What I learned: 99% of you just don't care enough

My magic carpet post was meant as a social experiment.

Here in the United States people have been ranting and complaining, protesting and posting, about how much things supposedly suck. So I wanted to put people in the (theoretical) situation of being able to do something about it.

I gave people the opportunity to escape to a new world, where things could be better. I even recommended four leaders I thought might be fitting. Even further, I allowed people the opportunity to choose their own leader.

I invited approximately 700 people on my magic carpet ride to this new world. Of those, only 8 people responded, which translates to approximately 1%. This was a very, very sad statistic for me to review. I spent a significant amount of time trying to find a free and simple-to-use survey website that would allow the opportunity for limitless responses. I figured, how could people not answer just 5 basic questions??

My blog post received 138 views according to blogger, so there were certainly more people who started the journey, just not many who finished.

I began wondering why. I thought of a couple reasons for why people were discouraged:

1) They didn't know what it was for -- they perhaps did not, in fact, trust me enough to proceed

2) There was too much text and/or to much to do to proceed

3) There was too little time (only 60 hours) to execute

I think most people quite frankly got lost and confused.

So what can I conclude from this? Well, first and foremost, if I was to ever find myself in the midst of a zombie land, I thankfully now know the group of people I would roll with. Thank you, all eight of you, for being far more awesome than everyone else.

Next, I can conclude that if I ever want people to act on something, I need to provide instructions fitting for a five-year-old: minimal text, minimal work, and step-by-step how-tos and whys. (smh)

Last, I learned that things rarely succeed with the first round. So, look out, because there's a good chance that I will repeat this or something like it sometime in the near future.

Would you like to go on a magic carpet ride?

Hello,

I would like to take you on a magic carpet ride.

I have spent quite a bit of time recently visiting and revisiting TED talks I thought were especially wonderful.

For those of you unaware of what TED is, it is an organization that was started in 1984 as just a series of conferences. Now, TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) has become a massive online database of speakers from all across the world whose ideas fall into the category of "Ideas Worth Spreading."

Frankly, I think TED Talks, or something as intellectually stimulating as them, should be in everyone's daily agenda. Just like an apple keeps the doctor away, I think TED Talks keep the dumb away. Just like you can grab an apple on your way out, you can watch an under-20-minute talk during breakfast, lunch, or an afternoon lull.

Moving forward, I would like to do something interesting here. I am going to present a story to you and I want you to play along. The story goes as follows:

I arrive to you upon my magic carpet and offer you my hand for you to get on. Do you trust me?

YES.

NO.

If people traveling from AU to USA got LOST...

... Do people traveling from the United States to Australia get FOUND?

If the jobs aren't good and plenty enough for you in the USA, move.

Working hard is the solution to most people's problems

My friend Carl posted this image today and I really liked it so I'm reposting it here:

It's so brilliant because a lot of people would rather complain about the system rather than work hard. When, really, the solution to most people's problems is just to work hard.

I, however, also completely recognize stories such as this:

I am a college junior, and I will graduate with 16,000 in debt. I pay for all my living expenses by working 40 hours a week making minimum wage. I chose a moderately priced, in-state public university, and even began at a two-year college because it was the cheapest option. I got decent grades in high school, but received no scholarships because I spent 6 years in the workforce before returning to college. I currently have a 4.0 GPA. I live uncomfortably in a cheap apartment with two siblings who were abandoned by my mother, who tried to kill herself because she was too poor for psychiatric help. I only eat out when my friends who own restaurants invite me for free dinners. I live at my means because it's the only way to provide for my other family members. I have no health insurance because I make too much for Badger Care, but not enough to buy insurance. My mommy and daddy don't pay for my college, my debt, or any other necessities or living expenses. I have had three dental infections in the last year, requiring over $9,000 in dental expenses. That is 1/2 of what I make in one year. I can see why most people in my situation would NOT attend college, because it is a drain on time and finances. 

There's a game I think everyone above middle class should play called SPENT. I played that game and walked away with 300-something dollars. Oh man! I wish I could have that much money right now!, I thought. But that's because I had $21.75 in my bank account after spending three weeks on the road to get to California so I could look for jobs in biopharm and brewing.

But, as I quoted before, and as I quote again, "It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness."

Some people just need to go to school and work hard and things will work out well enough for them to be satisfied (well, at least until that midlife crisis strikes). Some people need to travel a road less traveled by. Neither people are better than the other, they're just different.

A uniform of one's own

My friend posted this link today on why Steve Jobs wore that black turtleneck all the time. It got me thinking.

Uniforms originated as a way of clothing people who could not afford to clothe themselves. In 16th century England, for instance, uniforms were given to children at charity schools. Having attended a private school for four years, where money flowed harder than the Niagara Falls, I realize school uniforms now serve a different purpose. 

Uniforms are supposed to be unifying. But, along with that, they are also quite suffocating. I remember, for instance, how almost all of my detentions in private school were based on a uniform violation. I'd either untuck my shirt, put a belt around my skirt, or not wear my blazer. I hated wearing my uniform. But the teachers and parents told me it was supposed to make focusing on school a lot easier. I guess it makes sense: the less you have to think about what you wear, the more you can think about other things.

