Rejection Without Shame

Rejection comes in a litany of flavors:

“We don’t have any conflicts here.”

“We deal with conflicts really well here.”

“We don’t really need your services right now, but if we do, we’ll give you a call.”

“[silence]. Who are you again?”

“How do you say your name?”

“I don’t understand how anybody can make money from doing what you do.”

“How do you monetize that?”

“Yeah, your rates are too high.”

“Yeah, your rates are too low.”

“I don’t understand what you are selling.”

“Why can’t you help me NOW?”

“Where did you get your degree again?”

“How do you make it here in this town?”

“Where are you from again?”

“Hmmmm. Ok. That sounds kind of interesting.” [Then wander off to get bread at the networking event ‘nosh’ table.]

“Have you tried working for a human resource company?”

“Have you tried working with [insert name of big company here]?”

“I don’t understand what you just said that you do.”

“There aren’t any people around here doing that are there?”

“Could you not charge me as much?”

“We’re strapped for cash right now and not really focused on retaining outside help right now.”

“Your rates are too high; you’ll never make a profit around here.”

“We are a family company. There aren’t any conflicts among family.”

“I handle conflict really well; I don’t see how I would use your services.”

“Have you tried working with lawyers around here?”

“We can’t pay you.”

“We’ll get back to you.”

“We can’t pay you.”

“Can you do this for free for us?”

“We can’t pay you.”

“Send us your information and we’ll look at it.” >click<

“I just don’t have time to talk to you, call back next week.” [Call back again next week]

“I just don’t have time to talk to you, call back next week.” >click<

“That sounds interesting, but I don’t want you to drive all the way to [name location 25 miles in any direction from locally] to meet me. It would just be a waste of your time.”

“You’ll never make a living doing that. You should get a ‘real’ job.”

“You went to college for CONFLICT!?”

“Why don’t you just volunteer?”

Very rarely have we ever heard “No,” “No thank you,” or “No this isn’t for us.”

Although ultimately, the fact is that all the forms of rejection really come down to such a consideration. All the forms of rejection can be given without personally attacking, trolling, tearing down individuals’ talent, and questioning people’s motives. But when rejection crosses the line from “No this isn’t for us” to “You don’t deserve to have a voice,” or “You need to be denied the ability to speak because I disagree with you,” then we’ve crossed over the line into another area.

And we must be careful with what lines we cross because sometimes, there is no going back.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 6 – Randy Shain

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 6 – Randy Shain, Author, 173 Pages Every College Student Must Read, Entrepreneur, Speaker, Mentor & Coach

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #6 - Randy Shain

[powerpress]

Dear 2017 Graduates of High School and College-

Congratulations, you have come to the end of a long, traditional, mostly academic journey, whose steps and path were mainly decided for you by other people.

Now, upon graduation, you are in charge of your own decisions. And, where you may wind up at the end of the path known as your life.

I have been thinking a lot about your path, future conflict, and where you might wind up as adults.

I will not lie to you: Your seeming multiplicity of choices about when, how and why to start on your path really comes down to one deeply black and white choice. No matter what you have been told by professors, faculty members, or parents, the choice really comes down to answering unequivocally and thoroughly one black and white question:

Do you want to work or not?

Your work is not your job.

Your work is also not your passion.

I am not going to write here and tell you to “follow your passion.” That is often given, facile, advice provided to you by well-meaning, but misguided, people who operate organizations that may seek to hire you post-graduation. But more likely than not, they won’t.

But more likely than not, they won’t.

When you answer the much more interesting and pivotal question about whether or not to work in your own mind and heart, and to your own satisfaction, then you can make all of the other decisions that will cascade dividends throughout your entire life.

Let me paint you a picture:

I decided after the first ten years of being in the working world after college, that I wasn’t going to work a job—any job—another day in my life.

Think about that.

Now, make no mistake, I work at my business.

I work at my corporate training gigs.

I also work when I advise clients, take them through the sales process and get profit at the end.

I work when I write blog posts, do research, create videos and even do my audio podcast.

Like the one right here I did today with Randy Shain, author of 173 Pages Every College Student Must Read. But go get it after you read the rest of this.

In the traditional understanding of “labor,” both the Marxist and the Capitalist have it wrong: Labor is something that you can do for no money. And that labor—the labor that you decide needs no compensation—will assuredly be the labor that reflects your truest passions, desires, interests and goals.

And—trust me when I write this—money soon follows.

Your job (current or future) is not your work, college and high school graduates. Your job is merely a series of tasks that you accomplish in an organization in the pursuit of someone else’s passion.

