Hacking your Education

I've had my nose stuck in Hacking your Education by Dale J Stephens since I wrote my last post.  It's aimed at young people contemplating university, and I've already been, so I've been reading out of curiosity rather than to learn tips to apply to my life. Was it still a worthwhile read? Yes...

In a nutshell, the book is pretty much a "how to" guide for any young person who wants to map out their own path outside the traditional (and expensive) university route and get a great job or start their own business at the end of it. It's full of case studies of friends and acquaintances who, for whatever reason, didn't attend university at all or dropped out and made successes of themselves through grit, determination, good luck and a fair amount of blagging and hustling.

Stephens thinks there are 3 main reasons why we go to university: the social experience, to get a job, and to learn for learning's sake.  He argues we can get these things in the real world, without having to pay out for university and have more fun in the process.

So far, so good. But how? Stephens has tonnes of suggestions.  Figure out what you're really interested in.  Commit to learning outside the classroom. Make a to-learn list, find someone or a group of people to keep you accountable, and put yourself out there (he suggests setting up a personal website that becomes your online portfolio of experiences).  Learn in groups with other like minded people. Figure out your talents and how you learn best. Find mentors and teachers. Network, have lots of coffees. Use technology, become a writer or a programmer! Gate crash conferences and university lectures! Take advantage of free educational resources. Have your 2 minute pitch ready! Start up a company. Travel the world! Don't pursue traditional jobs through traditional routes (never send in your CV!). Get a job through your network. They'll call you! (Well, sort of - that happened to some of the people in the case studies). Phew. As he says at the start, this is not a book about dropping out and taking the easy option.

In the book he also talks about Peter Thiel, the tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, who set up the Thiel Fellowship in 2010 to give grants to people under 20 to spur them to quit college and pursue their own ventures (Stephens is part of this programme). This quote from Thiel made me think back to my post on expectations:

"The problem that exists with schooling is that it ends up convincing most people that they're mediocre, and then the talented people get regrouped and are forced to compete with each other, and then most of them get convinced they're mediocre as well, and you sort of cycle and repeat, until people's dreams and aspirations are badly beaten out of them over time." 

What did I learn from all of this? Well, I had no idea that universities like MIT in the US had made their course materials available for free online (yes, really! See here). Not only that, you can listen to university lectures on iTunes U, including from Harvard, which I think is pretty amazing.  I'm tempted to take a few modules...  Also the case studies in Hacking your Education are full of examples of young people basically designing their own jobs, just as Roman Krznaric suggests in How to Find Fulfilling Work.  It's reinforcing the message to put aside other people's expectations and do your own thing.

On reflection, it made me realise that there are loads of examples of people who have "hacked their education".  Dynamo the magician (who I wrote about here) could quite easily have been a case study in this book. Someone else I'm a fan of, the writer Caitlin Moran, could have been too - she educated herself in her local library and subsequently blagged her way to becoming a writer. Also, these twin sisters taught themselves to embroider by watching youtube videos and are now sought after artists.  I find these stories so inspiring. You can learn anything you want! It's all out there waiting for you.

Status Anxiety and its solutions

I've finished reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. In his "solutions" section he puts forward some interesting ideas we can draw on to counter status anxiety and feeling bad about our position in society or how we think other people view us.

He groups them into big themes: Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion and Bohemia.

In Philosophy, he talks about some of the philosophers in history who argued that the rest of society is stupid / ill informed / wrong and therefore we should dismiss and ignore other people's opinions of us.  He goes on to state that the obvious result of this sort of attitude is that one will likely end up with no friends. Hmm, doesn't sound very appealing.

Next he talks about Art - specifically novels, painting, tragedy and comedy.  He points out that novels have the ability to show us the moral good in people who would, if only based on their lack of outward symbols of status like wealth or power, be regarded by others as unimportant.  He says in life we only give praise to moral goodness that is outwardly displayed, but in novels we can listen in to the characters' thoughts and eavesdrop on conversations, which can give us a different perspective on them and make us appreciate their deeper qualities. In making his arguments he makes references the implicit social commentary in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I liked this idea and it reminded me that novels can teach us a lot about life, it doesn't always have to be through non-fiction. I haven't read either of these books so I'm adding them to my list.

The rest of the Art section didn't really strike a chord with me, but the Politics section made up for it. He starts by talking about what "status" meant in different societies through history and found that it was sometimes contradictory, and ever changing. In 2004 when the book was written he said that high status meant:

"[someone who has] been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research)."

He talks later about our pursuit of material things, and how advertisers sell us things like cars:

"...[the advert will] fail to mention our tendency to cease to be excited by anything after we have owned it for a short while...We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction...Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another...The new car will be rapidly absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence..."

This section made me think a lot, particularly the lines quoted above. I mentioned it to my husband and we had a good chat about our different buying styles, and which of our possessions give us pleasure beyond the initial rush of buying them.  I think this will probably deserve a separate blog post on its own...

