The Connection Between Motivation and Potential

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?" - Marianne Williamson

So I've read this quote a couple times in various places on the internet and it never really made sense to me. I personally have always had a fear of being inadequate or not being enough. I finally realized though that she is right. While we all have this fear that maybe we aren't this great person we think we are, we are 10x more afraid that we are and we aren't achieving it.

How scary is it when we see our dreams in front of us and realize that they are attainable? "I could never be an actor." is way more simple to deal with than "I could be an actor but it would take a lot of work, mental fortitude, and 10 years of dedication." Once we identify what our goals are, we as humans, have a tendency to view them as a mountain to climb rather than a series of small inclines.

It behooves every person to have a dream or a goal for themselves. I can't imagine living without one. The more clearly it's defined the more likely you are to achieve it. It has taken me a very long time to understand the concept of defining a goal and then figuring what incremental steps I can take to get there. Anything else is a dream and all you can do with a dream is hope. It's about changing a state of mind from inaction to action, wishing to doing. Losing 50 pounds sounds impossible but losing 2 pounds a week for 6 months sounds hard but attainable.

It sometimes happens that the weight of our potential hinders our motivation. When you know what you want to achieve and its a big task, it's easy to get overwhelmed. The key is to break it into small steps and complete them. The Kaizen Way to Self Improvement states that you just need to get 1% better each day. This in turn will create a snowball effect that will help you reach your goal.

As a friend of mine states "You just gotta get some W's everyday." That's all it takes. If I run one sprint outside, I beat yesterday. So on and so forth.

"It always seems impossible until its done" - Nelson Mandela

The New Age Handcuffs

Since the turn of the millennium we have seen a skyrocketing in college attendance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there has been an increase of 31 percent in college students from 2000 to 2014. This seems like it would be a great indicator of prosperity for America, and to some degree you're right. The issue that seems to be forming however, is an increase in graduates who struggle to find work in their field. This means settling for jobs that they are overqualified for and thus pay less than they demand. It happens every day. I get it, not everyone can land their dream job right out of college, it takes time to find what you want to get into. Truthfully, it's probably better that you get those rough jobs out of the way now so you can have an idea of exactly what you want out of a career. The problem is that college isn't free. So with that 31 percent increase in attendance comes a staggering 2,900% increase in student loans over the same period.The student loans slow creep up on you and when the return on investment isn't out there in the real world you can get stuck working a job you dislike simply because you're getting crushed by debt. Welcome to the New Age Handcuffs.

This problem is likely caused by a couple of things. The first is the idea of academic inflation. The same way that currency can inflate and be worth less over time,ew education can become watered down and devalued. It's partially due to the massive increases we've seen in college students over the last 14 years. Be it population increase or otherwise, we are simply overloading the work force with too many applicants with equal qualification i.e. a Bachelors Degree. Everyone looks to go to college  if they are able to because in America, that's how our success is measured in our early 20s. Very rarely do you see parents bragging about their child's acceptance into a vocational welding school even if that profession makes double that of an archaeology major. Ken Robinson touches on this subject in his TED talk which is well worth the watch. The major idea being that something needs to be done with the school system immediately. If this trend continues we will continue to pump out kids who think that a Bachelors is a guarantee to a job, that simply isn't the case anymore. You begin to have a generation of students inundated with debt they can't pay for because otherwise they can't pretend to be competitive in the job market. 

This brings me to my next point.

Student debt is far and away the worst type of debt you can acquire. This seems bizarre but this is a pretty common belief. Essentially, student loans are part of a growing bubble similar to the 2007 housing bubble, where the return on investment simply isn't there. Barring in-state tuition, trying to pay off these interest laden loans after 6 months in the real world can be a crippling task. That money to move out of your parent's house or buy a car has to be thrown into repaying for an education that hasn't guaranteed you a job. Even if that doesn't seem particularly frightening consider this: if you put $10,000 on a card partying your college away, you end up not being able to afford it and file for bankruptcy, $10,000 in credit card bills and $10,000 in student loans, guess what is infinitely harder to take care of. Yep, student loans.

My point in discussing all of this is not to scare anybody at the prospects after college but merely to acknowledge that it should be treated as an investment and not a formality. University, if accepted, is not a foregone conclusion. It's still a decision to consider with as much care as possible. That goes double for grad school. 

My two recommendations are looking into a gap year to dial in on the interest you want to pursue and see if you actually need a degree for it. The other is looking into vocational schools. I honestly think that they are the most underutilized and best investments you can make simply because it gives you a trade. It allows you to acquire a skill that is employable in the worst of circumstances.

The Paradox of Choice in the Internet Age

I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated because we are all told we can do anything we want to and that’s  where the conversation stops. What’s the anything? That answer is always left out of the conversation. There are an infinite amount of possibilities in the world so, you know, just pick one of those. Now a days its not that simple.

The Paradox of Choice is essentially the idea that the more choices you have, the better off you are, but not really. The more things I can choose from the better, the better chance I have to pick something that will make me happy but what happens when I now have 300 options instead of two? I pick the better of the two and be happy in one scenario or I pick the wrong thing out of three hundred and I think maybe there is something that would’ve been better suited to me. This is the fundamental problem facing all of us in the post - Internet society.

The idea of boundless choice applies to every facet of our lives: colleges, jobs, and even dating. Aziz Ansari touches on this idea in Modern Romance and how it affects our love life and basically boils it down to the thought that we are always seeking greener grass instead of working on our own lawn. Swiping all day on Tinder looking for a bio that matches us instead of going on those fifth and sixth dates that may build into a relationship. Why settle? Just look at how many potential matches I could be missing out on.

This is essentially the society we find ourselves in thanks to the Internet. We are simply overwhelmed with choice. How can we ever know that we are in the best situation when there’s so much out there we are aware of? We all have a friend who is traveling the world while we work a job that doesn’t necessarily spring us out of bed every day. I mean who can help but wonder if maybe they should be doing something else. Ultimately, no one has any clue because we are the first generation to live through this. An on-tap, instant source of information about people just like us doing weird and seemingly fun things.

I think at the end of the day the only real control we have on our own individual situation is to make the best of where you find yourself. Now of course this is not to say that everyone is fine where they are at but sometimes things aren’t as bad as we like to make it seem. I’m definitely guilty of that. The great thing about making the best of what we have is sometime you turn coal into diamonds and sometimes you realize you can’t work with shit and can move on

It’s also worth noting that it has never been easy to be a young twenty something thrust out into the working world. No one loves going from three hours of class a day to a 9-5. It’s okay to wonder what the hell you’re supposed to be doing because at the end of the day no one has it all together. I thought that someone would hand me an adult card and I’d understand how to do my taxes and pick healthcare plans. It never happened because everyone is figuring it out as they go.

So sometimes every opportunity isn’t perfect. That new date may have some quirks or that job may seem like a dead end but at the end of the day, it’s never perfect because it’s not meant to be. The lesson that I try and take to heart is that its better to have the experience and do the damn thing than to never know even if it doesn’t all make sense. I don’t believe in destiny but I believe that eventually we will right our own ship.

I say all this to say to anyone that feels like things aren’t perfect than maybe it’s worth an inner look rather than a change of venue. It’s worth putting on blinders in the interest of narrowing your focus from time to time. Just gotta stay positive and love the grind.