Thank You, Donald Trump

Based on the things Donald Trump has said (Mexicans are rapists, let’s ban Muslims, etc.), it’s very hard to argue he’s not racist—or at least that his rhetoric isn’t. In fact when people talk about Trump I tend to hear remarks like “oh my god our country is moving backwards.” However I want to argue that Donald Trump isn't moving us backward and in fact is helping us. That seems like a ridiculous thing to say, so let me explain:

While Donald Trump is the one saying these extreme things, one man alone saying extreme things is not important. But when lots of people start to agree with him and support him, that’s when things become interesting. And yes while there are some followers who don’t believe Trump will enact his ideas and follow him more for his audacity and status as an outsider, I believe there are just as many (if not more) who genuinely believe in his ideas. Just take a look at this clip from CNN after Trump said he wanted to rid the US of Muslims.

I don’t think Trump is actually influencing anyone’s views. I think his supporters have always believed what Trump is saying, but we’re just seeing it now. These people had these views the entire time but now that there’s a high-profile public figure talking about it fearlessly, they feel safer themselves to come out with their views. Seriously, watch the CNN clip again and look at the guy interviewed at 1:10. The reporter presses him to say whether or not he agrees with Trump’s Muslims-removal plan and after looking over both his shoulders cautiously, he says yes. You can feel that he’s uncomfortable saying this because he knows it’s not a popular position. And while I don’t agree with the idea, I totally understand why he’d be scared to say something like this.

And this is why Trump is actually really important and helpful: he is empowering people to say what they believe. This shows everyone else what we’re actually dealing with. We will never be able to change peoples ideas if we don’t really know what they are. I mean, think back to the guy from the CNN clip. How could we possibly hold a meaningful conversation and attempt to understand why he feels the way he does if we never even knew how he really felt.

Here’s the bottom line: I agree with almost nothing that Trump says. But he has proved to us that we have a lot more work to do than we thought. And for that we owe him thanks.

So Good They Can't Ignore You

This is a summary of the main points in Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

.....

Summary

1. "Follow your passion" is bad career advice. Many people don't have pre-existing passions and their path to finding work they loved was complicated.
2. Great work is rare and valuable so you, in return, need something rare and valuable to offer in return: career capital. This is basically high proficiency in something useful. You have to be So Good They Can't Ignore You (Steve Martin quote and the book's title). 
• To develop yourself to the point of being so good you can't be ignored, you need deliberate practice. This is practice where you intentionally force yourself to practice increasingly difficult tasks because overcoming/learning them will make you better. This part sucks, but it's how you develop skills instead of plateauing like most of us do. 
• It's easy to see this applied to athletes and musicians, but we don't tend to hold this mindset for everyone else. That is a big mistake.
3. Control over what you do and how you do it is super important. Cal calls control the "Dream-Job Elixir." This could mean leaving your job and starting a similar but more independent role or many other things. There are two traps to fall into with control, however. 
• The First Control Trap: it's dangerous to try and gain more control (leave you work, do something radical) if you don't have enough career capital to back it up.
• The Second Control Trap: once you have a lot of career capital, employers won't want to lose you and will fight to keep you on your traditional path.
• Use the Law of Financial Viability (do you have clear evidence that people are willing to pay you for your capital) to discern how much career capital you have and which control area you may be in.
4. To build work you love you cash in career capital for valuable traits like control and mission, a bigger reason or calling for your work.  
• The best ideas for mission are found at the adjacent possible (where you're at the cutting edge of your field and so you can understand things about your field that most others can't). 
• Once you have a mission you have to make it succeed, so generate small steps that produce feedback. Cal calls these little bets. 
• Finally, adopt the mindset of a marketer to make your work known. This is the Law of Remarkability: it must (1) literally compel people to remark about it, and (2) launched in a venue conducive to sharing and remarking.

One last thing I should mention: Cal argues that for most jobs it doesn't matter what you're doing specifically because you can become good at it and ultimately love doing it. However he does list three job attributes that would each prevent workers from developing following Cal's ideas.

