Why you can't be anything you want to be
sean-johnson.com
sean-johnson.com
The article's essence: "All you pesky, silly little humanities students, go do something useful like we CS people/engineers. No really. Build an app. Become an entrepeneur. Fail horribly, sleep on somebody's couch, oh wait. Have instant success. Become rich. Be the new Zuckerberg. Or work in a bar. Forever. Serving drinks to us. Silly, silly non-engineers."
We've had dozens of these articles recently, and they all garner the exact same responses, lots of people here (rather unsurprisingly) agree (→ know your market), some disagree, both camps supply their position by dabbling in dazzling amounts of anecdotal evidence. Voilá, HN front page + discussion in a nut shell...
Alternative reading: Y'all just need to learn to code, so you too can be instantly successful...
Bonus points: Guess which camp I belong to, bash me for my post solely because of this, ignoring the HN critique
Apart from that though, there aren't all that many "other" professions where you can "just" invent something new and go and become an entrepeneur just like that. They have a higher entry barrier, so I do think the article is very much about CS, dismissing everything else just outright from the onset.
The article didn't say to invent something. It said to produce value.
You can see lots of opportunities where that's possible by just going through any reasonably sized town. You may not be able to just start a refinery, but you can sell gas and/or repair cars.
The article doesn't advise learning to program to build an app so you can be useful like CS people.
His point is that you need to do something that others value. You need to adapt to the markets out there and learn how to sell rather than think you can go make a great living weaving baskets from bubblegum wrappers because that's "your passion".
For a given set of goals, I think that his advice is spot on. If I were to quibble with the article it's in the assumption that everyone has his goals.
Maybe I don't want to make a bunch of money. Maybe I'm happy barely getting by as long as I can play the pan flute to people wandering through the New Orleans French Quarter.
Then again, this is an article up-voted on HN, a site dedicated to entrepreneurs.
I am aware what HN is, what bothers me is the generalising tendency apparent here without actually being self-reflecting enough to also see that not everybody's world works like that. I find this to be observable in both the article and many comments.
So your point is that this article is way too entrepreneurial and HackerNewsy and you don't like that?
I don't understand the need to participate in a community based upon a set of ideas and then rail against them as though everyone else here made a mistake in the URL line of their browsers.
I love entrepreneurialism. I love startups and the startup culture. I love the idea that you can free yourself of the corporate world by adopting the right attitudes, honing the right skill sets, and working really hard. I feed off the energy of HN and enjoy reading articles about how people succeed, how they fail, and just what other entrepreneurs are up to.
I grant you that the article assumes some wants and the way some people work. However, I believe that the author is reacting to a very present "you can do whatever you want, little snowflake" theme in society.
In reality, I feel that there's a fine balance between finding something you love to do while adapting what you love to something that you can sell and market. But I don't criticize the author, his article, or HN for believing that the pendulum could use a big shift away from the snowflakes of the world.
You're right. I'm out.
I think his point is that the article is hiding a narrow-minded view of the world as general advice.
>I don't understand the need to participate in a community based upon a set of ideas and then rail against them as though everyone else here made a mistake in the URL line of their browsers.
I don't get the point of discussing things only with people who will exactly agree with you.
For reference, here are the article's points: > The market doesn’t care what you love > You must create value > You must be adaptable. > You must learn how to sell > You must be entrepreneurial
Clearly list your criticisms. The absurdity of your two comments is staggering.
This reminded me of Walden.
In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed- he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.
Thoreau goes on to say that he wove a basket of his own, but, rather than making it worth others' while to buy them, forgo the necessity of selling them altogether.
You don't have to throw every ounce of effort you have into your career and work harder than everyone else. But you do have to have skills someone wants and put in effort to build a career. How specialized those skills are and how much effort depends on what the job market is like and what your goals are. In any case, no one owes you a job -- but they might give you one if you can demonstrate that you can help them meet their goals.
Whether that's waiting tables or a low level professional job or a "rock star" developer or running your own business empire, those basic principles are still true. And there's nothing wrong with any of those as long as you're happy with the tradeoffs involved.