This does not excuse you from performing in said job with excellence. As a matter of fact, it is your moral and ethical duty to perform any job task that you take on in the pursuit of working another’s passion, with excellence and moral verve.

At this point, you may be thinking, “This guy is crazy. First, he tells me that he’s not going to tell me to pursue my passion. Then he tells me something that sounds remarkably similar to that advice that I hear very often.”

Let me be even clearer: Many people, from James Altucher to Tim Ferriss talk a lot about “choosing yourself.” This is the idea that no one—not a boss, a parent, an authority figure in government or anybody else—can truly provide your life with security and meaning anymore. The rules, the safety net, and the promises of the Industrial Revolution are dead and gone. They represented a brief, flashpoint in world history and humanity is gradually and fundamentally, moving away from those promises, all the way from cradle to grave. What this means is you have to pick yourself and do the hard work of actually building yourself up. You have to research and employ the tools that are laying around everywhere for free on the Internet—but that you haven’t been fully integrated into for the last 22 or so years—to develop yourself and your truly meaningful work.

This is the work of your life that you have to choose to do. Or not

Yes, answering, truly answering, the question about whether or not you really want to work, means that you will have to commit to doing two—or more—things at once. You will have to delay gratification, show grit and persistence in the face of rejection, and preserve empathy and remain courageous, in the face of dismissal, passivity, and societal apathy.

School didn’t teach you how to deal with this.

Work—in the way that people traditionally think about it—won’t teach how to deal with this either.

The church and your volunteer civic life may have gotten close to teaching you these lessons.

These fine line distinctions that come from committing to one choice and doggedly sticking to it. But I can guarantee you that the rich, meaningful life for which you are searching, will become available to you if you answer this one question firmly, unequivocally and then act on it in the same fashion.

Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about all of those banks and student loan debt that you’ve piled up while dutifully learning and regurgitating the meaningless lessons of a dead, industrialized system. There are plenty of smart people out here who are tap dancing as fast as they can to undo the banking system, which is the second to the last edifice of the old Industrial system.

That is their passion.

Their true work.

If you really want to do something about your debt, go get a job working at one of these organizations.

They are growing, they are hungry and no one sees them coming.

So.

Do you want to work or not?

Connect with Randy in all the ways that you can below and click on the player above to listen to his thoughts on all of this:

Randy Shain on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randy.shain.7

Randy Shain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-shain-68b03010/

One on One Mentors Website: http://www.oneononementors.com/about/

One on One Mentors Blog: https://www.facebook.com/oneononecollegementors

One on One Mentors on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oneononementors

Anxiety, Worry and Hurry

Worry about things you can’t control and outcomes that are dependent upon other people responding (or reacting) is at the heart of anxiety.

Our modern struggle with anxiety comes from three areas: Our desire for immediacy of outcome (or resolution); Our lack of internal resilience; Our impatience with process as a method of accomplishing goals.

We narcotize our worry, or anxiety, with food, alcohol, drugs, violence (self-directed and other-directed) and even lately video games, social media, and coloring books.

The thing is, sitting with worry, and then learning to have faith and let that worry go, is the only way to find the peace that we are craving.

The process of getting from worry to letting go of worry can be mediated and adjudicated by meditation, prayer, and journaling (we forget past victories over worry unless they are recorded…memory is a slippery thing) but when we combine the desire for immediacy, control, and impatience, then hurry sneaks in.

And we are too busy to remember past victories. Too busy to engage in a letting go process. Too busy to do anything but worry.

The ways out of this are easy, but they require self-knowledge, self-direction, and self-regulation to work.

Not more distractions.

Culture of Immediacy

The culture of immediacy that we have created with our digital social communication tools, has convinced our brains that problems of all kinds should be solvable immediately, to our specifications, and with little effort (or friction) on our part.

Here are a few examples. Your mileage (and examples) may vary:

Climate change could be solved tomorrow…if only the “right” people oversaw the solutions. Like the people who populate my Facebook feed…

Elections could turn out with the “right” outcome with results that I could see immediately…just like a Twitter poll does…

People could treat each other with fairness, justice, and equality in a pretty cool and hip way…if only it were the “right” people doling out the fairness, justice and equality…and all others who don’t agree (or aren’t hip or cool enough) could be blocked or never seen anyway….just like in my SnapChat feed…

Rights, responsibility, accountability, and freedom. These are human conditions that took centuries to adjudicate, argue over, and have conflict about, to come to the space of where we are now as a global culture.

