[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 7 – Eddie Thomason

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode # 7 – Eddie Thomason, Speaker & Inspirational Entrepreneur

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #7 - Eddie Thomason

[powerpress]

The fact is, entrepreneurship might be interesting and hot right now, but it wasn’t always this way.

The fact is, being a rapper or a hip-hop musician was seen as being the way to success, not that long ago.

The fact is, becoming an athlete (particularly an elite one) is still viewed as a path to success for many people.

The fact is that these are all narrow doors.

It’s never mentioned (or rarely mentioned) in breathless articles in Inc., or Fast Company, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs would be far happier aiming at making a living creating $3 million dollars in value for clients and the market per year, than they would trying to win the start-up lottery.

The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail; the vast majority of freelancers go back to working regular jobs; and, the vast majority of people are perfectly happy being employees.

But…

If you get your head right about what exactly is on offer, and what exactly it’s going to take to attain and grow your entrepreneurial dreams, then you can stare all kinds of events, people, and incidents in the face and never blink.

Listen to the interview with Eddie and connect with him in all the ways that you can below.

And start the process of staring your dreams in the face.

Connect with Eddie all the ways that you can below:

Eddie’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/unlockyourselfU/

Eddie’s YouTube: https://youtu.be/rxfnHLrv2s8

Eddie’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/unlockyourselfu

[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

An Academic Question

The question that academics should be asking (and answering) is this one: “What value do I add to a college students’ experience in a world where information is just a Google search away?”

The answer to this question requires academics to admit, out loud, that research may not be the best way to add value to a students’ experience in the wider world.

The answer to this question requires academics to admit, out loud, that the systemized expansion of the administrative class in colleges and universities may be a value subtraction rather than a value-add for students.

The answer to this question requires academics to adopt a posture that ensures that acquiring tenure is not about research that no one reads, publishing in a few august journals that can’t be accessed via Google, and then maybe teaching some classes.

The answer to this question requires academics to position themselves as true advocates of student learning, rather than giving lip service to the thought.

The answer to this question reduces class sizes, increases educational quality (higher education, that is…there are other questions to answer for K-12) and reduces the impact of the administrative class—and renders opaque the ‘black box’ of administrative decisions.

The answer to this question allows real, lifetime, impactful learning to occur inside of the institutions that we all know and love. Learning that becomes less about lecturing and information transfer (that’s what Google and Youtube are for) and becomes more about coaching, encouraging and watering minds.

There are a few academics who are asking—and answering—this question, but not nearly enough, not nearly loud enough, not nearly often enough, to bring the genuine change that students—both now and in the future—will need to meet the challenges of an ever more confusing 21^st century.

There Are No Lectures

Will this be on the test?

This is the question that we struggle with every new semester. It reveals what and where the focus of students has been trained into them over the last 12 years of primary schooling.

Will this impact my grade?

This is the question that reveals the struggle between attaining real learning, real connection with material, and real engagement, and the need for accreditation, for getting the “right” job and for fitting in all the ways that society demands of us.

Will this be in the lecture?

This is the question that reveals a deep desire for certainty and the continuing pushback against the Socratic, the uncertain, and the unpleasant friction of the unknown.

There are no lectures that can cover the ingrained need that these three questions reveal.

There are no carefully crafted syllabi.

There are no YouTube videos and there is not enough clever gaming of student’s pre-wired psychology.

And the professor that spends a semester (or several) preparing more for successfully neutralizing these questions than for engagement and connection with material that could be life-changing, is the professor who has invested in playing a game whose hand was dealt way back in kindergarten.

[Opinion] Indispensable Micro-Economies at Scale

There are two paradigms that are rubbing against each other, creating friction in economies, lives, employment choices, and even in personal lives:

The first paradigm is that of productivity. The type of productivity where an employee does “more with less,” where people are forced to shave the personal and the engagement from interactions in order to render them quicker and more “widget-like. The type of productivity where people work at mass and a type of productivity where quality scales in incremental steps.

The second paradigm is one that exists in the micro-economies of many state-level, land grant, higher education institutions: The paradigm where productivity means that more people are doing quality work without scale, in micro-ways, marketing to a group of people who represent a captive audience, and who have little to no interest in moving to scale. The second paradigm favors quality over quantity and replicates the volume of mass, without all the people.

In the wider economy, it used to be that the first paradigm generated enough value in terms of revenues, trust, and awareness, that the second paradigm could exist, almost in opposition to it in some ways, philosophically, economically, and even culturally.

This is no longer the case for a variety of well documented reasons, but the biggest reason is that the friction between revenue generating at mass is now in direct competition for value and meaning, with the network effect at scale. The other large reason is that we have all been trained as consumers to believe that quality and quantity both go together, hand-in-hand.

Artificial intelligence, automation, and more technological transitions are going to ensure the spread of these unique, fragmented, highly differentiated micro-economies, but not at scale. Or at least, not a scale larger than maybe the geographic area of a state, or a region.

This will lead to further fragmentations in ideologies, perspectives and stories about how the world “should” work, and more fracturing around what is the “good life” and who gets access to it.

This is the dark side of all of this.

The more positive side is that people—at mass—will have more choices, with more awareness of the rare—yet deadly—issues that can affect everyone at scale, and perhaps more meaningful engagement, communication, and awareness.

