Dear Graduates of High School & College – 2014 –

Dear Graduates of High School & College-

You have been told a lot of things by a lot of well meaning individuals on the way to the end at which you find yourself. You have been told things by your parents, your teachers, your counselors, your professors and even your crazy Aunt Ida.

But now, I’m going to tell you something that none of them may have had either the wherewithal or the gumption to mention. I’m going to try to do it gently, but, as a famous man once said “The Truth isn’t mean, it’s just the Truth.”

So….here we go…

Life is hard. Your grades, those letters that you spent a lot of time, sweat and—in some cases—blood, to get don’t matter a hill of beans to anybody outside of this institution from which you find yourself escaping.

Those little letters (and numbers in some cases) actually serve to hobble you and handicap you in venues outside of here.

The attainment of them has twisted your thinking into believing that there is only one way of doing, thinking, and being, when, in actuality, there are an infinite number of ways of thinking, doing, and being and no one can tell you which one is the best.

This realization is the chief thing that makes life hard for the first five years after you leave here. There are right and wrong decisions, but there are no definite decisions.

Employers don’t care about how smart you are.

You are the smartest generation to ever graduate from educational institutions that haven’t changed their approach to education significantly since World War 2 (it was something that happened in between the end of the Great Depression and the end of Jim Crow. Google it.) and no one outside of these walls cares about your level of intellectual intelligence. Unless you’re a doctor or engineer.

Employers only care about you showing up, doing the work, not complaining or bad mouthing them either in person or online, and then taking their check and going home to your one-bedroom, badly light and poorly heated apartment.

They don’t care about your student loan debt.
They don’t care that you fed kids in Kenya last year.
They don’t care that you have an active Youtube.com channel with 30,000 hits.

Employers are really…really…really…narrowly focused.

They only care about how much your work adds to their bottom line. In business speak, this is called “added value.”

And most of your bosses, i.e. employers, supervisors, managers and others above you, who will hire you, are people that never graduated college and couldn’t wait to get away from high school, or who drank their way through college and ten years later made anywhere between $250,000 and $1,000,000.

And all your intellectual capacity won’t matter a hill of beans to them.

Develop something, anything that you own.

Look, social media is great for Snap Chatting to your friends, knocking other people on Twitter or getting all hot and bothered about the Ukraine or social justice on Facebook, but these platforms can also be used to build a project, an idea or—even a business—that YOU care about.

This road, the road through entrepreneurship—is hard, heartbreaking, long, and lonely and will not be materially fulfilling for the first ten years that you are doing it.

Almost everyone will tell you that you’re crazy.
Almost everyone will silently cheer for your failure.
Almost everyone will tell you about their half-baked ideas.

But if you can survive all of that, you can have something that no one in any previous generation has had for a very long time: Positional financial security.

Or, you’ll crash and burn and fail.

But, at least you won’t have another $150,000 of student loans in your life, chipping away at your financial, emotional, marital (some of you out here WILL get married) and psychological health.

I will not close with the maxim that many do to “follow your passion.” The reason I won’t is because the Greek root of the work passion really means to “work unceasing.”

I will close by encouraging you to work.

Work unceasingly.

So…go do that.

Go to work.

Thank you.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

Google to Earth

The most difficult skill set to master, even in our current post-social age, is the skill of managing other people.

The recent changes and departures at Google serve as an example of this. No matter how “whiz-bang” the technology, people will always be at the core of a company’s focus, growth and competency.

Three points to consider:

Managing people is only going to become more complicated, not less, as individuals make life choices that serve to set up their existences around concepts of shared individuality, rather than enforced commonality.
Emotional intelligence, virtue ethics, patience, religious belief, recovery from failure, grit and perseverance are all learned discrete skills and traits that groups can advocate and promulgate, but that individuals have to practice and internalize. Unfortunately, these skills are to often “taken for granted” rather than “trained into” people.
Training implements skills at the lowest level, coaching reinforces learned skills at the next highest level and education—learned skills actively practiced and then passed onto others—happens at the highest level. This is the path for learning and absorbing, the discrete skills to be able to handle other people, as well as oneself.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant

Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)

Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining

Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

Wisdom in the Machine

When the astronaut Dave powers down the rebellious HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more recently in the 2013 film, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix, we determine through pop culture, what machine “death” looks–and feels–like.

The fact of murder comes from the fact of life and ideas and philosophies that we have as individual humans–and collective societies–about what traits constitute life.

In the case of a machine, we here at HSCT take the position that a machine cannot overcome the limitations of its creator.