They will not fall to the growing culture of immediacy anytime soon.

Netflix, podcasts, YouTube videos, search results. These are tools of communication that operate on the principles of speed to market (your eyes) and entertainment (your brain).

The slow, plodding things that need to change (i.e. systems) are hard to shift, require emotional energy in the face of human intransigence and institutional friction, and need conflict to change. It used to be that we recognized and passed on to the next generation, the idea that incremental change was enough and that lifetime change (on the scale of anywhere from 35.5 to 78.8 years) was enough to get a society and culture to where it could reasonably be expected to be.

But this idea of plodding, incremental change is slowly eroding in the face of collective minds, attitudes, and behaviors being transformed by the culture of immediacy that our digital social communication tools provide.

Combine this fact with the reality that the inner workings (both the how and the why) of our digital social communication have become incomprehensible for the average person and that we have elevated this incomprehensibility from a minor annoyance (think about how you could repair a car in your garage only 50 years ago) to a belief in the magical genius of self-interested companies (think Google and how the algorithm of search works), and we have a giant problem on our global cultural hands.

Relationships with people are boring, mundane, exciting, and thrilling.

Solutions to people problems cannot be solved through the clever application of another frictionless algorithm.

People cannot be inspired through speed, or motivated through impatience to change.

The hard work, the meaningful work, the work of people conflicting against other people, is the last thing that will survive the cult of immediacy we have built.

If we let it.

And the changes that can come about from that survival is worth leveraging all the immediacy-based, incomprehensible tools for good, that you can.

The Privacy of Memory

We lose a little of ourselves when we outsource our memory to Google.

But not in the obvious way that we think of.

What we lose in the privacy (some would say inaccuracy) of memory is the ability to forget.

And to be forgotten.

The privacy of memory and the palaces that we build in our minds of truths, facts, lies and stories is more valuable than we know to preserving the best parts of our fragile humanity.

In the rush to electronically preserve the truth in non-debatable, and factual ways, we are losing the pleasure (and the privilege) of the privacy of choosing what we want to remember—and what we have the grace, forgiveness and ability to forget.

When we can call out each other using facts we like that work for us (and avoid or dismiss the facts that don’t), our social media communications and interactions become about expressing the rawest of emotions with immediacy, in the face of overwhelming facts that are preserved as eminent, and indisputable truth.

Google can’t help us here. Neither can artificial intelligence. Neither can another social communication platform.

Only human beings can preserve the privacy of memory in relationship with other human beings.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #3 – Katie Vaz

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #2 – Katie Vaz, Illustrator, Graphic Designer, and Author of “Don’t Worry, Eat Cake”

[powerpress]

Love is a many splendor thing.

…maybe that’s splendid…

Or so it is said.

When you get to do what you love every day, it doesn’t seem like work. But the thing is, many people don’t do what they love every day.

Many people, for a variety of reasons, do what they have to do, what they are required to do, or what they are told to do.

Our guest today, Katie Vaz, a graphic designer and illustrator, and author of Don’t Worry, Eat Cake, is living the life that she wants to live, doing what she wants to do, and creating a voice and an oeuvre of work that shows what can happen when you march to the beat of your own drummer.

And now, a word about coloring books:

There’s a growing movement of providing coloring books for adults, and Katie’s book is about tapping into this phenomenon.

I personally have never colored (with the exception of finger painting and whatever I did in college art classes for my major), but I understand the sentiment behind the idea in a world where love is the hardest thing to attain.

What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.

That, and coloring books.

And cake.

Definitely cake….

Connect with Katie in all the ways that you can below:

Etsy Store (Use code EARBUD20 for 20% off orders for Valentine’s Day): https://www.etsy.com/shop/katievaz

Website: http://katievaz.com/

Blog: http://katievaz.com/blog/

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Worry-Eat-Cake-Everything/dp/1449478123

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katievaz

Twitter: https://twitter.com/katievaz

Katie Vaz Design on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KatieVazDesign

Network Leap 3

Most people don’t see it.

Confusing the primacy of what we can see, touch, taste, and feel, closes our human perceptions to the potential financial and monetary value of what we cannot measure and codify with our five senses.

This is evident in the primacy of the use of relationship networks in every aspect of our lives.

We cannot touch connection, though we can experience a story with other people.

We cannot see engagement, though we can engage in active listening and experience the positive effects of someone listening to us intently, and the negative effects of someone ignoring us.

We cannot see the value in a relationship, but we can feel with our hands and our emotions the ways in which people grow in relationship transactionally with us.

We cannot see the cruft, bad feelings, negative emotions, and life experiences where the relationship didn’t “work out” as transactionally as we would like, which often creates in us a sense of caution at getting back into relationships and connections.

We have all observed the causal outcomes of the impact of things we can’t see (relationships) and have experienced the power in maintaining and growing connections (networks) to people who may—or may not—be able to “help” us advance in the world.

We all know someone who has gotten a cake job, attained a plum position, or moved up the ladder of an organization, not through technical skills, but through the value of human connection.

Most people don’t see it.

We cannot directly observe the functions of the Internet.

We cannot directly observe how information spreads through bits and bytes and is translated into images, text, and videos.

We cannot directly observe how those videos, texts, and images impact the mind and change the perceptions of the receiver of those messages, but we all accept the reality of these changes happening.

We cannot see how searching for information on the Internet, using a tool such as Google, unites us as disparate people in a communal desire to connect, engage, and to grow our interests, our curiosities, our agreements, and our arguments.

Most people don’t see it.

But Google does.

Think about it: Google as a search engine tool proves—in a form monetized at enormous scale—that the networks of connections matter more for making money, making more connections, making products, making ideas, and making services than anything else tried in human history up to this point.

But there’s an upper limit to that knowledge.

Trapped by the confines of the box in your pocket (i.e. your mobile phone) or the box in your house (i.e. your TV or desktop computer) or the box in your briefcase (i.e. your tablet), there’s a hardware limit to a software solution.

There might not be a software solution to the problems that people have, but in the 21^st century, Google (now Alphabet) is going to do its level best to break out of the boxes it is currently trapped in, and prove that networks between people in the physical world, can be scaled and monetized just as easily as they were through a search function.

Google sees it.

Do you?

Finding Your Tribe

Social tools allow us to connect with other people now more than ever before through three important ways:

Education.

Entertainment.

Edification.

Finding the people who believe in your message, who desire to be educated, or who want to be entertained, is easier now more than ever.

Of course, it’s easier now more than ever, for the noise of a thousand million voices to drown out—not the finding of others who want to communicate with you—but to drown out the ability to connect in a meaningful way with others who need the connection.

Organizations have always sought to use communication connection tools to push agendas, send messages, and to ensure conformity.

But it’s easier now more than ever, for those organizations—governments, churches, political organizations, bureaucracies—to be circumscribed by the individual in search of connection rather than spectacle.

The hardest things during this 4^th revolution in human communication are not going to be finding your tribe, or cutting through the noise, or battling against the forces of conformity.

The hardest things are going to be as follows:

Starting.

Continuing.

Ending.

And every system that we have set up from our last revolution (the Industrial one) that remains in this one, was designed to squelch, manipulate, or channel in “socially appropriate ways” starting, continuing, and ending.

So, get to finding your tribe.

Go start.

The Moral Arc of the Universe

The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

And justice, supposedly, is blind.

Or so they say.

But people, with their prejudices, conflicts, disagreements, and dissensions, have trouble arcing towards blindness.

The issue with justice is not the fact of justice, that which is applied through the creation of laws, the codification of morals, and through genuine appeals to theology and philosophy.

The other issue with justice is that it’s application is often confused with something else.

Vengeance.

Because stories get closer to the truth of this than facts do, a character in a movie once stated that, “Karma is justice without the satisfaction. I don’t believe in justice.”

Many people and groups scream loudly for justice.

There are signs, placards, and bumper stickers with the phrase, “no justice, no peace” emblazoned upon them, but what they are really demanding is karmic retribution, not an arc of the universe bending toward justice.

Or peace.

Retribution, vengeance, revenge; wrongs righted with immediacy and swift, unambivalent consequences. Punishment, meted out by at the highest order, in the fastest way, with as few innocent people harmed as possible.

We are undergoing a global revolution where groups, cultures and individuals are confusing the potential, long desired outcomes of the revolution with their own personal desires for karmic retribution.

The narrative arc of the current revolution goes something like this:

Never before in the history of world is there access to more information, more money and more power to change the world in that ways that we would like it to be, rather than the ways that it has always been.

No longer will disparate groups and individuals wander the world, merely satisfied with the outcomes formerly guaranteed to them by “betters” or “others” in the social order.

We want more.

And if we don’t receive the more that we are guaranteed, then we will either move those in power to get it.

Of we will call for justice (and crank up the social pressure to conform) until we get the material outcomes we seek.

This narrative underlies current calls for justice, with the immediacy of the narrative following ever newly discovered injustices, as wave after wave of more access, more mobility and more individualized power seems to wash over the societies and cultures we inhabit.