The rest of the article was insightful and not too techno-centric... he even points to a non-engineering discipline like nursing as a field with plenty of demand. If anything, the broad takeaway is "try to find something that's enjoyable AND has market demand, and then provide value to that market." He never says the market has to be tech/engineering.
You can tell it was written with no real material behind it, the guy doesn't even stick around to respond to the controversy it will create.
I bet it is possible to automate top HN articles like this one using the methods in http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
I mean, if you disagree with the premise that a job should provide value to your employer, then how do you think the job market is supposed to work? What's the opposite? Are you supposed to go find a Job Tree and wait for a Job to fall off so you can support a family?
Your summary has virtually nothing to do with the article's essence. Among other things, the article doesn't state or imply that engineering is superior to other disciplines. Instead, it speaks of creating value, a concept independent of field. Indeed, the author isn't even a programmer—he's a product developer and strategist, and his degree is in marketing (http://www.sean-johnson.com/about/).
Some of it also interacts with politics, and I'm not sure I accept all the premises. For example, from my current vantage point in Denmark, society does generally believe that you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare), even if not a great one. Then it becomes a question of what you wish to do above that, in both economic and non-economic senses. One presumably wishes to both earn more money than the absolute minimum, but also to contribute to society beyond the absolute minimum; the two desires may or may not be aligned, and there are many paths to doing either/both. In other countries (notably the USA), political views are different on that question. In my own personal opinion I do think it is, in part, "a moral or systematic failure on the part of society" that the situation in the USA is as it is, but that's sort of its own debate (I'm not really anti-market, as I feel they're useful and in any case inevitable, but I don't necessarily think that maket valuation is everything).
That and the OA "The market doesn’t care what you love" are why I'm very socialist very anti the attitude/mantra "free market solves everything!!!".
Markets should not dictate how our society operates. Society should not value efficiency and profit over all else. Society should provide everyone with minimum food/shelter/health/education and let them choose what else to do. Whether that's make assloads of money as investment banker or play drums at love ins.
... paid for by?
What it says is basically that for a BIG of 800 Euro (per month per person) in Germany there are only 20 billion Euro's missing (per year), that's nothing compared to e.g. what's currently spent for banks and other fancy things without blinking an eye (or in other words: our society is already working with such a high productivity that a BIG is already possible) The tax system (and social welfare system) needs to be changed completely, but the level of taxation will stay the same.
Despite superficial appearances, we are not rich enough to just let everyone do as they please. Efficiency and profit aren't "just" evil things, they are the lifeblood that allows people to do something other than work. You decry them, yet without them, you have no foundation to stand on to create the world you say you want. Be careful, lest you get what you are asking for.
It is the capitalist system that has created enough wealth to allow you to become detached enough from this reality to even begin to think these thoughts. It is a rare anomaly in human history, not our natural state of being.
We do have the resources to provide a basic life for everyone (exactly what happens in nordic countries as posted elsewhere). Most people will want to do something with their lifes instead of sitting around, simply because it's boring not to.
There's a long, long road between everyone having food & shelter to the whole humanity fucking around. This reductionism is absurd.
Empirical evidence is not in your favor. Staring at a TV is quite satisfying to a distressingly large fraction of society.
In Germany, according to the Federal Statistical Office (https://www.destatis.de), more hours are spent for unpaid work (100 billion hours) than for paid work (60 billion hours) (as of 2009). This gap seems to keep increasing.
Also in Germany, numerous (sorry, can't find a citation right now) polls showed that about 80% of the people still want (and will) work more or less fulltime with a BIG. Funny enough, also about 80% of the people think that with a BIG the _other_ people won't continue to do so and instead become (or are already) lazy.
Suffice to say, countries don't last when ever more people rely on relative fewer producers. Greece and Spain tried and went too far: they just ran out of other people's money. Much of Europe is heading the same direction. Every communist country grids to a halt, with socialists tending the same. There is a glorious time of high living on other people's efforts, but greed and weariness win out.
