– David Meyer

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People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic equipment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy. To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.

– Donella Meadows

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There are so many good quotes on Affluenza that I could fill an entire post with them; but I’ve constrained myself to two.  If you’re anything like I was a week ago, you have no idea what Affluenza is– sort of.  Most likely you’re familiar with the phenomenon but not with the terminology.  Allow me to enlighten you.

Affluenza is a mix of the word ‘Affluent’ and ‘Influenza’ and refers to being affluent as a kind of disease, like Influenza.  Proponents of Affluenza believe that as a person’s material possessions and worth grow, they become more dissatisfied and actually experience a decrease in quality of life rather than an increase.  The reason for this being that as a person’s wealth grows and they become able to afford the more luxurious things in life, their life slowly loses meaning.

You would think that it’s the opposite– but when you think about it Affluenza makes a lot of sense.  Most people are after the ‘dream life’.  As Americans coined it, ‘The American Dream’.  Fame, fortune, a beautiful and wonderful spouse; luxury at its finest.  People spend their entire lives working toward this goal.  Some reach it, others never come close but almost everyone pursues it in one form or another.  We go to school to learn how to work, and we work so that we can earn money.  Going to school and working comprise almost 75% of most people’s entire lifetimes.  Meaning that most of Average Joe’s time is going to be spent pursuing affluence.

If you’ve ever beaten a video game, you may know where this is going.  What happens when you beat the game?  Normally you feel a sense of satisfaction for having overcome all the obstacles on your path to victory; but if the game allows you to continue playing after you’ve won, most people will play for at maximum another hour before turning the game off, putting on a shelf and never playing it again, unless they start a new game.

Why?  Because it’s boring when you win.  As human beings it’s our nature to pursue goals in a never-ending cycle.  Once a single goal has been met, we immediately move on to the next goal.  As a species that drive has helped us achieve the dominant role on this planet and it has been responsible for every technological advancement ever made.  Unfortunately, when we’re talking about happiness, this drive can be a problem.

Bringing the video game analogy back to reality, you can think of reality as a video game.  One in which the end-goal is to earn so much money that you never have to work or even worry about not having enough money for anything ever again.  That’s a lofty goal that can take years– even generations –for a family to reach.  So what happens when you achieve that goal?  You get bored.

Boredom usually leads to unhappiness if left unattended.  Boredom is the reason you see people like Jay Leno have a warehouse full of cars that cost five times the price of your 25-year mortgage.  He even has an entire website devoted to it: Jay Leno’s Garage.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but it illustrates my point rather eloquently:  When you have nothing else to work for, you create a website devoted to your ridiculously expensive hobby of collecting cars.

What this means for the rich

What this means for the rich is that they need to find a life purpose other than making money.  That can be very difficult to do since, as I mentioned earlier, we as a society train people to have a life goal of making money, as it’s the only way they can survive.  When you have so much money you never have to worry about not having it again, you need to move on and find something else to do with your time.

It’s easier than you think, but you need to really focus on your own desires which can be difficult to do when you have zero practice listening to your own needs.  (Which applies to most of us.)  You need to start exploring different hobbies that interest you and find out which ones you really like.  Often a good goal while doing exploring these things is finding out what you can do that you enjoy but that also brings the most good to other people’s lives simultaneously.  Achieving world happiness is, sadly, a goal you will probably never complete, but that consequently makes it ideal.  You can help millions of people every year and there will always be another million for you to help.  Will Smith achieves this by blending what he loves(Acting.) with helping people. (Acting in big-name movies like The Pursuit of Happiness and Seven Pounds which have strong philosophical messages.)

What this means for everyone else

What this means for everyone else is that they probably don’t need to worry about Affluenza right now, and may not within their lifetime, but that it is always better to nip it in the bud rather than wait for it to bloom.  Even if you don’t think you’ll ever have affluence to the level that you’ll never need to worry about money again, your life can substantially improve by moving away from chasing wealth and focusing on the things you really love in life.

As I said above, unless you’re well practiced in discovering what you love, you may have trouble moving away from the rat race as a life goal to something else.  Try things out, and stick to the ones that you love.  Make them, and the people in your life, your priority instead of your job or money.  Both money and your job are important, but you’ll find that when they are not the driving force behind your life that you become a much happier individual, as do those closest to you.

Affluenza does affect those without money.  Take for instance, Bob.

Bob always wanted an Acura RSX.  He worked hard for five years and finally saved up the money to buy it.  Satisfied with his purchase, he drove his Acura lovingly around for six months before something else caught his eye: A Mustang GT.  He wanted that Mustang GT, but it was much more expensive than his current income could afford.  So, Bob worked really hard for eight more years and eventually bought the Mustang GT.  He drove his Mustang around for a year before he spotted a BMW.  That BMW was so much nicer than his Mustang GT.  It had heated seats, GPS, backup camera, plus it was much faster!  He had to have it.  Twelve years and countless laboured hours later, he was able to afford it.  Then one day he saw a Lamborghini…

And it goes on and on.  Most of us do this not just with cars, but with everything.  The moment you get whatever you want, as is human nature, you almost immediately focus on the next best thing.  One minute you’re dying for that 700 sq. ft. apartment with the beautiful view and the next you’re upset that you only have a 3000 sq. ft. house without a heated garage.