People, especially the creative ones, would rather have their own uniform, one that makes them comfortable. And one man's uniform is not necessarily everyone else's uniform. Perhaps Jobs likes his black turtlenecks while Zuckerberg prefers blue vests. What's wrong with that?

I believe in a "uniform of one's own." What I mean by this is a uniform that maintains a person's individuality while also sharing a common thread. An easy way to achieve a common thread is to have the same designer present different styles from which the individuals can choose based on their preferences. A common designer, color, or logo are just some ways to achieve a common thread and thus establish a sort of unity among peers. And if a person is creative and ambitious enough to create their own especially unique style that incorporates the common thread, I think that should be applauded. 

Creativity, individuality, and self-confidence are very important for success. Creativity is hard to teach but easily nurtured. Companies and schools should not inhibit individual thinking. As for the military, I will report back on that matter once I spend some time at a base.

Mindless Following 101 needs to be abolished from the American curriculum

Just saw that this photo has gotten 22,155 shares on Facebook:

The caption reads, "This photo is actually getting pulled off Facebook...so, the photographer added a lil text and renamed the file. Pass it on. I'm SURE the media doesn't want this one out there. Share it as much as you can." - Geoffrey Lueken

So here we are, brought back to the basics of Mindless Following 101. Just some comments on the post include, but are not limited to:

"WOW!"

"The media is not going to fool ME!"

"Take a look at the Occupy Wall Street crowd! Utterly amazing."

"Why is MEDIA keeping this protest a SECRET?"

Before even reading the comments, I questioned just how possible this really was. It just didn't seem real. And, usually, when something doesn't seem real, it probably isn't. Thus I quickly found a link to this website that proves this photo was photoshopped. Maybe THAT is why, Mr. Lueken, this photo is being pulled off. 

The blogger, Tim Parkinson, writes, 

"The original photoshopped image was produced by digital artist Scott Lickstein, who intended it to represent a 'virtual 99% turnout', ie what the OWS protests would look like if all of the people supporting the movement online could turn up at the protests in person... Whilst Lickstein’s other work certainly has a political bent to it, this piece was never intended to mislead people into believing it to be a real image."

First off, it is kind of awesome how quickly a spurt of action like that can happen on a Tuesday afternoon. Tim Parkinson's blog blew up with traffic once he made that post. Pretty awesome for him, I think, to get that kind of recognition by doing something so simple as a bit of quick research and demonstration. 

To follow, it's sad how people allow their emotions rapidly lead their actions like that. I think some people want to believe that the 60's & 70's movement has returned. I don't think it has. But that's just me. Power to the people who want to relive the hippy days of drug-aided love, happiness, and freedom. But those people just further prove my point -- that the basic principle that governs a lot of today's generation is that they want to protest like their parents once did. 

Protesting is the most short-term fulfilling way for people to express their unhappiness. It is visual, vocal, and it gives people a sense of belonging -- towards a cause, and a group of other people. It's an awesome thing, really; it really puts peoples' potential cumulative energy into first-hand perspective.

As much as I believe that there is a good share of people who protest for the right reasons, I also believe that there is a greater share of people who protest for the wrong reasons. They want to make a preposterous spectacle -- they want to exaggerate everything -- and they throw out connotations (e.g. "He's a fascist pig!") and images (e.g. Hitler mustaches) as if it were candy at a parade. 

Listen, if you want other people to really pay attention to what you're saying, don't attack them. People hate being attacked. And they will attack back. And if they're stronger than you (in which some cases just means that they have more money than you), they are going to attack harder than you. I know it doesn't seem fair, but you crying like a baby about it and throwing up neon hot pink signs stating that you were RAPED by the government is not going to get rational people from the other side to ever listen to you. And that's why you're protesting, right? Because you want people to listen to you?

Apokalypsis

Apocalypse originates from the Greek word apokalypsis, which really means revelation.

What happened was that I was looking for a documentary to watch during my late Friday evening after spending a good number of hours tweaking the fine details of my resume. I scrolled through my Netflix and narrowed it down to a decision between a documentary on dwindling honeybee populations and one titled 2012: A Time for Change.

The 2012 documentary didn't have a scene of mass destruction on its poster -- rather, a peaceful, almost meditative, image consisting of a spiral of jewels, eyes, and vivid colors.

Naturally, I was intrigued.

So I clicked play. And thus began my journey....

...into a movie that speaks perfectly to our present time.

The movie starts out by telling the story of how humanity was originally made of mud, then wood, and finally corn. The people made of mud were too weak, the people made of wood were too destructive, and the people made of corn were too visionary -- so their clear vision and understanding was slightly obscured, and thus they were able to build great feats of architecture and develop a system of mathematics and language. Human civilization was born.