And then these workers will cease doing unpaid work (which e.g. encompasses stuff like running theater groups, looking after the elderlies, ...)? Of course they'll do, because now they have to work on underpaid jobs to 'prove their worth' to society and get enough food on the table for their families.
It is widespread thinking here in Germany that those on welfare are 'keeping the welfare coming in and acquiring luxuries; they don't seem particularly motivated to work'. It is 'supported' by numerous shows (for whom? for those on welfare?) on TV.
It is on the other hand clearly refuted by a huge range of studies from various disciplines (economics, social studies).
As far as I understand most essays/reports from 'rather neutral' (yes, difficult to get an unbiased view) institutions here in Germany usually tell the story that nowadays a small minority lives on people's efforts, and this minority is well above welfare level.
Is there any 'proof' for your starting sentence? (countries don't last when ever more people rely on relative fewer producers). After all, automation levels increase ever more, and thus productivity, too. E.g. the number of people working in farming has shrunken dramatically (at least in first world countries), yet we have overall more than enough to eat ('overall'!). The fact that any country runs out of money is not an argument: Did Spain's productivity suddenly (or maybe also slowly) fell to zero? Did the people in Spain suddenly all lose their ability to work and think?
The proof is obvious. If consumption exceeds production, necessities run out eventually. "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money." Of course Spain and Greece are more complex than this, but the short version is too many people rely on too few producers; it's not that productivity went to zero, it's that production minus consumption did. The USA is facing the same issue, and driving up hugely infeasible debts to forestall the inevitable.
The point of YCombinator is to work real hard on something clever and create a valuable business and reap the rewards; not motivating if those rewards are taken and given to those who do nothing for them.
"We"? Why should I work so you don't have to?
Seriously - why should I forgo a nicer car so someone else can "find themselves"?
Of course, that makes me "greedy".
Why? Why should an able-bodied person get free food, housing, and healthcare as a basic right?
Shouldn't an able-bodied person at least be required to have a job to obtain any of those things?
What possible societal benefit could such a policy have?
It is assumed that you get more focused, happier and more committed working people, because they can choose their work based on whatever motivation drives them. That could be money, curiosity, laziness, skill, chance etc. It is also assumed that people would be willing to take greater risks, since they can be sure they a) won't become homeless and b) won't starve.
If society provides a safety net for everyone, you don't have to build your own while trying to do all of the above work on top of creating a baseline of security.
Personally, all the people I know who inherited their money are useless and/or dysfunctional. I'm not saying that none find the motivation to do much with their lives after their needs are met... but to assume that enough of society is going to behave that way to change the way that society works seems to be wishful thinking.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/03/new-freakonomics-radi...
Selection bias. You're specifically selecting for people whose only money is money they inherited; failures, in other words.
There's a lot of children of rich people who are quite successful in their own right. Bill Gates, for example, did not come from a poor home. And the other thing you have to watch out for is reversion to the mean. It's unlikely Gates' children will outdo him.
So you don't know a lot of people who inherit then. That is probably because most of those people do not show off this money and you will never know.
You only see those that show of and why not to say it? what you want to see based on your prejudices.
I have known a lot of people who inherited, some of them are useless or dysfunctional, some of them are really resourceful and know how to make good use of his money. E.g the creator of "Zara" inherit a small clothing store: http://www.zara.com/
Now is one of the biggest in the world.
Half of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, physicist of all time came from wealthy families, so they could dedicate time for non-primary necessities, a luxury even today.
The hope is that it can be administered in a way such that it will not greatly harm incentives to be successful either, merely dampen the curve by some percentage: so there are still rich and poor people, but the rich people maybe will only be 20x as rich as the poor instead of 200x. It's still much better to be successful than to be on welfare, both in terms of prestige and social standing, and material comfort (you can think of it as an order-preserving nonlinear mapping). And there are some arguments that it may help economically in some cases: by raising the floor of what bad outcomes look like, it becomes more plausible for individuals who don't have a family safety net to take risks.
As for what possible societal benefit, the Scandinavian societies are fairly nice places to live, partly as a result, though making like-for-like comparisons in economics is notoriously difficult. They certainly have lower levels of severe poverty, crime, homelessness, etc. But there are many books arguing for and against these views, so I'm not sure I can convince you in a comment.
"And therefore there is no great loss if we remove fear of dying from the list of motivators to work."
It's unbelievable that our species is still debating whether or not "fear of dying" should be a motivator of everyday behavior at work.
Find the US city where you'll die if you don't have a job. This supposition is simply untrue.
While working solely to live longer and live decently doesn't have quite the same ring as working solely to avoid dying, the meaning of his statement seems clear.
Furthermore, homelessness and malnutrition also increase the death rate. There are lots of homeless and hungry people in the US.
So while you might not immediately die due to being unemployed, as there are a variety of safety nets, being without a job will, statistically decrease your expected lifespan. Food assistance does not prevent people from going hungry. Homeless shelters are packed to the brim, and in some cases quite unsafe. You can't get non-emergency care if you are unemployed and broke, at least until Obamacare kicks in (or if you are covered by Romneycare).
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Then, to make up for the fact that there was no reward incentive model, they had to bring in authoritarian force.
The most insightful criticism of communism that I've ever heard was from a bunch of Romanians I know who grew up in a country under control of the Soviets. When they hear Americans or other Westerners espousing pseudo-communism as a solution to society's problems, they get apoplectic. They can't even begin to grasp why a society that has discovered and nurtured capitalism would turn to empirically failed socioeconomic models.
Seriously, if you're going to want to stand on someone's shoulders to move society forward, why Karl Marx's?
Friedman wasn't a Basic Income proponent. He was a proponent of negative taxation. He was only interested in being consistent with the way we treat income tax and welfare. He felt that the welfare manager's job of determining exactly how to administer relief to recipients was something that couldn't be done properly. He preferred just giving cash based upon income levels on a sliding scale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
Given the abuse of the Welfare system over the half century since Friedman supported negative taxation, I don't doubt that he would have different views and controls for such a system were he alive today.
A lot of ideas sounded good 50 or 100 years ago that we have tried but have failed. It doesn't mean we should keep trying them.
The entire interview is online at:
"This argument has several problems. I’ll discuss two of them. The first problem with it is that BIG cannot be accurately characterized as something for nothing. All societies impose many rules on every individual. Consider the discussion of homelessness above. Why can’t homeless people build their own shelter and their own latrine? Why can’t they drink out of a clean river? Why can’t they hunt, gather, or plant and harvest their own food? They cannot do these things because the state has made rules saying they don’t have the right to do these things. The state has imposed rules saying that almost all the resources of the Earth belong to someone else. Those of us who benefit from the rules by which our society distributes ownership of the Earth’s natural resources benefit every day from the state’s interference with the propertyless, and we pay them no compensation. A state without BIG is the state that has something for nothing.
BIG is (and should be seen) not as something for nothing but as the just compensation for all the rules of property and property regulations society imposes on individuals."
Not the way that you assume, no. Huge strawman here.
Since we provide police protection to unemployed people, should that also mean we provide them ponies? What are the limits of this argument you're attempting to make regarding "providing unemployed people things for free since they get police protection"?
as a society grows wealthier, it could grow more humane
You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
You never answered the question about providing police protection. Instead you changed the subject.
Any system of decision making is arbitrary at some point. "Letting the market decide" is no different, it just absolves society from culpability of life outcomes. In many ways, it's not that different from people who claim things happen because of "God's will."
And one of the benefits of democratic government is that society gets to answer these questions. You can see the very different solutions countries like Denmark and the US have come to (and Denmark has done more for unemployed people than the US has without resorting to giving them ponies).
>You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
This is a straw man argument. There is incentive for people to get up and go work for a living. Denmark has an unemployment rate is 6%, and their welfare state is far, far more generous than that of the US. I would suggest your anger at unemployment benefits is misdirected.
This is part of the difficulty with the USA's current healthcare debate. It's simply impossible to offer to every person, every imaginable medical care. There are not sufficient resources.
So from a philosophical perspective, how can there exist a fundamental right that cannot be fulfilled?
And then from a practical perspective, someone is going to have to decide where to draw a line. Someone will have to decide who will be given what procedures. The effect of this is that, at the very least, our rights (and not just these new positive ones) will be tossed around like political volleyballs. And at the worst, it creates an explicitly class-ful society, where some people are granted privileges that are withheld from others (which is the universal outcome in all Communist nations thus far)
[1] "Positive rights" are those where we say that someone must be given something, as with food, shelter, or healthcare. "Negative rights" are when a person is guaranteed to be free of something, as with freedom of speech (government may not limit speech), freedom from double jeopardy, etc.
Consider, for example: a headache could be a symptom of brain tumor or other problem, the best diagnosis of which would be through an MRI. We'd like to catch these things as early as possible, so we'd like to do MRIs on everyone who is a possible victim. But imagine that every time a patient walks into the doctor's office with a headache, the doctor orders an MRI for him. How long do you think this practice can be sustained for?
The fact is that in a world with scarce resources, we must make decisions about how to allocate those resources. When the field of medical care is controlled by politicians, then politicians will be making those decisions. The questions over who is covered for what maladies with how much treatment becomes a political question.
So you can expect that maladies that cluster on easily-identifiable demographic groups will receive a disproportionate amount of funding. For example, one might expect that because gays may comprise a voting bloc and suffer from HIV more than others, politicians will pander to them for votes by allocating funds for HIV treatment that are out of proportion with the number of sufferers and the severity. By contrast, other maladies -- say, my Crohn's disease, which has weaker demographic ties -- are likely to be relatively overlooked.
And in the end, although the GOP is certainly using hyperbole in referring to "death panels", someone is going to have to make a decision at some point that treating this 90-year-old geezer just isn't going to have the ROI in terms of quality-life-years saved, and that it's not cost effective to continue treatment.
Anyway, my claim is that when the politicians can decide what and how much you're getting of something, it's difficult (in my mind, at least) to call something a "right". What other rights do we have for which the politicians get to make the decision about how much of that right each of us is entitled to?
And there is the problem. Someone has to make this judgment call. It's all a matter of opinion. And it changes over time, there's no single objective answer. Today, "take this Z-pack and keep the wound clean and dry" is a completely ordinary treatment; a century ago it was sci-fi, that wasn't even available to the hyper-rich. When does it cross the lines from experimental to esoteric to mundane?
by the way, many rights are regulated by laws created by politicians
That's only sort of true, at least in the USA. If something is understood to be a right, then those regulations are limited to only what can clear various tests as defined by the courts. Enumerated rights like speech, for example, are protected by a strict scrutiny test; at the other end of the spectrum is the rational basis test.
But in the end, these are actually judged by the courts. In other words, it's ultimately the non-political branch of the government that makes the call.
By contrast, these positive rights are entirely driven by political caprice.
(Caveat: I'm referring to Federal regulation here. It may vary somewhat state-to-state, because of how state Constitutions are designed.)
The parents of my generation (born in 1984) have babied and protected their children to a fault. Reality is not always pleasant and life isn't fair--instead of telling our kids they can be anything, we need to give them the tools to choose marketable and worthwhile careers. Unfortunately, we can't all be astronauts and veterinarians.
We need to stop pretending that there is one root cause to this problem. The real cause is the degradation in the quality of the American populace.
If only they'd worked 35% harder, the universities would have created physicist jobs for everyone. Yeah, that's how economics works!
You might want to go back to the part about "opportunities".
I wish we could FORCE all the incoming freshmen to read this essay. And read it again every semester.
Anyone who has this mentality is not following their dreams, they are following the crowd. Crowd-followers rarely do find success. That is what stood out to me in the article. The people who are being written about are not really doing what they want to do, they are doing what is expected of them (go to college and then get a good job).
I wonder if the results would be different if these people struck their own path?
To many faced with "you can be whatever you want" don't want to do anything; all they "want" is satisfaction of basic urges and amusements. Pressured to attend college or get a job, they perceive "do whatever you want" as picking a marginally satisfying term from a menu, and dutifully showing up for class and assuming a job will somehow follow.
Those who "do whatever you want" are going to do it regardless. I write software for a living because software is my life: I'm going to write software no matter what, I did it compulsively from an early age, and got good enough at it that someone wanted to pay me to do it. Michael Dell and Bill Gates and others dropped out of college because it got in their way of compulsively creating technology businesses. Eminem spends every spare moment writing lyrics, and if he has no paper he'll scrawl them on a wall.
"Be anything you want to be" only works for those who have a want, not for those who don't.
To many faced with "you can be whatever you want" don't want to do anything; all they "want" is satisfaction of basic urges and amusements.
I think you're articulating perfectly the "delusions" that those in the "me" generation have.
There's a big difference between "wanting" to be, say, a famous singer because you want adoring fans, and "wanting" to be a famous singer because you truly love music to your very core, will sacrifice anything short of your own life to do it, and because you really have a unique point of view to share.
But, even for those in the latter camp, they have to have at least some sensitivity to their audience, and the market forces that enable them to pursue their passion as a livelihood.
What people don't seem to understand is that passion and discipline are interlinked. Like any long-term relationship, your passions are going to have ups and downs, times where you don't want to push forward. Discipline and willpower are the only ways anyone can convert passion into marketable skill.
So yeah, you can do anything you want. You just have to be willing to be disciplined on top of being passionate.
Your comment is level-headed and insightful and it's a rehash of ancient understandings regarding the value and meaning of work and life. Passion, discipline, prudence temperance justice fortitude patience charity faith and hope.
These "link-bait" discussions were stale thousands of years ago. How very simple-minded the "smart" people here are, for all their delusions of high intellectualism.
Maybe if HNers took more humanities they wouldn't be so fascinated by these shallow articles.
It's not either/or. The best thing to do is find a career that is exciting or interesting to you in some ways, but also has a good bit of practicality.
In other words, we shouldn't be asking kids "what do you want to be when you grow up?" The question should be -- "What are the top five things you could see yourself doing?" Because of those 5 things maybe 4 of them are impractical, and maybe the lucrative one isn't the top choice, but it's up there.
If so, that certainly would be a lie, but that's not the message I hear being said and it's certainly not the message I like to send.
If your dream is, to take a recently topical example, to compete in the Olympics, do you really think you can get there just by sitting in front of the TV thinking "I want to be in the Olympics"? Yeah, you might wind up in the Olympics as an usher :-) But if you want to compete as an athlete, you're going to have to work your ass off. Is there really anyone who doesn't know this???
Or, let's take the teacher example. If you dream of being a great teacher who truly inspires students to learn, you can absolutely have that. Maybe it will take the usual form of teaching in a school, or maybe you'll do something different, like Sal Khan. Either way, if you aspire to be a great teacher and you do the work required to become that, you will be able to do that and get paid for it somehow. There may be too many ordinary teachers, but there are never enough great ones.
That's true in any area.
On the other hand, if all you aspire to is mediocrity, that's not a passion -- it's the absence of a passion. If the only thoughts you have about what you want to be are, "yeah, it would be nice to be X", then I absolutely agree with the author: you're unlikely to get that. But it doesn't mean you can't; it just means you won't.
Why pretend otherwise? Acknowledging it doesn't mean you and I can't do great things in life. It just means there are particular great things that we will never be able to do, and should not waste our time trying to do.
Olympic athletes are not super heros. There are the exceptions, but 95% of them are "normal" people who just work really hard. Maybe you can't be the greatest sprinter ever (who knows?) but you could make it to the olympics. The brazilian judo gold winner was just a very poor girl with a wish 4 years ago.
What Pistorius has done is redefine what disabled means. He's not actually disabled at all, he's superhuman, quite literally a cyborg. For the Olympics they slowed him down by reducing the springiness of his, err, springs, so the poor humans could keep up.
As for the others, you could train as hard as Phelps but guess what, it wasn't training that gave him his flipper-like feet or his extraordinary armspan.
And forget Phelps, Bolt, etc. They are one in a billion, and the greatest athletes of all time in their field. What about the other 99%? What's the excuse for them?
No, but I've met plenty that equate college degree in field that sounds interesting = qualified individual, good job. I used to be one of them. Only with experience do I realize how silly that was. I've also met plenty of friends / people who sling this around: "I got a CS degree; I wanted a programming job but no one would give me one. So now I do X." Many people dont want to seek out problems to solve, they just want checklists placed into their hands; when they don't get one, they falter. That is, imho, why the medical profession is so competitive - get into medical school, and you will be a 6-figure fully employed Physician. Just complete the curriculum.
idk, maybe education can't be entirely (or mostly) separated from on-the-job experience. Shadowing, Internships, etc. should (perhaps) be required for degrees in the first place?
I'd like to contest this. Overpaid and underpaid - by what standard?
The standard ought to be how much someone is willing to pay you for your goods or services (whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur).
I think this actually matches people's intuition a lot more than they realize.
Oftentimes, when it seems like someone intuitively ought to make more, it's actually because they are making significantly under what would be a true market rate, because their work is not actually being offered on a free market. Case in point: scientists and educators who work for the government.
He speaks of these things too early in his life and I cringe at noticing this fact, being 24 myself.
"You can be anything you want to be" is simply true, because notice how it says "can" and not "will".
"You can be anything you want to be" is an invitation to self-creation and to not shutting the door on any dreams.
When you peel away one layer of life's veils, the next awaits you. Blog authors in general have a hard time adapting their stance and tone to this truth.
I find it absurd that people think students expect to be handed jobs on a silver platter. Everyone accepts that the job market is difficult even if you are talented, and I don't think many truly expect a job just because they have a degree. Most everyone realizes that "following your dreams" is financially untenable.
The economy is complex enough to provide room in just about any field someone would want to enter--but there is no golden ticket piece of paper that will open the door for you. No one wants to grow up to put plastic on the end of shoelaces, but many are not adaptable so they try to beat a dead horse even though technology has supplanted their job (a bad move as you rightly point out).
My point being, don't swing too far in the direction of "Life sucks, deal with it!" because that's not quite true either.
I suspect the only people in their 30s who can honestly say they spent their entire 20s in full-time pursuit of a career in their passion and got nowhere are PhD graduates. This says more about PhDs and mistaken beliefs surrounding them than anything else.
I feel like I had more options for what to be (i.e. career) than I was aware of, it's just the "how" that was left out.
TLDR: Growing on your own is more fun and enriching than being dependent on others.
When something works, why take the risk? Especially if it involves money.
Even though I know a lot about basketball and have some skills, I can't make my basketball intelligence payoff for me in the NBA. I'm short and slow, while all the other players are tall and quick. My body is unfit for professional basketball, it reduces my intelligence, thus my ability to generate perceived value.
The NBA is an extreme (and tangible) example, but so is our current TI/Web industry. It requires a tricky mix of social/behavioral intelligence with technical intelligence that makes it very hard to the average professional to stand out. Maybe that's why there's so much frustration in the industry. People have the skills and the will to succeed, but something is always missing in their profile.
Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences"[1] may help us understand what's going on. Our industry prefers some types of intelligence because they seem to be more aligned with business success than others. Some people have developed this intelligence during their childhood and early adult lives, thus are more attractive to some job positions than others. If your predominant intelligence is "logical-mathematical"[2], chances are you will be very motivated to work/study with CS; and expect just the contrary if you are "Bodily-kinesthetic"[3].
Well, my two cents. Just bringing in a different perspective.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...
Taking on board what people have commented in this thread, I think it ought to be replaced with "insert your passion here". He has chosen entrepreneurship because that's his thing, but it seems to me idiosyncratic.
On the other hand, it's HARD to do stuff you dislike b/c your family depends on it. Why don't we give some attention to those people instead?
It feels relevant.
How numerous comments degenerated into capitalism vs socialism only further proves the original point.
Everybody wants something for nothing.
1. Job security
2. Job satisfaction
3. Good pay
I've never had a job that had all three, and it is really critical you avoid jobs that only give you one of these options.