Advice to a 20-year old: 10 Bullets
10 - Perception is reality.
Shape it to your advantage.
The only reason why you'll ever make a million dollars is because somebody else will give it to you.
The only reason why you'll get a degree, a job, a promotion, a Nobel prize, or a jail sentence is that someone gives it to you. No man is ever an island.
Hence, you must arm yourself with something that instantly marks you as special, that instantly gets you recognition as someone to be reckoned with ... more
10 - Perception is reality.
Shape it to your advantage.
The only reason why you'll ever make a million dollars is because somebody else will give it to you.
The only reason why you'll get a degree, a job, a promotion, a Nobel prize, or a jail sentence is that someone gives it to you. No man is ever an island.
Hence, you must arm yourself with something that instantly marks you as special, that instantly gets you recognition as someone to be reckoned with ... more
1 comment:
Advice to a 20-year old: 10 Bullets
10 - Perception is reality.
Shape it to your advantage.
The only reason why you'll ever make a million dollars is because somebody else will give it to you.
The only reason why you'll get a degree, a job, a promotion, a Nobel prize, or a jail sentence is that someone gives it to you. No man is ever an island.
Hence, you must arm yourself with something that instantly marks you as special, that instantly gets you recognition as someone to be reckoned with.
(Stop. Is it really you whom I hear unthinkingly groan about my supposed political incorrectness in using the word 'man' instead of 'person'? Just stop in your tracks and think for a minute (a good habit to get into.) Don't accept conventional wisdom or old wives' tales without first checking their well-foundedness. Often, you'll be surprised.
I'm not being politically incorrect or insensitive here.
'Man' totally means human being, of course.
Although unschooled nitwit ignorant modern Political Correctness dim-wittedly insists on trying to get us to say 'humanity' instead of 'mankind', PC is quite so totally wrong here: etymologically it's exactly, perfectly the opposite - man means human being (now admittedly often but not always specialized in the meaning of male) whilst 'human' specifically etymologically means male person. Incidentally - the word man, in its different early versions in antiquity (such as the very recognizable 'manu' in ancient Sanskrit, meaning human being) originally meant 'the thinking animal', as opposed to all other animals deemed unthinking, and is etymologically related to words like 'mind' and 'mental'. So it'll forever be mankind to me.)
Do not pick something incomprehensible to most: I know people who toiled for years in advanced mathematics and/or in theoretical physics, who achieved an outright other-worldly level of knowledge there, at great personal cost in years spent and effort and sacrifices made and intelligence expanded: it does them no career good, because no one understands, and hence recognizes, their accomplishments.
It certainly does not mean you should not study these fields: you probably should. But it means you must also cultivate something immediately comprehensible and visible by all.
Maybe play effortlessly a musical instrument, or speak perfectly say Japanese: no one needs any training to be impressed: it's immediate.
As a case in point, Kevin Rudd's life achievements probably far outstrip his acquired knowledge of mandarin Chinese - but everyone - and that includes John ! - admires him for it.
A few years ago, I went to the launch party of a new company that had just achieved public listing on Nasdaq.
The launch was held at a famous restaurant in New York City . We'd booked the entire restaurant for the evening, along with a quartet of musicians hired to play live background classical music.
The four investment bankers who'd midwived the IPO were there, mostly keeping to themselves - no doubt a whit blasé, after all they did public listings for a living - I'd joined them - just love hearkening to bankers' tales.
But what I remember most is one of the bankers frowning, looking at the others and, nodding in the general direction of the band, saying "They don't play very well, now do they?", upon which all four bankers rose up, strode over to the dais where they bade the musicians step aside, and at the drop of a hat embarked upon a perfect rendition of Albinoni's adagio.
There you have it: The talk of the town. For weeks. Four named investment bankers, playing flawlessly.
The old Jazzman's saw about the necessity of a gimmick to make it in the Big Apple - that is, to be successful in the fiercely competitive New York City scene - holds truer than ever. In business you can afford to be a generalist if you do that well - indeed, as Wahnsinnskarriere insists at book length, it is all round better to be a good generalist, and probably a career drawback to be too good a specialist - but you need a seemingly effortless, throwaway gimmick, with which to impress your clients, peers and bosses, become the occasional object of approving gossip, and cow your competition.
9 -
Overlapping, perhaps, with the foregoing: try to be absolutely excellent at something. Anything.