But so what, right?

Well, conflicts occur when narratives differ, when perceptions of justice don’t match and when unanticipated disruptions happen. Conflicts happen when narratives of actual injustices (and perceived narratives of injustice) rub up against each other.

And when the only resolutions come in the form of power transfers and shifts, conflicts escalate quickly to violence.

One need only look at incidents around the United States (and the world) last year to see the evidence of this. With that being said, there are some critical questions to ask–and answer:

What are we to do?
What is the balance between justice, vengeance, and the more revolution that we are experiencing worldwide?
What is the most unambiguous way for all people (even those who have chosen not to participate due to inability, lack of ability or lack of interest) to benefit from the new largesse that technology promises to provide?
What are societies and cultures to do, even as the center disintegrates and the power holders in culture, media, and journalism and on and on, lose out in the shifting narratives of our times? Who gets to choose?
Who gets to make the world?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

But far more energy should be spent on discussing and answering the questions, than on advancing a narrative that cries out for justice disguised as vengeance, while at the same time proclaiming that fairness and equitable treatment are the true goals.

On this day, let us commit to knowing the difference between justice and vengeance and to asking—and answering—the hard questions of the narratives that underlie our motive, our assumptions, and the ongoing global arc towards something that might eventually look like justice.

[Advice] Conspiracy Theories

The standing rule is that people tend to most easily believe in conspiracy theories that they create; and tend to reject the conspiratorial thinking of others.

The trouble with our concerns about fake news, is that they come from a place where critical thinking has been reduced in favor of playing to (and supporting) audience attention spans that rival those of hummingbirds.

The long read, the long form content, the long movie; the challenging idea, the scientific journal, the complicated path to learning a new language; these are all in competition against TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), the 30 second cat video on YouTube, the 6 second looping Vine video, or the easily shareable click-bait article.

Audiences have been convinced by both marketers, and journalists (just marketers in another way) that their thinking and content consumption choices are sophisticated. That they are able to sift through biases consciously (without relying on assumptions and inferences from facts not in evidence), come to rational conclusions, and then act on those conclusions to co-create an orderly world.

Oh, but were that so.

When audiences can pick their own personalized access to “knowledge” and can choose their own “facts” then news that comes from sophisticated marketers (some former journalists) and content creators, becomes the coin of access to the conspiratorial realm. And social cueing, confirmation bias, and attribution activates individuals in the audience to create their own, publicly viewable, and socially shareable conspiracy theories.

Not about aliens landing at Roswell.

Not about the Illuminati running the world.

Not about a rising one-world government.

Not about a coming cashless society.

But conspiracies about stolen votes, illegal voting (and voters), racialism, economic injustice, Big Pharmaceutical companies poisoning vaccines, Big Agricultural companies poisoning seeds, Big Banks ceasing to be allowed to failed, Big Governments seeking to curb natural rights, Big Faith seeking to curb libertine tendencies, and on, and on, and on.

This type of conspiracy theory mongering is particularly subtle and insidious, because it plays on the mistrust and biases audiences already have built in to their world-view and thinking, but it does the play at scale, and one-to-one. This creates a feeling of community (we’re in the know) while also creating a feeling of persecution (we’re on the outside of everyone else).

And people should have expected it. As more knowledge, has become more accessible to the common individual (if you have a smartphone in your pocket with Internet access, you have a supercomputer) we have been encouraged to embrace the conspiracies we like, share them with our friend circle, and then sit back and wait passively for reality to match our frames and worldviews. And when that doesn’t happen, we go back, double-down, and start the conflict cycle.

Mass media (led by the collapsing and panicking journalism field) is complicit in this as well, seeking to drive audience attention to ideas and concepts that are spurious, but that also generate clicks. This is because mass media content production can’t figure out (at scale) how to get audiences to pay for something they can get anywhere for free, but it’s also driven by the ego-based desire to be seen, be acknowledged as an expert, and to grow the network and personal brand of the content creator at the expense of the market, and the audience, gaining new knowledge, or being challenged in any meaningful way.

Fake news—and the environment that allows conspiracy theories to metastasize—is not going to go away. The echo chambers of social platforms are too powerful, with too many voices, too many passive audience members, and too many exclusively self-interested actors.

What is going to have to change is, as always, the hardest piece: Individuals are going to have to decide what they will absorb, what ideas they will believe, and they critically reject other ideas, based on objective evidence and proof.

But if individuals (and audiences) could do that effectively, the placebo effect long-ago would have ceased to be effective.