Life is defined, not only by self-sustaining processes (we were asked while writing this post, if it would be murder to power down a machine created by another machine) but also by wisdom that is attained through life experience.

The crux of wisdom lies at the intersection of common sense, insight and understanding.

HAL 9000 may have had one, or even two, of those things—such as insight and understanding—but “he” (see how we anthropomorphized an inanimate object there) lacked the third trait in spades: common sense.

Just like Skynet in Terminator or the machines and computer programming networks of The Matrix, HAL 9000 was unable to negotiate in good faith with his creator.

“He” made an “all or nothing” decision about Dave’s presence, Dave’s mission and Dave’s motives and then took extreme action.

The same way that the machines did in The Matrix and Terminator.

The ability to negotiate with others in good faith, and to honor those agreements, is a human trait based in knowledge, experience, common sense and insight, not just a happy byproduct of a conscious mind.

And until machines have the ability to negotiate with, not only their environments in the rudest sense of the term, but also with their creators, we should feel free to power them up—or down—at our will.

After all, our Creator does the same thing.

Right?

-Peace Be With You All-

Tragedy of the Abundance Commons

In an abundance economy, built on trust, generosity and collaboration, the real tragedy of the commons is those who choose to participate selfishly, and in essence destroy the very thing that they are building in the first place.

http://hsconsultingandtrain.wix.com/hsct

Jasmine Starr’s recent issues in the blogging world are one example.

So is Marissa Mayer’s commentary about the photography world.

Many look at collaborative work in a social space as competing against the soiling of that same space by the presence of big brands with their ability to pay big money to clog your Facebook feed with advertisements.

However, the real tragedy, is allowing the collaborative possibilities to wither under the weight of fears and concerns over Edgerank, “what kind of content should I post,” and irrelevant speculation about an overabundance of noise and chatter.

Collaboration cuts through all of that to the bone of what abundance is at its heart: sharing.

Didn’t someone else bring this up about 2,000 years ago?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant

Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)

Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining

Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HSCT’s website: http://hsconsultingandtrain.wix.com/hsct

Towards A More Thankful Union

We here at the HSCT Communication Blog are all thankful this day for many things:
The country where we live,
The family that we have,
The connections we are about to make,
The business that we are growing,
The tools that we have to explore the world,
The intellect and science behind them,
The religiousity that allowed people to develop ideas,
The advancements in the world that feed more people well,
The times that are a changin’,
The peace we have an opportunity to build,
The relationships we have had a chance to build,
The connections that we have made,
The critics, naysayers and disbelievers that we have,
The “no’s,”
The “yes’s,”
The “maybe laters,”
The incredulity,
The pain
…and the promise…

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant

Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)

Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining

Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Rendering Unto Peace

There is nothing more capitalistic and freedom loving than making peace.

Think about it.

Two people come together to agree (or disagree) on an issue.

The issue gets resolved, gets to stalemate or gets blown up, but no matter what happens, the people involved in the process (the warring parties and the mediator) get to participate together.

Managing conflict is a place where the capitalistic principle of work = pay should rule.

The principles of freedom and republican democracy work in conflict management as well, because all parties involved can make a choice, whether they want to participate or not, and to get to resolution, everyone must learn and practice the principles of negotiation.

We here at HSCT grow weary of hearing political commentators and others talk about the fallacy of conflict resolution and of developing peace, while at the same time focusing on litigation, imprisonment, warfare and strife as the preferred way to go.

Jesus talked about peace. He also talked about money (check out Matthew 22:15-22 on this one).

When are we going to cease believing that making peace and making money are mutually exclusive?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

On Liberty, Wikileaks and Sullen Paranoia

“We in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” John F. Kennedy
In America, we pride ourselves on freedom, first amendment rights and the ability to have extensive privacy protection.

Yet, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Big Data and other intersections between the government and corporations sharing information to either get us to buy more, spend more, or to just watch us more, has put to lie some of these freedoms.

Enough Americans still see this country as the “Home of the Brave,” but less and less so over the last few years.

However, there is nothing that couldn’t be recaptured about the freedom to be left alone, inherent in our American freedoms, by replacing a few legislative leaders and by rethinking how we look at the cultural and social implications of privacy.

Two articles, one from Jules Polonetsky and one from Peggy Noonan make the point that, while personal-public behavior may change in the short-term, due to surveillance and monitoring, in the long term, such efforts serve to create a nation of, in essence, sullen, paranoid, people: Angry and pessimistic at being watched constantly, but unable to stop it and believing that it is everywhere.