Yale University has one unusual criterion in its admission requirements: that the applicant have demonstrated excellence somewhere.
In anything at all - it does not matter whether the applicant speaks ancient Ukrainian, or was an Olympics medallist, or has published a novel, or whatever. What Yale is after is that the future graduate both understand what excellence is, and the price one has to pay to get there.
8 - Forget your childhood.
Seriously.
I mean it.
Because you parents were most likely like everybody else, they did not cope well with your child persona: you were out of control, you ran out into the street not checking first for traffic, you did dumb things, you craved constant, disrupting attention. In Australia, a staggering - and in my opinion criminal - majority of over 90% of the population are not in favor of legally banning slapping or hitting children.
In other words - the Australian public is overwhelmingly in favor of violence against children.
I sometimes wish that we were as advanced in our social attitudes as, say, they are in the Kingdom of Sweden, where hitting your bairn will, as it should, land you in jail. We routinely wreak horror against children in this brown land of ours, there are child killers à la John McMaster out there. In Victoria, some 57 professional child carers are currently under legal scrutiny for violence against toddlers.
Adam Phillip, our dear but infuriatingly kneejerk leftwing columnist, in his moments of open introspection talks of his childhood in those words: quote the horrors of a home where cruelty and butality threatened to crush me unquote. No wonder he became leftwing and republican: opposition to all authority figures, be they real (money) or totally figmentive (Elizabeth) , his shrill enmity rooted in a gruesome first, and formative, relationship to authority (his parents).
And therein lies my admonition, for you to absolutely, now, thoroughly forget your childhood: to make it in the world, you need a sound, functional, smooth, effortless relationship to, and with, authority. Your boss will promote you - seldom your peers, not your subordinates, never the true dearie who cleans your offices - a very fine wight her.
If your attitudes to authority are coloured by your childhood - when authority was, statistically at least, blows and pain, verbal abuse, peremptory orders behight dumbly because never explained - if you hence, understandably instinctively prefer to hobnob with middle and lower management but feel queasy in the presence of, and therefore tend to shun, the higher-ups - then you won't have a career.
7 - Understand reality. Learn from it.
That one looks straightforward and obvious, does not it?
You'd be baffled. You'd be stunned.
Bottom line: Real world achievement. Measurable external reality is the only thing.
You have no idea the number of people out there who fancy themselves great achievers but when measured against neutral, objective achievement metrics are utter nobodies. It's their way of protecting themselves against harsh reality. If you need escapism - go to the movies. Read Stephen King. But do not be one of them.
Find a way to keep grounded in objective external reality. Even when said reality is a harsh lesson in modesty, as it inevitably shall sometimes be.
It also means - listen to criticism, ditch the abundant chaff but by all means hang on to, and put to use, the rare wheat.
A lot of criticism may arise out of jealousy, envy, competition, unfairness. You'll hear totally ill-founded carpings over the years, levelled at you by ignoramusses who do not begin to understand what they're talking about. Go into Amazon.com or any such site, and read what some of the wannabe online critics say about absolute masterpieces - be it in literature, music or films. Sheer works of genius are taken apart by orthographically challenged dunderheads who miss the whole point of the work they presume to pan, because their puny backgrounds did not in the slightest prepare them for brilliance.
But once in a while there is welcome, indispensable, constructive criticism that comes from out there. Good criticism is rare, because it's no one's business nor job description to improve you. So if you are lucky enough to be told something constructive, do not miss out on it.
The day you let wishful thinking govern your actions.
The day you stop learning.
The day you believe that you don't need further improvement and that you can just coast along, is the day when you instantly become a self-delusional moron, and your career ends.
6- Marry well
90% of your joy or misery in life will come from whom you wed.
Wed a true helpmeet. If it's too late, the old bum's rush beckons - now.
Life is too short. When you are well wed, your sights are on the other challenges of life. When not - the 5th column is in your house.
5- Understand money
Do not believe what merchants, what judges and parties rolled into one (with vested interests) tell you about money. For instance - at times it most definitely is wiser to rent than to buy. The bank won't tell you.
Cash in the bank is the be-all and end-all. It defangs stress - stress is first an ager, and then a killer. It enables a sense of humour, a sweet break in the Bahamas, an ability to relax. At least.
Do your homework on this, read a few books, become a bit stingy.
Most importantly - in your career choice - go where the money is.