The other part that I liked in the politics section was his recounting of a scene from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Woolf is denied entry into Trinity College Library at Cambridge University because she is a woman (she was told she could only enter if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or if she had a letter of introduction).  Instead of thinking "what's wrong with me?" she thought "what's wrong with them?".  After this she came up with a set of political demands for women, which included "a room of one's own".  I've never read this book, but that was my university library so it caught my imagination - I know that as a naive 18 year old I took it completely for granted that I could come and go as I pleased.

The remaining sections of the book cover Religion (where he reminds us that in the end we're all going to die so status anxiety is a bit pointless) and Bohemia, where he pointed out that there are groups of people who choose to forgo status giving activities and possessions, and he talked about Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden Pond as an example.  

So...to wrap up, I liked this book and definitely had a different perspective reading it now than when it was first published.  Even so, the quote about status in Roman Krznaric's book is still my favourite on the topic and had the most impact on me and how I think about status. So punchy, so simple and so true.

Magic, according to Dynamo

My parents were visiting recently from the UK (I moved to Australia 7 years ago) and we were catching up on what we were into watching on the TV. They started raving about Dynamo, a British Magician, who I had never heard of.  My mum grabbed the remote control and started cruising the channels, and, lo and behold, Dynamo's show was on TV at that very moment.  Since then I have been mildly obsessed with him (much to my husband's amusement).  He has made it onto this blog because I just read the book about his life, Nothing is Impossible.

First of all, if you haven't seen his TV shows, seek them out - they are highly entertaining and completely baffling.  I started out a cynic but was quickly sucked in.  When I first saw him performing magic on TV I felt a strange sensation of delight and disbelief that often made me burst out laughing.  I was talking about him in the office the other day and one of my (completely normal, sane) colleagues said "He just brings joy!" Exactly.   

What is magic anyway? Dynamo quotes Joseph Dunninger (he says he was a pioneer of magic):

"For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not, none will suffice." 

This reminds me of the end of the Life of Pi and its religious undertones. Dynamo reflects on this quote and says:

"I think magic is a feeling, it's an emotion. It's something that is brought out in someone when they're witnessing something they can't explain. They think, I can't explain that, it must be magic."

Secondly, please don't dismiss this book as a shallow "celebrity autobiography". It's not.  This book is an inspiring story about standing up to bullies, coping with a chronic illness (Crohn's disease) and long spells of hospitalisation, the life transforming influence of his grandfather (who introduced him to magic) and being totally focused on magic and excelling at it. It's about taking opportunities, joining forces with other people, having great ideas and being dedicated to pursuing them. He's a great role model.  Despite all his success and celebrity friends he comes across as being completely modest and down to earth.

It's funny, I was thinking while I was reading it that (by accident rather than by design I'm sure), Dynamo looks like he's ticked all the boxes Roman Krznaric talks about in "How to Find Fulfilling Work" - he's covered all the elements essential to meaning: he's cultivating his passions and talents (magic), he is doing work that makes a difference (entertaining people), he's earned money and gained status (fame and respect for his skills) - and pursued them in that order, which in my mind makes him seem like an all round great bloke.  He also ticks off flow (pursuing magic for its own sake, not the rewards it brings) and freedom to do as he pleases. Dynamo's found fulfilling work!

On freedom and "having it all"

In his book, How to Find Fulfilling Work, Roman Krznaric talks about the importance of freedom.  In the short section in the book on "freedom" he addresses, among other things, the idea of "having it all."

He quotes Shirley Conran, the British author and journalist, who wrote the 1975 book, Superwoman, in which she famously said "life's too short to stuff a mushroom".  She was lamenting the implicit message our culture is peddling that women who aren't able to shine in both their job and as mothers (while doing something esoteric on the side like learn Japanese) are somehow inadequate.

Krznaric brings a male perspective to the issue and reframes it as being relevant to both parents.  He thinks "can women have it all?" is the wrong question to be asking (I agree), and argues that the question should instead be:

"How can parents support each other so they can both have some of it all?"

I was at a drinks function after work one night last week and met two other women who were both qualified lawyers, one was looking after her children full time and one was working part time after returning from maternity leave.  This topic came up in conversation and I mentioned the "you can have it all, just not all at once" idea and they both said "that's what Quentin Bryce said".

Quentin Bryce is Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, and a pretty remarkable, inspiring woman. She said this in an interview in 2008 (you can see it here). My favourite quote is this, and I think it's relevant to men and women:

"For a very long time now I've been saying to young women, you can have it all, but not all at the same time. How important it is to take very good care of yourself, of your mental and physical and spiritual wellbeing, it's hard to do. It's easier to be a workaholic than to have a truly balanced life. It's very tough for a lot of women teetering on that tight rope of balance and balancing too many responsibilities."

How true.  It's so easy to let work take over sometimes, and so much harder to stop it.

On flow

I promised I would come back to the subject of "flow", which was one of the key elements in fulfilling work that Roman Krznaric wrote about in "How to Find Fulfilling Work".  Just as the idea of "being yourself" kept coming up in various books, so did the the concept of flow. 