The balance between the result of every click, search and posting being held against me and government and corporations being able to interrupt me constantly with marketing and appeals to buy or support more and more stuff, has not been worked out fully in the American public sphere yet.

Fortunately for all of us, the American public will figure out how to resolve the tensions in this conflict, long before the laggards and late-majority in governments—local, state and federal—will.

-Peace Be With You All-

Big Data, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Federal Data Gathering Centers

“Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth. Tell no lie. Everything you think, do and say is in the pill you took today.”–Zager and Evans

There is a direct line between the rise of GMO’s, the enthusiasm with which “Big Data” is being adopted, the coming of Google glasses and other wearables, the prevalence of Federal Government “data centers” (7,000 at last count) and the ubiquitousness of cameras on stoplights, street corners, and in city parks.

This line overlaps with mobile device tracking, police and the NSA monitoring your cell phone calls and Internet searches, and the coming of “the Internet of Everything.”

This line is followed ever so casually, by the prevalence of laws and policies designed to provide a benefit (i.e. the Affordable Health Care Act, among others), but that tangentially allow larger and larger private and public bureaucracies to burrow deeper and deeper into personal behavior choices that we make on an individual and societal basis.

The intersections all meet at a point of behavior monitoring, or “nudging,” of private individuals into buying acceptable products, acting in acceptable ways and making sure that everybody else does the same.

In the arena of conflict resolution and peace building, we here at HSCT find the idea of behavior management or behavior monitoring by large, faceless, entities to be–well, “creepy” (as the kids are wont to say as they Tweet out every instance of their lives looking for connections)–and authoritarian.

Dare we say, all of this progress smacks of Orwellianism.

Now, before we are accused of wearing tinfoil hats and searching the skies for black helicopters, we have an “early adopter” curve for you to make our next point.

Now, early adopters are the people who will buy the I-phone when it’s brand new and will probably buy the first pair of Google glasses at $200 a piece.Your folks in the middle–the early and late majority– are most of us. They will buy a smart phone from Wal-mart two years from now and only because their friends all have one, so “why not?”

Your third group is at the end of the curve. The laggards are the people we all know who still have VCR’s and will never buy Google Glasses because they’re either paranoid about Big Brother, or they just don’t care.

The anti-GMO people…

The anti-CCTV camera people…

The ACLU…

The guy who drives around town distributing a mimeographed, weekly paper, out of the back of his car which is full of garbage and may or may not have an animal in the back.

These are your laggards.

Moreover, it is the behavior, choices and conflicts that this group of people present, that confounds, distorts and affects bureaucratic “thinking” and policymaking, and leads to more and more talk of “the Internet of Everything.”

Now, mugging people of their autonomy, independence and free will and limiting choices, stands in opposition to peace, in our opinion.

The right NOT to participate is the most sacred right in the Constitution.

This sacred right, to go off on one’s own, creates conflicts with other individuals and societies.

However, peace is NOT the absence of conflict.

The false promise of all of these technologies is that by everyone, everywhere, at all time, having their behavior, choices, ideas, attitudes, conversations and thoughts, confirmed, conformed, reformed, and reconstituted, for the benefit of the lowest bidder; that somehow, that act of “tamping down” the unruly nails, will ultimately lead to some sort of man made Utopia.

That is NOT peace.

That is TYRANNY.

Let us all become vigilant watchmen on the walls for peace.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Offer] What Does it All Mean?

“The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” – Morrie Schwartz

Our principle conflict engagement consultant, Jesan Sorrells, is often asked on sales calls for Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) a very interesting question by potential clients, customer and vendors:

What does HSCT stand for?

HSCT’s stance, approach and core, are best defined through our brand’s tagline, “Helping YOU ethically attain PEACE in YOUR life.”

Our tagline is more than just a witty phrase, or a method of branding; it reflects and defines the mission, values and vision for our consultants and our company.

Like many this week, we watched the events in Boston following the bombing at the Boston Marathon with a mixture of many emotions.

The subsequent manhunt and capture of the alleged bomber, and the subsequent information that was revealed about his upbringing, brought us back to the events at Sandy Hook, Connecticut last year.

We don’t know what to make of all of this yet, but we here at HSCT would like to take the time to encourage you to read our post from December 2012, “Masculinity in Conflict” here (http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/masculinity-in-conflict-george-zimmermantrayvon-martin-edition/) and let us know what you think by commenting below or sending us a brief email at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com.

And, check out our offers page –> http://bit.ly/HSCTOffers for FREE downloads, and more!

-Peace Be With You All-