When you remove the focus on things and start focusing on ideas, activities and other goals that need for the latest and greatest drops away, and you start to realize that things aren’t that important in your life:  People and happiness are.

Do yourself a favour and forget that new iPhone.  Find something you love and connect with the people around you that love you.  Affluenza affects us all in some respect, and it’s spreading.  At least now you know that there’s a cure.

– Will Smith

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Will Smith is kind of one of my heroes when it comes to the philosophy of life.  He believes that whatever it is you devote yourself to, it should benefit not only yourself but other people– it should make people’s lives better.  He believes that anybody can be great, and that the key to greatness is not talent, but skill.  And he also believes that skill can be developed by anybody, regardless of talent, so long as they practice at whatever it is they do, day after day, and they never give up.

I truly believe that.  Anybody can be great.  Anybody can be successful, and it’s not the natural born heroes who become famous, rich or extremely successful.  They’re regular people just like you and me who decided that they wanted to be great at something, and they never quit in pursuit of that.

In his acceptance speech at the 2005 kid’s choice awards, Mr. Smith said the quote that I quoted above, and when I heard it, it struck home.  Everyone is familiar with that little man (or little woman) who tells us we’re getting tired and that it’s time to give up.  You don’t have to run to be familiar with that.  In fact, I even talk about this little guy in my post about increasing your attention span.  Every time you continue doing what you’re doing and ignore that overwhelming urge you get to get up and do something else, you defy that little man and he begins to learn his place.

It’s important that he does, because that little man is the gatekeeper out of mediocrity.  When things start to get really hard, or you get tired of doing them, he pipes up and tells you, urges you that you must stop, lest you experience extreme discomfort and displeasure.  When you push past that urge, and you devote yourself to your craft you begin to transcend the work-ethic and the hole that a lot of people find themselves in.

More importantly, you realize that nothing catastrophic happens when you ignore that voice.  The discomfort you experience when you continue doing what you’re doing can be intense for a brief period of time, but then suddenly, as if it never existed in the first place, it disappears.  All of a sudden you’re ahead of where you’ve been stuck for ages, constantly practicing and improving because you have the advantage of never giving up, despite failure and despite displeasure.

How do you do you ignore a voice that’s so compelling, though?  Practice.  You can ignore it for five minutes at a time at first, just pushing past that initial point until that point starts to come later and later.  Eventually you become more compelled to complete whatever it is you’re working at than to heed the urge to stop.  Persistence is really the only defining trait of those who live their dreams and those who don’t.  Some people quit early, listening to their peers advice that they should “be realistic.”  It’s the people who aren’t ‘realistic’ who succeed– who win– who become great.  Reality is subjective, and what is realistic for you is up to you.

Once you defeat that internal voice, you simultaneously defeat the voice of everyone else who tells you to quit.  You begin to rely on yourself for inspiration and motivation as opposed to external stimulus.  That’s the most incredible tool you can ever wield:  Imagine a house that powers itself, never needing gas, electricity, water, air conditioning– even the fridge refills automatically.  What would someone pay for a house like that?  There would be no reliance on any other companies for your complete survival, your house would do it all by itself.  It would be completely self-sufficient, regardless of the economy, the gas prices or the hydro companies.

When you become that self-sufficient house that never needs maintenance or repairs from outside sources, anything you want to do is within your reach.  As long as you’re patient and persistent, it will come.

– English Idiom

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All right, so let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first.  That quote was crap.  I know it.  You know it.  (And if you find a better quote about diversification, e-mail me or leave it in the comments and I’ll update it!)

I’m going to venture into territory I’m not overly experienced with here, (Read: Have not been practicing for more than a year but thus-far it has been effective and I believe it’s an understated habit of successful people.

What I’ve noticed with successful people and what has brought me quite a lot of meaning, joy and success in my own life recently is diversification.  I realize that diversification is the type of term you expect to hear from a financial advisor and not this website, but hear me out.  I promise this won’t be a boring seminar.

The Dream

Everyone has their ultimate ‘dream’ or life-goal, even if they aren’t in touch with it and have settled for something else.  Following that dream and doing everything within your power to achieve that life goal is something I’ve devoted a lot of time to on this site.  Consequently I may have led many people to believe that they should devote everything they have towards achieving that goal– which implies that you should drop everything else and keep your eyes on the prize.

I wrote about following your dreams in a focused way because at the time, that’s what I was doing.  For a while that felt like it was the right thing to do, and it was the right thing to do because it was a step forward from what I was doing towards working towards my dream: Nothing.

But eventually it occurred to me that while success can be achieved through working towards a solitary goal and abandoning everything else, it’s much easier to achieve if you work towards many goals all at once.  It’s also a great way to make money.

My dream is to write fiction and be a professional Author.  If you’ve ever watched the show Castle, the protagonist, appropriately named ‘Castle’ is exactly what I’m talking about, only with less show-boating and with my books being sci-fi instead of crime dramas.  I love coming up with ideas, characters and stories, planning them out and then finally writing it, so my dream of becoming a full time novelist is near and dear to my heart.

At first I thought it wouldn’t be long until I broke into the publishing industry and started getting my work out there, but that was not the case.  Getting a novel published takes a lot of work, time, research, skill and also a little bit of luck.  Even though I’ve already written a novel and continue to toil away at other books, getting that novel published has been a long and hard endeavour.

