely find God because we are "open" in a way we are not when caught up in every day life.

It starts with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in. Some people never fully let go of those ill-fitting parts or else run back to these broken connections. May it never be said of us that we failed to meet this challenge. Here's to transitions that take us into uncharted waters without a map. This is the ultimate adventure.

Stephen Goforth (born April 24)

Experiencing Flow

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Instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth, passive entertainment leads nowhere.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

The value of soft skills

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A soft skill enables you to interact well with others. It’s nontechnical and typically falls into categories such as communication and negotiation, adaptability and learning, teaching and training, and interpersonal abilities, including empathy. For organizations, developing and rewarding soft skills is becoming all the more crucial in our ever-automated world. Machines are getting smarter, and as they take over more basic, repetitive, and even physical tasks, the need for workers with social, emotional, and technological skills will be higher than ever.

McKinsey & Company

Learning about Making Infographics

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Taking Pride in Doing Evil

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She was very much ashamed of being in jail—but of being a prostitute, not at all. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased with herself and proud of her position. Yet, how could it be otherwise?

No man can play an active part in the world unless he believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever position a man may hold, he is certain to take that view of human life in general which will make his own activity seem important and good.

It is generally supposed that a thief, a murderer, a spy or a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. In point of fact, the case is precisely the reverse. Men who have been placed by fate and their own mistakes (or sins) in a certain position, however false, always adopt a view of life which makes their place in it good an appropriate.

To maintain this idea, men instinctively mix only with those who accept their view of life and of their place in it. This surprises us when thieves boast of their adroitness, prostitutes flaunt their shame, murderers gloat over their cruelty.

We are surprised, however, only because the circle, the sphere, of these men is limited, and principally because we are outside it; but does not the same state of things exist among the rich – who boast of their wealth, i.e., of robbery; the generals—who boast of their victories, i.e., of murder; the rulers—who boast of their power, i.e., of violence?

We do not recognize their ideas of life and of good and evil as perverted, only because the circle of men holding these perverted ideas is wider and because we belong to it ourselves.

Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection