"It’s not really the nice guys that get the girl, but the sweet ones"
Just some random person that passed out in my room
"It’s not really the nice guys that get the girl, but the sweet ones"
Just some random person that passed out in my room
“Those were the experiences we went through in shaping how we saw each other. If you’re not put under an environment to care or demonstrate compassion or empathy towards others, you would not develop your way even though it’s a forced environment. It fosters a relationship that you thought could only build over time. It’s a huge acceleration process where it’s feasible and reasonable. Ultimately, it creates the journey that all friends go through.”
And that’s why I believe you should be PS. I tell you this all the time, but I love you, truly.
Someone stated that they have too big of an ego.
Knowing them for quite a while, I observed the person doesn’t take many risks. The person fails to take chances or just show up.
I realized that the number one thing that is good at destroying your ego is embarrassing yourself. You know, those moments where you feel scarred for life. Those regrets destroy the ego, make you more resilient, and allow you to fail faster and thus learn faster. You iterate much faster which allows you to better adapt to a situation.
I fucking hate those things about “calculated risks” and “failing fast” even though I mentioned it. Most of the time, I hear people spew that shit without putting the context behind it.
To eliminate that fear of speaking up, to eliminate that fear of failure, you must confront the uncertainty that you can and possibly will fail, embarrass yourself, look like a dumbass and lose something from it. However, people fail to realize that what you lose is actually less than what you expected. It’s not really Armageddon if you fuck up something too bad. And you probably have never tried to fuck up something too much.
I fucked up plenty of times. And I realized that I paid a humongous price for the lessons that I learned:
$1500 Freshman Year
$6000+2200 More Sophomore Year
$1200 Junior Year
Those things were priced pretty high. Given my situation, it nearly took me everything. If I lost $50-100, I probably wouldn’t have learned so much. It’s those tremendous losses that really motivate you to do better. Not those victories. Those awards and stuff that other people besides yourself acclaim so much fade. But those regrets, those things that you can’t really erase, those are the best things that can happen for you. Embrace them because they make who you are and strengthen your character even if you don’t know its effect yet.
However, I’m conflicted. Ever since I made the mistakes, I become more conservative. More risk averse. I miss out on opportunities that are worthwhile because I was so afraid of a past experience.
I think that’s the other side of regret. You must really get past it, realize it’s the past and that it’s not affecting you now that you should take the gamble.
I don’t know the answer yet.
Yay high school all over again!
Staying at home. Having a curfew. Waking up before 6. Going to work at 7. Coming home. Eating dinner. Studying for GRE. Makes my day.
And I’m pretty content with it actually. No high expectations for anything.
Focusing on 4 things:
1. Job
2. GRE
3. Life
4. Yu-gi-oh
Though it’s more like…
1. Yu-gi-oh
2. Life
3. Job
4. GRE
Priorities are misaligned. What do I do?
When we look into people’s eyes, focus and think about it, we often times see projections of ourselves within them. We paint their manifestations with our own perceptions of them, both negative and positive. And it’s interesting that we view people in such a way, because each person is a reflection of ourselves, not our bodies but our thoughts and insecurities. When Sartre mentioned that in the character that “Hell is other people”, he is not saying that as truth. We create our own hells and use other people around us as agents. It is our own selves to create the hell and it is our own selves to take it apart. It is us and us alone. No one else.
Something that pisses me off about has been my desire to seek out things that are comfortable, riskless, and prestigious. Has it ever occurred to you that it’s the people before you that contributed to that? And has it ever occurred to you that you have as much stake and even more responsibility now to perpetuate that lasting tradition instead of just riding on it?
We value things based on such criteria instead of seeing how much we can learn and help transform it ourselves. Maybe I’m just irrational, but I enjoy things that are broken, imperfect, and unworthy. I enjoy solving it, patching it, and resuscitating it. In a sense, I want to save it. I won’t let it die. I won’t let the others prove me wrong. I want to prove myself right.
You would like to figure out the approximate probability that there are no jackpot winners for the Mega Millions. On March 27, 2012 4,715,569 tickets from the total pool of tickets were winners. Approximately 1 out of 40 randomly chosen tickets are winners. Therefore we can approximate that 40 *…
By: Keenan Cummings
Beaker Magazine, March 19, 2012I was an agency-trained, senior-level, print/branding designer and left to work at a startup. Here’s why:
-1- I want my work to feel valuable.
It seems the higher up the institutional chain you climb, the more abstract the value you generate, and the more you are worth. The roles become so far removed from the end goals they are managing, and you have to wonder how long you can stay focused on what matters — making peoples lives better.
“The vast majority of the wealthiest people I’ve met are far more about building value for themselves than they are about creating value for anyone or anything beyond themselves.” (Are You a Role Model, HBR)
But this doesn’t add up in the startup world, mostly because there is not time nor room in the equation for anyone that doesn’t directly affect the outcomes of pursuing whatever the goals may be.
In a startup, value is a concrete measure of your contribution. I enjoy the clarity and trepidation that brings to the work. Things can fail, and the onus is on the person or team that failed to solve the problem correctly. (No blaming ‘bad’ clients!) Likewise, the triumphs are deeply felt because of the intimate relationship you have with the possibility of failure.
-2- I want to stop talking about good work and start making good work.
Startups are notoriously biased toward action — it’s a survival tactic in a competitive field.
I’ve spent a lot of time on research and development, writing pages of airy ‘positioning statements’ and the like. It often felt like intellectual glut that gummed up the process. “Research & Development” feels valuable, but I’ve found that it rarely delivers.
Startups trade R&D for insight and iteration: talk to users, find a solution, something elegant and surprising and useful, and try it out, not as a print out on the wall to be discussed and over-thought (and yes, over-thinking is symptomatic of many if not most stalled innovation processes), but something out in the real world with other people using it.
-3- I want other people to find value in my work.
That value is directly tied to making people’s experiences — and *hopefully lives — better. You have to deliver on that if you expect any kind of real impact.
Client work can often be far removed from any real world positive affect. When your goals happen to align with a client’s, then sure, it’s great to help them achieve that. You’re lucky if you can build a roster of clients you deeply believe in.
More often you are operating under one major but overlooked assumption — that lending clarity and delight to any message makes the world a better place, regardless of the real value of the message you are helping to sell.
Working as part of the team that is defining not just how a product gets communicated and used, but what that product is and what it does for people — that’s an opportunity you rarely get with client work.
*Part of the reason I have a very specific idea of the type of startup I want to work for. There are plenty of problems I don’t care to solve, and more power to the people out there tackling those.
-4- I want my mom to understand what I spend my time doing.
You ever meet someone very successful and say to yourself “what the hell do they do?” You ever meet someone that can hardly answer that question themselves?
I’ve come to believe that “coordinating teams of interdisciplinary, strategic partnerships for generating long term sustainable growth” is code for makin’ spreadsheets and delegating real work (the spreadsheet has even become the symbol of faux productivity).
-5- I want to design with empathy, and that means being close to the ground.
I want to get as close as possible to the people that will love, hate, use, abuse, praise and sh*t on my work.
There is power in making something for someone you know well, someone that you’ve taken the time to listen to.When you are designing for a real person with a real problem you exercise that designer’s empathy that you’ve been trying to squeeze out of yourself when you read vague marketing reports about a ‘target’ consumer or an archetypal customer.
You sit down for a casual cup of tea and a chat and they blow your mind with insights into what the problem is and how to make something that really works. You take that with you, synthesize and sift through it, and cone up with something that you are uniquely qualified to come up with. It is grueling, sweat-dripping-from-the-brow work — empathy exercise. Getting it right is intense and rewarding.
-6- I want my stamp on the things I make.
I don’t want to contractually hand over credit for my work to any institution. Too many designers do great work that is absorbed by client’s contracts or even by the agency they work for.
The industry is changing. Designers are getting involved long before the brief is created. They are helping identify opportunities and build platforms and even products and in turn, generating an immense amount of value. The industry is demanding much more out of agencies but the rates aren’t changing. And we aren’t just talking learning new tools or building a web team or hiring film producers. Clients are demanding deeper domain knowledge, broader expertise, and bigger ROI.
I can go create this value somewhere else, for something I really believe in, and for a company that is moving quickly and iterating responsively.
I realize why I work. I choose to overcommit myself to tasks, classes, and jobs because it distracts me. I don’t know what the hell what I want from my life and productivity provides me something to do while I wait and push my desires aside. It’s my form of procrastination.