1. Few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing rare and valuable skills
2. Job focuses on something you believe is useless or harmful to the world
3. Job forces you to work with people you dislike

Thoughts

1. If many people don't have pre-existing passions, that means they were developed from...something. So could we potentially alter our existing passions and create new ones with some cognitive framing? I think the answer is yes. Also, we haven't experienced everything we ultimately will, so the scale we use to judge how much we like something could change drastically as we find out new awesome things we didn't know existed. 
• however, I think it's a little quick to throw out the idea of passion altogether. Obviously as people find work they love they become passionate about it, and passion also seems to describe mission. So perhaps it'd be more beneficial to think about passion after you have career capital and control rather than before or never.
2. This part I totally agree with, especially deliberate practice. It's humbling to think about how many skills of mine alone have plateaued: piano, beatboxing, singing, smash, YouTube (maybe?), and I'm sure many other that aren't coming to mind. Deliberate practice is just how you get better and we often don't do it because it's difficult...I want to focus a lot on this in my personal life, and that will be discussed more later on in this post. 
3. Control, autonomy, has come up in literature time and time again as being important to people. While reading this I tended to think of freelance-type work as one of few paths with more control, but more control could simply mean a different role in one's organization. 
• As for the second control trap, I think to the movie Get Smart with Steve Carrel. Because Steve is the company's best analyst, he's turned down for a promotion because they feel like they can't afford to lose him in his job. If Steve had read this book, he would have known that he had a lot of leverage at that point.
4. This section really loses me. I think Cal is stretching his examples to fit this category. One guy for instance is an archaeology grad who loves communicating and eventually gets a show on the discovery channel. I don't know if he needed a mission for that, he was just good at communicating and happened to come across the right people and loved doing what he did. The "little bets" were a side-result of his fervor. I think gaining enough capital to experience the adjacent possible is really important, though I don't think you need to be in the AP to experience a passion or mission. I think experiencing the AP is more reflctive of how much career capital you have rather than connected to mission. Now I do think the law of remarkability is actually quite legitimate, but I feel like it accounts more for people recognizing you for your career capital, not building a mission. 

Plans Moving Forward 

[I'll probably come back and edit this section later, just posting initial thoughts here right now]

The biggest things I took from this book are (1) that it's absolutely worthwhile to get very good at things and (2) we achieve a high level of skill only through deliberate practice. With that in mind, I want to take a more intentional approach towards completing the tasks and developing the skills I want. Specifically, applying for internships and increasing my proficiency in graphic design, coding and YouTube.

I think I should put these tasks to a schedule, doing each on certain days so I can focus exclusively on one per day. Until I apply for a fair amount of internships the internships will carry a disproportionate amount of weight. Here's the schedule:

Minimum 30 min per day on each subject:
M–Internship Application
T–YouTube
W–Internship Application
R–Photoshop Tutorial
F–Coding
Weekend–YouTube

For the Internships, I will mostly just be applying to places I've found and looking up potential opportunities. Not much deliberate practice as I see it, more of just completing a task.

For photoshop and coding I'm still learning the basics, so I'll be continuing tutorials online. That qualifies as deliberate practice because I'm learning new things that will naturally be difficult and different.

For Youtube, I had to spend more time thinking of how I can deliberately practice being "better" at what I'm doing there. For that purpose I'm going to make a list of traits I think described good YT-ers. [I'm almost finished but I have to post this at 8, sooooo I'll be coming back to it later]

1. Engaging speaker, passionate about topic
2. 
   

YouTube section:
I think I need to differentiate first whether I want to just improve my skill or also try intentionally to grow (because while connected, those are two different things). I'll talk about just improving for now.

Here's a short list of the qualities I think make YouTubers great
-they have fun with their own style.




 layout a schedule and plan to help me work on the skills I want to develop. At this moment in time, those are coding, photoshop, getting an internship (not a skill, but whatevs) and YouTube. importantly, (2) that deliberate practice is critical to becoming better at what you do.

1. I'm coming back to this.

What are the things that, right now, I want to be better at. 

photoshop, coding, youtube. 

going ham on YouTube? and i guess internship...resume.


.....
Mid-way through writing this I came across this post by my friend Serena. I had read it before and bookmarked it, and now because of its title I read it again. http://serenafulton.com/2015/05/05/why-following-your-passion-is-bad-career-advice/

Generalizing Psych Activities

In my multi-cultural psychology class we did this activity: thumb-wrestle for 1 minute and each time a partner pins the other, they get .2 extra credit points. As soon as we were told this and paired up, I said to my partner, "this makes me feel awkward, let’s do whatever and say we each won twice.” She agreed.

Our thumb-wrestling was really more pleasant conversation than anything else—mostly about how my thumbs relative to hers were enormous and how the activity therefore wasn't fair. I did wind up winning both of the two wrestles we did. Time was up and the teacher started to say what I (and probably you) had expected all along.

This activity wasn’t about the winner or loser, it was about how we would engage in the activity, specifically whether we had more collectivistic (cooperative, group-oriented) or individualistic (competitive, individual-oriented) tendencies. It was meant to elicit behavior like me proposing we split the victories regardless of the outcome. As the teacher was explaining this, my partner said she’d write down that I’d won 3 wrestles and she’d won 1. 

This activity was...interesting. My teacher said it was to see whether we were more collectivistic or individualistic but I strongly contest the fact that an exercise like this provides much real insight into our generalized behavior. There are soooo many others factors coming into play. 