Most people’s dreams are that way.  Some people want to be doctors or lawyers, others want to be astronauts or professional athletes, others want to be musicians, artists and others want to own their own business.   All of these things have one thing in common that my dream also shares:  They require a lot of time and a lot of work before they pay off; (Sometimes at all.  In the case of writing you spend all your time writing your book before you see a cent.  In the case of becoming a doctor you’re actually incurring debt before you get anything!) but when they do pay off, they pay big.

So if all you have while you work towards your dream is that dream you can find yourself on some hard times.  Most of us will do something we don’t like to earn a living while we’re waiting for our dreams to come to fruition.  That gives us two things: One we like but are also frustrated with because it’s taking so long, and one we don’t like at all but that we need to survive.  It’s not a good situation to be in and it certainly doesn’t motivate you into giving your best work when you’re working towards your goal.

Here’s the key:  Stick your finger in too many pies.  Well, okay, not too many.  There is a reason that’s an idiom.  But feel free to get your finger covered in fruity goodness is all I’m saying.  It’s really important to stay focused on your dream and to work towards that every day, but you can also do other things.

In my case, I find other avenues to write rather than just putting all my eggs into writing novels.  I write all the articles on this website, I write on another website, I take pictures and maintain a Flickr account, I repair computers and I work a day job.  All of these things have a monetary potential and a lot of them would allow me to be self-employed if they ever grew.  On top of that stuff, I’m still writing books.  So no matter what happens, I have all these different methods of living a comfortable, self-employed life that I’m working on, so that even if one doesn’t pan out (Or, probably more accurately: Doesn’t pan out quickly.) I have lots of other things I can do.

Putting it Into Action

I’ll be honest with you:  I only recently started diversifying my hobbies/work interests.  It can be ridiculously overwhelming when you think of all the potential there is in each area you decide to pursue but what helps is just taking it one step at a time.  If you have five different interests you want to pursue, even if only one of those is your dream path you can pursue all five.  Tackle one per week, and just do something small one day a week towards each one.

Like so:

Monday: Hobby 1

Tuesday: Hobby 2

Wednesday: Hobby 3

Thursday: Hobby 4

Friday: Hobby 5

It doesn’t have to be a huge, time consuming amount of work you do each day, but it should be something that moves you closer to whatever your goal is in that area.  It should also be fun.  Pick things you enjoy doing.  If you like playing sports, pick a different sport to play, or start a blog about sports.  Go cover a game for your local newspaper, or take pictures of it.

Finally, do something to work towards your main goal every day.  That way you won’t feel like your side projects are taking away from your progress towards your dream.  You’ll find yourself a lot less frustrated and with a lot more opportunities  knocking on your door.  Diversification isn’t just for money.

– Unknown

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Most people don’t really like to commit.  Usually because once you’ve committed to something you’re, well…  committed.  You can’t get out of it.  That’s usually a scary thought.

It’s also the reason more people don’t go into business instead of going to post-secondary school, or who don’t go into post-secondary school and go straight into the workforce.  Each requires a certain level of commitment towards your future goals and nothing really has the guarantee of success behind it.  (Although universities and colleges would have you believing otherwise.)

The same can also be said for relationships.  Many relationships fall apart because one or both parties just aren’t willing to commit.  Committing can be scary because what often goes through a person’s head when they commit is this:

I’m going to be trapped into this if I commit to it!

That’s right.  Trapped.  That’s usually the term that comes to mind when people think of ‘commitment’.  And, well, rightfully so.  Committing to something is a way of making a promise to yourself and to others that you are going to do something and keep doing it no matter what.  Most people don’t think they have it in them to do that, or simply don’t want to.  The thought of being stuck doing something is terrifying for most people.

But the truth is that by not committing to certain things, like a person or a job or your education, or even something as simple as a side project, you are committing to something else without even realizing it.

Let’s say you have a project to build a model boat that requires a commitment from you of one day a week for 52 weeks.  (You’re an amateur model builder who focuses on the details of the job and as such takes an absolutely extraordinary amount of time to put the model together.)

Now, you go out, you buy your super glue, your model parts, you get a work bench and clear off space for the building of this model: you get everything prepared and you start building it the day that you get it.  At the end of your first day, you realize that in regards to the entire project, you’ve made very little progress towards completion and that it’s going to take a commitment of one day a week for 52 weeks in order for you to completely finish building the model.

You decide that you don’t really want to commit your Sundays to building the model because sometimes you just like to relax on Sundays instead of working on your hobby.  What if one Sunday it’s nice outside and you want to go to the beach?  You don’t want to be stuck inside building your model boat.  That would be lame.  So, instead of committing one day a week you just endeavour to work on it whenever you have the time and it catches your fancy.

52 weeks later and your boat has done nothing but collect dust.  By deciding not to commit one day a week to the completion of the project, you are in effect choosing not to complete the project.  If I want to be really cheeky I can phrase it like this:  You’ve committed to not completing the project.  While I can’t say that everyone won’t follow through on their “I’ll get to it whenever I feel like it” strategy, most of us won’t.  Meaning that without committing we really won’t complete much.

Take a moment and think about it.  For the most part, things you commit to you succeed at.  If you commit to writing every day for a year, your writing ability will show an absolutely astonishing improvement by the time that year is up, even if two weeks in you still feel like you suck at writing.  The same can be said for anything, really.

Even something more black and white, like achieving a specific goal, can easily be achieved if you commit to it and follow through with that commitment.  If I made a commitment to be able to make 9 out of 10 three-point shots from right in front of the hoop in basketball and then practiced once a day for one hour for an entire year, I would put money on the fact that I would achieve that goal.  Even if by the third month I wasn’t even close to achieving that.

The same thing can be said for relationships.  If you choose not to commit to a relationship, you are essentially choosing to opt out of the relationship, even if you don’t break up with that person.

Commitment is scary, and that’s why it works.

Because when you do actually commit to something or someone (Most often they are not independent.) then you are held responsible for failing that commitment.  You are expected to ‘show up’ so to speak, and do whatever it is you committed to doing.  It puts pressure on you because if you fail your commitment, there are consequences.  And that, dear readers, is a good, good thing.  I’ve said before that you should eliminate fear and I stand by that, but while you’re trying to get rid of it, use it to your advantage.  If you’re afraid of disappointing or failing then that fear will serve as a motivation to do whatever it is you’ve committed to.

Commitment isn’t fool-proof.  Sometimes you’ll still falter– it’s only human.  I do it all the time.  But it’s a handy tool to have when you’re working towards something that you want in life, and one you should employ whenever you get the chance.  If you’re still scared of making a commitment, that’s okay.  Be scared and do it anyway.  The worst thing that can happen is that you fail your commitment and you end up exactly where you would be had you never committed in the first place.  Give yourself the benefit of the doubt and you’ll be happy with what comes your way.

–Lewis Mumford, “Orientation to Life,” The Conduct of Life, 1951
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Influence is a powerful weapon in both the right and wrong hands.  It’s effective, invisible, and slow-working. Worse still, when you’re influenced over time you usually don’t even realize that you’re being influenced at all.  You’ve got to watch your back for influence because I can promise you that it’s always creeping up on you when you least expect it.

This is something I’ve been realizing recently, then forgetting, then re-realizing.  It’s tricky like that.  I’ve talked before about how you need to really pay attention to the people you hang out with because you tend to follow the same goals and habits that those people have.  Even if, when you met them, you were very different after a few months you’ll find your priorities having changed without you even realizing it.

That’s true about more than just people.  It’s true about your life– about everything.  It’s true about your home, about your car, about your clothes, your hair, your work environment, the way you hold yourself, the way you speak, the thoughts that you think, the media you expose yourself to, the ads you’re subjected to and the music that you listen to.  As humans we like to think of ourselves as individuals who are unique and autonomous, but the truth is that what we are is a species of actors.

We absorb and imitate.  That’s what learning is.  You’re only able to read this article because when you were a child you absorbed and imitated what your parents did when they were communicating to each other as well as your peers in school.  Eventually you learned the language, social queues and gestures that we all use.  But you picked that up because as a human being you’re a natural mimic.

That doesn’t end when you’re a kid, even though it’s easy to maintain the illusion that it does.  Everyday you’re adapting and imitating in order to fit in with your current circumstance.

Life can take several distinctly different directions based on that information:  It can take you to a place where your wildest dreams become your reality, or it can take you to a place where mediocrity is king.  It can take you to a place where even though you live like royalty compared to 98% of the rest of the world,  (And if you live in a first world country, congratulations, you belong in that upper two percentile.) you feel like life sucks and you complain about every little thing like so many of us do.  Or it can take you to a place that’s like hell on Earth.

That’s why I wrote about complaining.  It affects your life in ways you may not even realize.  When you focus on the negative, you notice everything negative.  Even good things are viewed in a negative life, and when there’s some sort of ambiguity to the outcome an issue (You know, like with 90% of life’s challenges.)  you assume something negative is going to happen instead of something positive.

Sometimes, like today, I have to take a step back and realize just how damn good I have it.  That’s really hard when you have co-workers, family members, friends, the TV, the news and everything else in your life whispering unintentional suggestions in your ear about how you should act.

Meditation helps with this, but if the thought of meditating offends your sensibilities, you can always just schedule ten, five or hell, even two minutes a day to just run through a list of the things you’re grateful for.  Things that you like about your life.  The people you appreciate.  The luxuries you enjoy.  It’s laughably difficult to come up with a list of those things when you first start being grateful because we’re all so used to being ungrateful and looking at the next best thing; but after a week of practicing you’ll wonder how it was that you weren’t able to have an overflowing list of things to be grateful for.

Remember that no matter what someone says, it is not gospel.  You can step back, think and decide for yourself.  Life is your car and you have the keys in the ignition and your hands on the wheel.  You have the ability to decide what car it is you’re driving and where you want to take it, no matter how many people give you directions.  Take the time love the little things in your life and be thankful.  Forget about what you don’t have and remember all the things you do have.

You might be surprised where you can go and how fast you’ll get there.

–Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1962), Anonymous

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You may have noticed, dear reader, being the rather astute individual that you are, that I have not posted on this website for quite a while now.

I thought I would take this opportunity (At my lovely wife’s suggestion) to let you know where I’ve been and why the site hasn’t been updated.

If you’ve ever been to another introspective, advicey-type, personal development site you may have noticed something about the more succesful ones: They post two to three times a week on average.    The reason for that is because any succesful article based or blog-based website has to update frequently or, quite understandably, people lose interest and stop visiting.

The problem is that when you’re forced to write that frequently you tend to run out of the large wealth of genuine ideas you had when you began the site rather quickly.   You can even take this very website as an example.  I posted 43 articles in the span of three months covering all sorts of different topics.  (This is your que to check out my robust Table of Contents.  Wink, wink.)

And then I went and got married.  Then I went galavanting around Ireland with my wife and when I came back I found that I had very little to talk about.

Now, how the average site of this type gets around this is very simple, and surprisingly effective: They start writing crap. They make up a topic or find one on the vast interwebs that we all surf and throw 1500 words underneath it that are about as uninspired as you can get.

And that works.  People keep reading, and even though they know that the most recent article maybe isn’t so good, they know this person does get inspired and write spectacular articles when they’re ready for them and they keep reading for that.

I hate doing that.  Mostly because when I sit down and start writing crap, it takes me about two minutes to sit back in my chair, whistle loudly and proclaim: “I need a cup of tea,” followed shortly by “and this is crap.”

I don’t want bum articles on this site that are just place-holders until something good strikes me and I decide to come and write it down, so I stopped writing.

But I didn’t really start again either.  I got lazy, and I stopped being motivated.  Even when good ideas struck me and I realized I should hop on here and post about them, I didn’t.  And for that I sincerely apologize.

I am going to endeavour to post on this site one non-crap article once a week– which I hope you, dear reader, will read and benefit from.  But, if I don’t have anything that’s not filler I won’t post.

Deal?

And we… kill those people.  ‘Shut him up!  We have a lot invested in this ride!  Shut him up!  Look at my furrows of worry!  Look at my big bank account!  And my family!  This has to be real.’

It’s just a ride.

But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, have you ever noticed that?  And let the demons run amok.  But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride.  And we can change it any time we want.  It’s only a choice.  No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money.  Just a choice, right now.  Between fear and love.

– Bill Hicks

– Aldin Sinclair

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You can’t be serious.

I realize how incredibly trite and even more incredibly bias the title sounds seeing as this site is completely based around inspiring yourself and others, but I’m not writing about this topic to promote IEvo.

I know sometimes it seems a little unreal to think that someone writing inspirational material often needs inspiration themselves– especially since everything you read that they’ve written is itself motivational material.  It seems like these people have endless fountains of positive energy that they simply spill out at their earliest convenience for your consumption.  That’s how I always felt about it, anyway.

The reality is very different though.  Now having an outlet of my own for inspirational material that I write, I realize that everyone needs to be inspired some times.

Seems to be rather generic advice, though.

Yeah, it does.  When I say inspire yourself, I’m not just talking about general inspirational type material like ‘You can do it!’ or whatever.  I mean looking for advice specific to whatever is bringing you down or giving you a hard time.

This is something I’ve done naturally for many years and I can tell you that it works.  You, being the lucky person that you are, have access to the most vast, information rich resource on planet Earth, and you have it in the comfort of your own home.  This is probably the only time you’ve ever heard this, but the internet can solve your problems.  Anything you can think of is on the internet because others have been through whatever you’re dealing with right now.  Whether it’s manipulative people, money problems, relationship woes or even how to tie a tie.  It’s on the internet, and there is helpful advice from lots of people experienced in exactly what you’re dealing with.

So what I mean when I say ‘inspire yourself’ is that when you find yourself really upset because a friend died recently, take the time to look up how to deal with grief.  I imagine you’d be surprised by what you find.  There is quite often very useful, very practical advice that you can use.

How do you distinguish good advice from bad advice?

Two ways, and the first is practice.  You’re often able to tell right off the bat whether or not something is good advice or bad advice by how it’s written.  Does it have a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes?  Is it well thought out or clearly something pumped out in ten minutes?  Signs like these can often tell you whether or not your source is reliable or if they’re simply trying to get hits to their website.  As I’m sure you know, there are a lot of people out there who have an internet connection and there’s no filter on what someone can post to their own website.

The second way is much simpler.  Follow your gut.  Your gut knows what it’s talking about, as it’s had experience telling you whether something is right or wrong for the entirety of your life.  If you read some advice that just doesn’t sit well with you, don’t follow it.  Conversely, you’ll probably find that when you read good advice that it feels like you’ve just discovered a rare gem.  I’m explaining it to you, but trust me, you’ll know the difference.

There is one thing to be cautious about.  Sometimes you’ll feel like rejecting the advice you read because it’s so radically different from what you’re doing that to make the change would require a lot of effort and work– it would mean, well… change!  Change is often pretty frightening and no one really likes it very much unless they’ve conditioned themselves to liking it.  You’ll know the difference when you feel it.  Deep down you know when you’re rejecting an idea because it’s too different and when you’re rejecting an idea because it’s a crap idea.

Finally, if you don’t know the difference, or feel like you don’t know the difference, you can always simply try it and see what happens.  Unless the advice your reading is potentially dangerous either physically or mentally, it’s usually worth a shot.  Just type in whatever it is you’re looking for on Google (ie. ‘Dealing with grief’) and press enter.  Results ahoy.

Try it.  Sometimes just reading the right advice can turn your whole week around.  Plus really, what have you got to lose?  A bad mood?  A crappy situation?  That’s what I thought.

– Sir Ken Robinson

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So, where were we?

Ah yes.  Degrees.

My point in saying that degrees are not worth what they used to be worth is not to discourage you from getting a degree or to imply that if what you want to do requires a degree that you shouldn’t bother.  There are many ways to get around the barriers that face recent graduates.  My point is that getting a degree is not a meal ticket.  It is not a safety net, or a winning lottery ticket.  Not any longer.