Krznaric explained that a flow experience is one in which we are completely and unselfconsciously absorbed in whatever we are doing.  We are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.  Usually this activity is challenging enough to require our focus, but no so challenging that we fear failing.  It has been described as being almost like Buddhist meditation - we are totally engaged and present and the future and past fade away.  For athletes this is being "in the zone".  It's important in the context of work because doing these "flow" activities gives us a sense of fulfilment.

The pioneer of the theory of flow is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and it feels like his name is referenced all over the place now I know what flow is.  He talks about it in a TED video here, and you can read a review of his book, Finding Flow here.  

Susan Cain talks about flow in her book, Quiet.  She says:

"The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."

She argues that typical "flow" experiences tend to be solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking (which is why it's relevant to her book about introverts).  Flow also get a mention in Gretchen Rubin's book The Happiness Project (she covers a lot of ground!). 

I realised when I was reading about flow in Krznaric's book that I had been experiencing it myself in the process. I had barely noticed the hours passing by.  If I'm enjoying a book and it's not too hard going I definitely get into a flow state.  But what about other people? My husband, who loves surfing, says for him it's in the moments when he's riding a wave.

What about you?

How to Find Fulfilling Work

I love libraries. I set up this blog in the State Library of New South Wales and I'm writing this post from Avalon Community Library on a glorious sunny spring day.

It was during an unexpected afternoon in my local library last month that I began reading How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric, one of the books in the fantastic School of Life series, which is edited by the equally fantastic Alain de Botton.  After about half an hour of starting the book, sitting in the study section of Manly Library, I got an excited urge to run out to the newsagents and buy a notebook and pen so I could remember the insights starting to emerge from the pages.  Five minutes later and back in the library, I spent the entire afternoon immersed in the book.

I think most of us at some time in our careers question whether what we're doing is the right thing for us. I happened to be in the middle of a couple of weeks off work so it was a good topic to reflect on.  I loved this book.  It completely changed the way I think about work - and how I use the time I have in my life - and found it quite liberating.

Thinking about work can be mind bogglingly complex.  Krznaric breaks it down nicely and works through the elements methodically.

He very neatly sets out his view that fulfilling work has 3 key elements:

• Meaning
• Flow
• Freedom

He then breaks down "meaning" into 5 components: money, status, making a difference, following our passions and using our talents.  He explains that money and status are extrinsic motivating factors and the others are intrinsic motivating factors. Given everyone will have different preferences and priorities around these components, Krznaric says there is no single blueprint for a meaningful career.

The next part of the book looks at each of the 5 components in more detail.  The role of money in life and happiness is a fascinating topic in itself (and the subject of another book in the School of Life series called "How to Worry Less About Money" - more on that later).  Status as a topic is also something that I find really interesting ("Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton is on my list to re-read), and there's a great quote in Krznaric's book - which I've copied down from my scribbled notes so might not be word perfect but you get the gist:

"the universal desire for reputation in which we judge ourselves through other people's eyes is fraught with dangers"

Next he talks about "making a difference" and how this can weave into the world of work.   This made me think about the emerging world of social entrepreneurship and some articles I had read recently about people making a difference as individuals, and also prompted me to read "How to Change the World" by John Paul Flintoff - yes, you've guessed it - another in the School of Life series.

The fourth and fifth components are combined into a section on cultivating passions and talents. Again, he offers a great quote, this time from Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand:

"The master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

I love this quote.  It reminds me of an interview I read many years ago with the photographer, Mario Testino, who was talking about how he ended up becoming a professional photographer, and he said someone (father or grandfather...I forget who) told him that he should do a job he loved and use the weekends for rest, and not to choose a job that meant you had to fit your entire life into the weekends. I've never forgotten that.  There is another quote in the book, from Herminia Ibarra, that I absolutely loved and was an utter revelation to me:

"our working identity is not a hidden treasure to be discovered at the very core of our being - rather it is made up of many possibilities...we are many selves."

Krznaric argues that, because we each have within us a range of different experiences, interests and talents, we could find ourselves happy in a whole range of different jobs and we don't need to agonise over finding the one perfect thing. He encourages us to consider becoming "wide achievers" with "portfolio careers" (pursuing different jobs at the same time on a part time basis) or as "serial specialists" (doing a range of different jobs one after the other).  He encourages people to "act now, think later", because humans suffer from "negative bias" which makes them naturally cautious and more prone to focusing on what could go wrong.  He advocates decreasing risk by dipping your toes in the water of a new job or career by doing work experience, volunteering, undertaking training courses, talking to people who know about it and doing things in your spare time outside your main job (like write a blog!).

The remainder of the book talks about the other elements, flow and freedom, which I'll pick up in another blog post.

One thing I found really valuable about this book is the series of questions and exercises you are prompted to do throughout.  By taking the time to do them it makes the book more engaging and relevant to your own life. There is also a "homework" section at the back recommending further reading.

If you don't get round to reading the book, you can watch the author give a talk on it here.

Have a great weekend!