In some fields there is a lot of money slopping about. In other fields - specialties that require just as much hard work, as much intelligence, as much selfless dedication, as much hard-earned knowledge - there is just not much money.
Reread all the 'pro' career advice out there, and they will to a man tell you to do what you love, what you resonate with, and that riches will follow.
Piffle.
I know people with a passion for Old Norse. They lived their passion to the hilt, and thoroughly impoverished their lives.
They've read all the sagas in the original text, all the Eddas, they will tell you the differences between East Norse and West Norse, they will rattle off kennings until you keel over from boredom.
There is no money at all in there. They bought their first CD player at the age of sixty, when they were nearing retirement.
If speaking Ukrainian is the one thing that floats your boat - don't make a career out of it. Go to the Ukraine, build a shining career there in some field, and segue seamlessly into that career when you come back home. Don't build a career out of speaking Ukrainian in Australia - trow me when I say, there is no money in there.
So do not necessarily do what you think is your life's avocation. If there is no money in your life passion, pursue it as a hobby - on the side.
In the end, business is about money - money for health, for education, for buying shoes, for saving someone who is sinking. It's all about lots of money.
Or, as some might say, it's all sackfuls of gelt, mounds of moolah, heaps of dough, slews of buckaroos, bucketfuls of bucks, pailfuls of mazuma, oodles of oof, wheelbarrows of wherewithal, piles of pelf, lots of lolly, boodle 'n booty, filthy lucre, the ready, brass, bread, the greens, dibs, chips, capital, the notes ......
As the late Cardinal Spellman once put it in a famous sermon: 'It's Your Duty To Be Rich'.
4- Beware of the leeches and the hanger-ons.
All politically correct textbooks, all the drumbeat PC propaganda out there, tell you that most people are honest, most are straightforward, fair-minded folks who will give fair and receive fair.
You're setting yourself up for a dingy hovel on Pauper street should you believe any of it.
Sure - if you are called upon to take a psychological test as part of a hiring process, do not tick the case that says yes, most people are dishonest, lest it be thought that you are either paranoid, or worse, that your answer stems from what psychologists call a projection.
But in your heart of hearts know that the needs of the world out there are infinite and can never be slaked. Any celebrity will tell you to beware of the vampire public. Be unwary enough and open the door to being ever so slightly expoited and they will feast on you dry in a New York minute.
Do not be naive. Do not be an easy mark. Be fair - but immensely tough in how you defend yourself.
Reread my take on guns.
3 - This advice here is hoary and well-troden, however still indispensable. To some extent - to some extent only - work hard.
As a case in point - The Rolling Stones. When you hear, as I have, the Stones rehearsing, you hear the most godawful jarring cacophonic discordant dinning racket you ever heard.
How did these guys ever become the greatest Rock n Roll band ever ?
And then it dawns on you : hard work.
And indeed: the reason why the pop/rock/whatever music scene today is so bad and forgettable and fluffy is precisely because the bands do not work hard enough.
And should you feel tempted to say, regardless, that anyway what the Rolling Stones put out is godawful jarring cacophonic discordant din: get out of town. Reread point 7 above: The Rolling Stones have sold hundred of millions of albums, have chalked up the biggest aggregate number of concert-goers than any other performing artist or artists ever, have generated several billion dollars in the course of their careers, and created tens of thousands of jobs. That's reality.
Another point: don't judge if you don't know. The Rolling Stones have penned masterpieces like 'Time Waits for No One', and many others, such as the whole haunting 'Sticky Finger' album. So there.
Listen to bands like, say, Supergrass: they sound exactly like The Rolling Stones would sound had they stopped midway in their rehearsals. Listening to Supergrass, you ache for more work: there are harbingers of greatness in there, fleeting glimmerings of emerging classics. But, hey, no cigar: lads - you wrapped up too soon.
Don't.
But it's of course not our number one.
You developed a talk-of-the-town gimmick, and you worked hard doing so, so you already know about hard work.
If you work too hard, keep your nose too close to the grindstone, you'll lose sight of the forest for the trees. You may drift away from the bigger picture. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy .....
So then, more power to number 2:
2- Work smart - not hard
1- And our number one.
It does not matter much what you do in business, as long as you do something.
Life is non-linear. Things happen differently than planned, from weird angles. But they happen only if you prime the pump. Get out there. Phone someone for no reason. Be pro active. Make it happen.
It does not matter what you do in business, as long as you do something.
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