Degrees, I think we will find, will return to the status they had when they were first introduced.  Degrees used to be about imparting and receiving knowledge– a general knowledge of a variety of subjects so that a person who attended University could be called well educated, not about securing a position.

Why do you want a degree, anyway?

I’d like to call this into question simply because an alarming number of my peers’ answers are: “Because that’s what I have to do.”

You don’t need to get a degree, especially if that’s not in line with what you want to do.  I’ve already talked about deciding if what you want to do is in line with getting a degree, so I won’t dwell on it, but that’s the first and most important consideration you need to take into account.

Quite often people’s passions are not in line with the ‘ideal path’ that school or your parents, peers and teachers believe would be better for you.  The only person who knows what the ideal path is for you is you, and you must trust in that.  No matter what people say, your best chance at being successful always lies in following your passions instead of following the well-troden path or the money.  Money will come when you’re doing what you love.

Something else to take into consideration when going into school is how much money it’s going to cost you.  A lot of people look at student debt as a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be.  People don’t really think when they plunge themselves into a forty thousand dollar debt when it’s for school, because they think that once they’re through school they’ll earn it back in a couple of years.  They think that’s a guarantee.

But, as we’ve already gone through, there are no guarantees. There was a special done by CBC News here in Canada talking about graduate debt and how it can actually set you back farther than someone who didn’t go to university.

They studied a particular couple– the husband went to college for 2 years and paid for it outright (Since college is much, much cheaper here in Canada than University is.) and his wife went to University and was some sixty thousand dollars in debt.

All the common idioms were true.  She did get a better job out of University than he did when he was out of college– but there were some key differences that most people don’t talk about.  First of all, although she did get a better job than he did straight out of school, she spent 2 extra years in school while he was working and earning an income while she was incurring debt.  Furthermore, by the time she got out of school, he had been at his job for 2 years and earned a promotion in that time, upgrading his income to the exact same level hers was coming out of school.

She also had $60,000 worth of debt to her name, whereas he had none.  It took her ten years to pay it off.  Ten years. If you don’t know what that kind of debt and payment time can do to your income, look at this post I wrote here.  People often think student loans aren’t a big deal because the interest rate is very low compared to traditional loans, but it still adds up very quickly when you’re not able to pay it off all at once.  And if it takes you ten years to pay off your loan, you’re likely paying more than 50% more than you initially borrowed.

That’s a huge chunk of money you could have put towards a house, vacations, a second property– whatever.  Money you could be spending on your own needs instead of paying back to the government or a bank.

If you’re still not convinced that student debt is a big problem, you might want to check out this article that was published in the Wall Street Journal this year.  National Student Debt has now officially surpassed America’s National Credit Card Debt.  And if you know how I feel about credit cards, I’m sure you can surmise how I feel about student loans.

Preparation for the real world

Unfortunately, the school system in general simply doesn’t prepare students adequately for the world they’ll be in once they graduate.  How can they?  School systems and curriculum’s are rigid and relatively unchanging– they’re based on past demographics instead of recent ones.  Five years from now the job market will be completely different from how it is now, so how is it that schools can claim they’ll prepare you for the world 16 years into the future?  Schools are constantly working off of an old model, meaning the only people guaranteed success are the ones doing something different– those who are taking steps to prepare themselves for what is happening now.

Believe it or not, I could go on about how ill prepared school makes us, but I think you get the point.  The system needs a complete overhaul.

The bottom line here is that what you need when you’re going into the job market is to use your brain.  Don’t rely on tried-and-true methods of the past because they don’t last.  As soon as something becomes a ‘sure thing’ everyone starts to do it.  It over-populates and then it becomes worthless and ineffective.  Suddenly you need to find a different way of making a go of it.

I want to be very clear that I’m not arguing against getting a degree.  If that’s what you want, or that’s what your dream career requires then go for it.  Work hard and seperate yourself out from the crowd and make sure you’re passionate about what you’re doing and I’m sure that you’ll succeed.  All I urge is that you really think about it before you take the leap into getting your degree.  Think of how much debt you’re putting yourself into, how much you’ll be earning out of school, how much time it will take you to go where you want to, etc.  Be smart.  Plan out your future before you throw yourself into circumstances that will take years to undo.

And first and foremost, follow your passion. Nothing is more important.  If someone tells you you can’t make a living doing what you love, don’t listen.  If you’re serious about your dreams and your passions, you will find a way to make it work no matter what.  I literally do not know anyone who followed their dreams and ultimately failed.  As the saying goes, ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way.’  Believe it.

Here are some resources if you’re interested in reading more about education and the crisis it is currently going through:

Graduate unemployment: Here and here

Sir Ken Robinson’s talks on Education: Here and here *HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*

Graduate Debt: Here

– Sir Ken Robinson

—

To be frank, this is going to be a very touchy subject with some people.  There are those who will disagree and be upset with the information and opinions presented here, but it is a topic very close to my heart and something that I believe does not get nearly enough attention from any form of media.

This article is about education.  It is about what education used to achieve, what it currently achieves, how it should be changed and how absolutely critical that change is.  On its most base level, this article is about why if you don’t fit within the confines of the formal education system you are not doomed to failure.