Yes, I said let’s split the points. No, that doesn’t necessarily make me a collectivistic person. I said what I did because I personally don’t value .6 points of extra credit so much that I’d be competitive to an off-putting extent. In my opinion the social perception of being a “tryhard” strongly trumps the insignificant amount of extra credit available. 

So whether I’m an individualistic person or not (I am), this activity doesn’t reflect my true beliefs because there are other social factors that act on the situation with greater strength than the extra credit incentive did. From a brief glance around the room, it seemed like most if not all students had made some sort of “collectivist compromise” like myself, though we have no way of really knowing whether or not this collectivism applies to any other aspects of our lives. 

So this collectivism activity, while it may shed light on some specific situational attitudes, cannot be generalized because there are too many other factors at play. I’m guessing my teacher knows this, but it still bothered me enough that I wanted to write about it, haha. 

A couple of other things I noticed:

• My partner wrote down 3-1 instead of the actual score, 2-0. She probably felt that even though I said I was totally fine splitting the total that she should be fair. 
• We could have kept the orginal score because I still had two more than her. But 2-0 is significantly different from 3-1 because with the latter she also earns points. 
• Lastly, while I did say we should make it even, I didn’t specifically lose intentionally to make our scores actually even. I was just going to do the thumb-wrestling, disregard the ultimate score, and say we were even. After I won two I could have (very obviously) let myself lose so we both actually won and lost twice. I wonder if other people did this. Does it say anything about me? Probably, but I don’t know exactly what. Let me know your thoughts below :) 

The Fine Print

Recently the internet was in an uproar about the Fine Bros. trademarking the term "REACT" as part of a global initiative they were trying to launch. Basically they would let people use their format if they paid them, and if not they'd take down their videos. The story is more complex than that and it's been a little difficult to follow, so I've compiled a multi-media storyline explaining what went down.

1. Fine Bros. Announcement Video (watch only first half!)*
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9X8xZzyZyY
2. Reactions
• Film Cow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No_Vti186Tk 
• h3h3Productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwcmWhPcTk8
• boogie2988 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN-vhZoO7wM
• Hank Green https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-trouble-with-trademarks-dcd8af3bede3#.gf3lx8emx
• Former Fine Bros. Employee
  https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/43sdch/not_a_video_but_the_finebros_have_cancelled_all/czkn6yc
• Philip DeFranco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_3HESGr52A
3. Fine Bros. Update Video (watch only second half!)*
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9X8xZzyZyY**
4. CGP Grey Sarcasm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dPnaAt-Rbs
5. The End
• https://medium.com/@FineBrothersEnt/a-message-from-the-fine-brothers-a18ef9b31777#.p4vpo2fda

In the end it seems like many people still don't trust them and they have a record of going after other creators. Whether or not they changed as people at least we don't have the trademark issue anymore.

~~Footnotes~~
*original video by Fine Bros. was deleted, mirror upload (if this is deleted let me know, I downloaded the mirror)
**before and after uploading the update video, The Fine Bros. were losing something like 300 subscribers per minute...which is insane. They went from something like 14 million subscribers to 13 million in one day. I didn't keep a good track of those specific numbers, but I've compiled the drama for you all to follow :)

The Longest Ever Study on Happiness

This TED Talk discusses the longest ever study on happiness. It followed 724 men from their childhood to their 90s, and it has spanned generations of researchers. These men were originally students from either Harvard or Boston’s worst suburbs. I summarized the main points of the talk below:

1. Social connections are really good for us. Loneliness kills. People connected to families, communities are happier, healthier, live longer. More isolated people are less happy, less healthy, brain functioning declines, they live shorter lives. (1/5 Americans are lonely)
2. It’s not just the number of friends or being in a relationship that makes you happy, but the quality of those relationships. Living in warm relationships is good, protective. Living in bad relationships is worse than a divorce. Biggest predictor of health at 80 had nothing to do with cholesterol or physical ailments: people who were most satisfied in relationships at 50 were healthiest at 80 (when they had more physical pain, their moods were still happy). But for people in unhealthy relationships, the emotional pain magnified the physical pain.
3. Being in securely attached relationship to another person keeps your memory sharper longer.

As we can see, the ultimate takeaway is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Nothing about fame or wealth correlates that strongly.* The speaker mentions in the beginning that over 80% of millenials have the goal to get rich, and 50% want to become famous. I don’t know if it’s only millenials who have these unrealistic life aspirations, but watching this TED talk could help a lot of them realize that perhaps that goal isn’t the best one.

*Other researchers have found similar things, that while money may correlate up to a degree, it isn’t as big as we think (https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory?language=en).