But right now, we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new fragmentation.

HIT Piece 5.31.2016

Seth Godin made a good point: “In any failing system, the people at the top get hurt last.”

From schools to students, higher education is playing out this maxim before our eyes in the US right now.

The schools at the top in the US—Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and even second-tier, state schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota (where I used to work)—are doing fine in terms of enrollment, prestige, status, and the other markers of being “at the top” in a system of higher education that’s failing.

Students who can attend those schools, and manage the debt that comes from attaining credentials that aren’t any better than the ones obtained at a third tier school with minimal cost, are also doing fine. They, their families, and their personal finances are “at the top” of attending at, participating in, and paying to a system that’s failing.

Certain racial and ethnic groups who have historically been able to attend colleges in large numbers and who have done so at a swift, continuous generational pace, are also doing fine. They and the generational wealth transfer of knowledge, confidence, and self-esteem that comes from knowing that generations before you attended higher education and did well (i.e. it was the path to financial security and relative prosperity) means that if you choose to participate in the higher education system now, then you are already “at the top” in a status driven system that’s failing.

The people at the top get hurt last.

But if you’re a school, a student, or a member of a racial or ethnic group that was either in the middle, or at the bottom, historically, economically, socially, or by any practical measure that matters, then you are being hurt first by the failing of the higher education system as it was previously arranged.

And the worst part is that, you are almost guaranteed to continue to be hurt as the system (which is failing not because of anything anybody did directly, but because of a series of decisions made steadily and non-maliciously over time) continues to spectacularly collapse into something else where the outcomes aren’t guarenteed, and the vision is cloudy.

This is why, when discussions of higher education, debt, and the inability of credentialing to match employer need, come around to minority groups, women, the poor and working classes, immigrants, and others in this country are in relation to the system that created this problem, pache Mike Rowe, but we need more Hispanic physicists than we do Hispanic carpenters. And we need fewer wealthy scions who birth Ivy league lawyers, and more state school, 1st generation, entrepreneurial wealth builders backed by the 1st college degree in their household.

The people at the top get hurt last.

My mother went to college. So did my sisters. I went to college, though my father did not. My grandmother on my mothers’ side of the family went to college. My children are going to college.

Yes, the higher education system is failing.

But I am far from being at the top where I am protected in spite of the system failing.

-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: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Why Go to College: For the Rest of Us

Since the economic collapse of 2008, there have been many articles and blogs written about the importance (or lack of importance) of attending higher education for young people.

This talk has taken place amid a backdrop of ever rising tuition costs, zero wage increases, artificially suppressed inflation, a boatload of student loan debt burdening the 18-22 year old cohort and the dim post-graduation employment prospects where an average job search takes 6-9 months.

Hope and change indeed.

All of these writers, bloggers and opinionaters on both sides of the debate have one thing in common: They all hail from middle to upper middle class households and backgrounds, where at least one parent (and in many cases both parents) have already attended college.

In particular, they hail from backgrounds where they grew up with the suburban (and in some cases ex-burban) comfort that at least if they graduated from an overpriced college with an undervalued education and an economically meaningless degree, that somehow, someway, it would all work out in the end.

Now, in principle, we here at HSCT have no problem with people carrying such assumptions and even acting on them in the real world.

We have no problem with people writing long, effusive, opinion pieces on the lack of efficacy of a college education and worrying about the debt attached to obtaining it, in the context of a world where student loan debt cannot be disgorged through a bankruptcy process.

We also have no problem with questioning why it is important for people to have college degrees and even the tenuous link between a college degree and economic success based in secure post-graduate employment.

Make no mistake, yes our background is in higher education, but we would be blind and foolish if we did not admit that there are real structural problems and cracks in the mighty edifice constructed since post-World War II.

We get off the train though, when we think about the “please take the college years and go off to ‘find yourself’” type advice, being given to minority high school students.

We have a problem when very well meaning, successful, wealthy people, who did not attain degrees, but attained a measure of success, stand in front of diverse audiences and make the audacious claim that can be summed up as “we didn’t go so you don’t have to either.”

We’re sorry, but too many folks in those diverse audiences come with backgrounds from racial minority groups in this country that have experienced systemic, institutionalized, historical racism. And some of those students’ backgrounds are from communities still experiencing the results of such racism, racialism and racial prejudice. Thus, some of the worst advice that they–as well as their younger brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews–can possibly hear is “don’t attend college, because it’s too expensive, too much student loan burden will be upon you at graduation, etc., etc.”

This is not a statement based in social justice, social re-engineering or any desire for any form of social gerrymandering.

This statement comes out of a recognition that more African-American males are in jail in this country than even have completed high school.

This statement comes out of a recognition that Hispanic, Asian and Eastern European populations have traditionally valued education as the only way to advance in America.

This statement comes out of the recognition that the only way to open the doors and unlock opportunities if you are not from an upper class or even a middle class structure, is through the hard work of education, monetary sacrifice, and doing the right thing for the most people possible.

Of course, when there have been three to four generations of racial, ethnic and class minorities that have attained college education in America, we will be the first to write all about how going to college is a fool’s bargain.

We promise.

-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/