Creativity

Creativity is, in many ways, what makes us human.  It is what spurs on the innovations in technology, medicine, everyday conveniences and all other aspects of our existence.  Very simply, creativity is what makes the world run.  It is the most important asset we have.

Aside from what creativity does for humans on a macro scale, it also does for us on a micro scale.  Those who are the most succesful in their jobs, in business and in life are the ones who are the most creative.  The very wealthy and the very succesful are all people who thought beyond the borders of their field, or who were brave enough to go into a field in which there was a low chance for success.  Actors, musicians, writers, dancers, artists–  people who took the dangerous path, or at least what was labeled the dangerous path through their schooling.  When they succeed in their field they surpass anything you could even hope to earn in a traditional position.

Creativity is important.  And yet, despite its importance– despite its many uses, in school it is beaten out of us.  You are not rewarded in school for being creative or for thinking up new ideas or ways of doing something– you’re rewarded for following instructions.  You’re rewarded for doing what you’re told and following in the footsteps of those creative souls before you who discovered the information you are now learning.

I know that not all schools are the same, but in the public education system, there is a great deal that is similar from place to place.  Some people are lucky enough to have great teachers and administration at their school and others get teachers who are only there to earn a pay-cheque and administrators who care more about what the rules say in their many books and profit than they do about actual education.

I was in one of the latter schools and I can tell you that after 12 years of attending the most basic level of schooling that I was ready to give up.  Any idea I had beyond what I was told to do was unacceptable.  Any alternate method I had of learning the same information on my own terms was rejected and punished.  I was to fit within the machine that was public education or I would be expelled from it.

My school took the easy route for themselves.  They followed the rules to the T and anyone who did not work within those rules did not get to attend school, thereby (Or so we were all told.) ruining any hope they had of a career or a future.  The schools would have you believe that you would be a bum on the street if you did not play their game.

And to an extent they were right.  You do need a basic education– a high school diploma –if you want to do absolutely anything.  In an age where a Bachelor’s degree is now holding the same weight as a high school diploma did thirty years ago, the high-school diploma has become an almost worthless piece of paper.  And if you don’t even had said almost-worthless-piece of paper, where does that put you?

But this is not the purpose of education.  It is not the purpose of education to kill humanities most valuable asset.  Rather, it is the purpose of education to endow knowledge to be used in conjunction with creativity so that new innovations and revolutions can take place.  As much as we need the knowledge education provides, we also need the creativity we were all born with, no matter what field we decide to go into.  There has to be a balance struck between the two.  Right now formal education tries to do without creativity and it is failing, but conversely creativity without knowledge is also useless.  We need both.

The Many Misconceptions About Having a Degree

When I was a kid my parents drilled into my head that if I were to be successful, I had to go to school.  School, they said, was the key to everything.  It was the key to having a good career, which guaranteed me a good job with good benefits and a good income.  And good benefits and a good income meant a comfortable, safe life.  It sounded like a pretty good deal to me at the time.

And when I was going through school I heard the same thing repeated by all my teachers and principals.  School was necessary to having a good life.  Period.  There was no alternative.

Had I liked school– had I worked well within the bounds of school this wouldn’t have been a problem.  I would’ve put my nose down and studied hard, and today I likely wouldn’t be running this website, writing novels or composing this post for you to read.  I’d probably be studying to become a doctor or a lawyer or a business man.  Things would’ve been different, and a lot smoother.

But I hated school.  I still do, if I’m honest.  Not because I don’t learn anything, because I do.  I have learned and continue to learn a great deal from education.  But because, as I said before, school sets out to kill any kind of flexibility or creativity on the individual’s part.  If you wanted to do something different involving an assignment– present it in a different way, or complete a different task that still has the same end result, that wasn’t allowed in any school I ever attended. (To date I have attended five.)  And if I did it anyway, I was outright punished.

I’ll give you an example that will probably stick with me until the day I die.  When I was in the fifth grade my class was given an assignment during the third or forth day of school.  We were to find an object at home that related to whatever we wanted to do with our lives (Being ten already, we were simply expected to know exactly what we wanted to do.) and bring it in to present it in front of the class, with an explanation of what we wanted to do for a living.

At the time I loved to do two things in my spare time–  I loved to draw, and I loved computer games.  Worlds of fantasy and visions of the future were things that I loved to explore as a kid.  As such, as a child my dream job was becoming an inventor.  I didn’t know what I wanted to invent, but I thought it would be something cool.  I wanted to invent something big, something important– something that would make the world into something closer to the fantastic computer games I played rather than the dull place I thought it to be at ten.

So, having these as my two hobbies, I drew a picture of a MechWarrior.  For those not familiar with MechWarrior, it was a computer game back in the 90′s about piloting big walking tanks and blowing other big walking tanks up.  It was very futuristic and very entrertaining for a ten year old boy, I assure you.  Anyway, here was what I drew a pencil sketch of: here and I brought it into class and presented it.

I said that I wanted to be an inventor, so I drew a picture of something I wanted to invent.  My teacher was not impressed and pressed me for specifics.  Why had I drawn that in particular?  I told her that it was a big machine with guns and whatnot and that I would invent such a thing for military use, to defend our country.  The truth was that I had no intention of building a MechWarrior, it was just something that I was into and I liked to draw, so that’s what I did.

My teacher reamed me for it in front of the whole class, while I stood up there holding my picture.  She told me that to want to invent such a thing was terrible and told me to sit down.  So, being extremely embarassed I sat down and that was that.

I’ll admit that a lot of what made that experience bad was the fact that my teacher was a short-sighted foolish woman who did not know how to handle children, and who I later found out really got off on power (She used to keep the entire class late after school to practice whistling because according to her ‘At ten years old, you should all be able to whistle.’) but the ‘lesson’ if you will call it that, stuck with me for the rest of my time in school.  What I took from it was that doing something creative– something not quite within the bounds of what was asked for was punished quite severely.  I can’t think of anything worse she could have done to a ten year old other than to embarass them in front of 28 of their peers whom they had to sit and work with every day.  I would’ve preferred it if she had said nothing and failed me.

So when I learned this lesson about the inflexibility of school I really began to dislike it.  I nearly failed grade 5 because I hated it so much, which was ironic to both myself and my parents because in the previous year I had been in an advanced section of my class for bright students.  The difference was that my teacher in the previous year had been flexible and knew how to work with kids.  From grade 5 onwards, my teachers just didn’t care.  And neither did those above them.

You might be wondering what this has to do with getting a degree, and I do apologize for digressing to such an extent but it was a point I felt important to demonstrate.  You either do exactly what you’re told and succeed or you don’t and you fail.  In fact, not only do you fail but you’ll be humiliated as well– something for many people that is arguable worse than failure.

So what does it have to do with a degree?  When I made it through high-school many years later I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  And the reason for that is because everyone I ever talked to who was an adult or a teacher or an administrator told me that if I wanted to do something I loved to do, like write novels for a living, or draw, that I would be poor and that I would waste my time and my money in a post-secondary school studying such a thing.  So instead of doing what I knew I wanted to do, I tried looking elsewhere and couldn’t find anything I really loved.

But I thought I knew the two things you needed to succeed based on what I had been told:

1. You need a degree to be successful

2. Even with a degree, you cannot be succesful in the arts unless you are exceptionally lucky

Put very simply, that is not true.

My parents, my teachers and my administrators all told me that I needed a degree to be succesful because that’s how it was after they came out of school.  When my parents were children, having a degree was like having the golden ticket.  As Ken Robinson says in his talk on education, (Which I’ll link at the end of this article.) if you had a degree you had a job, and if you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one.

The thing is, it wasn’t just my parents telling me that I had to get a degree to be succesful– It was everyone’s parents.  Everyone from the previous generation was drilling into the current generation that to be successful and lead a comfortable life, you had to get a degree and you had to get it in something other than the arts.

So everyone got a degree.

Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything

Everyone got a degree.  Banks handed out student loans like they were handing out candy on Halloween and they still do.  No matter what your financial circumstances are, you can get a degree so long as you study hard enough because a bank will lend you anywhere from sixty to a hundred thousand dollars to do it.  And you’ll be paying off that debt for the next ten years once you’re out of school.

Which was fine, for the most part, since getting that degree guaranteed a nice job with good benefits and a good income.  You would be able to pay it off in no time.

Except that now you can’t.  I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you that a Bachelor’s degree is now the equivalent of what a high-school diploma was thirty years ago.  It seems like that’s the common advice given nowadays.  Certainly, towards the end of my educational career in high-school that’s what I was being told.

Except, paradoxically the advice I was given to go along with it was not: ‘Look for some other way of making a living– some creative solution to solve this new challenge.’  It was: ‘You better get that degree or you’ll be really screwed.  In fact, once you have the degree, you better continue on to get an MA or a PhD because those are the only guarantees there are for a job now.’

But that’s not even true anymore.  My father worked as the Physics Coordinator at one of the best Universities in Canada for 38 years and the one thing that he found again and again when he met ex-students after they had graduated disturbed him.  It disturbed me, too, because it flew in the face of everything I had been told.  You see, these students who had graduated with a degree or a masters or sometimes even a doctorate in physics who my father met after they had graduated– it wasn’t what they said that disturbed him, it was where he met them.

They were packing his groceries for him at the supermarket.

They were handing him his movie rentals.

They were serving him his dinner at a restaurant.

Because what none of these graduates had when they got out of school was any experience.  And when companies were getting hundreds of thousands of applicants all with degrees, they had to have a way to prune through them in order to pick the best candidate.  And they way they now do that is with experience.  Along with a degree, they want five years of experience doing the exact job that they’re hiring for.  It’s a very specific set of criteria that not many will fit into, which is exactly why they do it.  It makes their job of picking someone much easier.

And it means that all those students coming out of university with no experience in the job of their choice are being passed over for those who have both the degree and the experience– those who had the good fortune of being born five or ten years earlier when educational inflation was only starting to become a problem.

Case in point, my father retired last year.  He worked at a University for 38 years with, ironically, nothing but a college diploma.  When he left he was making good money and was at the top of the ladder for his job title.

The University replaced him with a man who had a PhD in physics, and they pay him nearly $20,000 less per year.  He is also lower down the rung than my father was.  That’s right.  A man with a doctorate today is making less than someone with a college diploma was 40 years ago.

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There is, astonishingly, a lot more I would like to say on this subject but I won’t cram it all into this post as it is already twice the length of what I normally write.

On Thursday I’ll post the conclusion to this article.  I hope you’ll join me.

In the meantime, if you’re still looking for more information on the topic, you’ll probably be interested in hearing Ken Robinson’s speech on TED.com, which is what originally inspired me to write this article.  You can find it right here.