Over a progression of various civilizations, we have further and further obscured our vision, to the point that we now have almost completely isolated ourselves from the natural progress of things. Well, the problem with that is that we, as beings of the Earth, are not above any other beings of this Earth. Just because we are capable of a higher level of thinking does not entitle us to anything remarkable -- especially when it comes to doing remarkably dangerous things like extracting oil and high density elements (e.g. uranium) onto this surface where they don't belong. Our biggest sense of entitlement comes from money. But what good are dollar bills and credit cards in the middle of the jungle or a tsunami?

There's a simple law that Sir Isaac Newton once published that applies to our concept of living just as much as it does to a truck coming at a sedan at 60 mph: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Numbers of people, highly intelligent people at that, have been speaking out about the obvious neon green sign hanging above our heads: STOP KILLING THE EARTH AND ONE ANOTHER -- IT'S GOING TO BITE YOU IN THE ASS!

Our problem really is that simple. Of course the more eloquent thinkers have instead phrased it as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"; and they have developed concepts and methods for nurturing compassion for living beings; and even showed scientific evidence that we and everything that surrounds us comes from the same original bit of matter.

The obvious message should be getting annoying by now to anyone who has been paying attention. I know it has for me. It's like I've been surrounded by advertisements about humanity's deterioration for a decade just like that scene from Minority Report.

Replace those ads for booze, insurance, and beauty products with crying baby sounds -- and that's what those of us who care to read important information have been metaphorically dealing with. Stop the crying!!! Whatever it takes, make it stop! 

Really. If I had 74 billion dollars like Carlos Silm Helu of Telmex, I'd funnel it into everything demonstrated in 2012: A Time for Change -- minimalist building construction, utilization of ecosystems to clean our waters, and employment of fungi to do things we excavate mineral sources to build machinery to do -- rather than Colombian oil excavation, like what he's doing. 

But why are so many people still not paying attention? Why is the message not striking people across the head who need to listen the most? What does it take to get them to listen? I think our Earth is generating these same questions in a sense. Need we forget, our Earth is a living organism -- and, when an organism, especially one this powerful, is attacked, it will attack back. 

I believe in the Revolution of Revelation. We are on the brink of it. Let's just hope we make the necessary changes before it's too late. 

What does it take to get a job around here?

I understand that the job market in the United States isn't great right now, and I understand San Diego has a 14% unemployment rate -- everyone keeps repeating that. But I am far more capable and wise than to be disheartened or discouraged from my abilities to succeed by a statistic.

There are not many chemical engineering educated people out there who are capable of coming up with their own ideas, communicating well their ideas, and leading people. I am.

Moreover, I acknowledge the evident changing trend in how we conduct business and educate future generations, because the way in which we learn and process information has changed.

A person who is capable of leading a company into the revolutionary change is crucial. That's great that we have people who have been working in the industry for decades; of course they should be valued for their experience and wisdom, which a person can only gain through time. But it’s also important to find people who are intelligent and capable of working with these experienced and wise people to progress in a forward-thinking way. That’s what I can do.

This is what I can bring to any job I do: my clear vision, sharp mind, and hard-to-beat ability and desire to make the company I work for the best it can be. Just like my mother, a therapist, and grandfather, a doctor, can easily see what's wrong with a person, I can easily see what's wrong with a system by just observing how the system works and occasionally asking a few questions. Then, I can almost always come up with at least one solution. This is one of the reasons I entered engineering -- I like finding solutions to problems.

And, frankly, I don't think I even needed a degree to prove that I was good at this. All a degree did for me was allow me the ability to apply equations to solving problems, when, really, problems are often too complex to be solved through material and energy balances. All a higher degree will do for me is make me more specialized with my equations towards solving more specialized problems. So I don't understand why people keep shaking their heads when I tell them I have a Bachelor's, not a Master's. Schooling isn't the solution to everyone's problems -- schooling is the solution to the problems of people who are incapable otherwise.

I have never been incapable; I just needed the right nurturing to bring out my capabilities. And traveling was the best nurturing I could have asked for. In the different countries I visited, I began seeing how many different solutions to problems different countries have, and I came back a lot more attune to how we do everything here in America.

My time spent in college, interestingly enough, was the most confused, stressed, and sleep-deprived time of my life. I kept wondering what I was doing there, what was the point of what I was doing. Thoughts of uncertainty flooded my mind and inhibited my ability to see solutions to problems as clearly as I should have. My exam scores suffered, and thus my GPA plummeted. Really, all of my life suffered just because I couldn’t realize any long-lasting solutions to my problems.

I wish I could do those five years over again, but instead I have to acknowledge what was and prove myself otherwise. This obviously is the more difficult route to live, but there's a saying by a Roman philosopher that goes, "It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness."

Information 101

Imagine a class with no subject. That's right, no department under which it falls.

Better yet, it's a class with no professor -- and no teaching assistant, either.

Now, the cherry on the sundae: you can even do it from the comforts of your bed, all you need is your computer.

Imagine a video chat class, dubbed Information 101, to which you get to invite your friends. You pick the dates and times you want to meet. Then, at each meeting, each person posts a minimum of one link source to discuss among the group.

We already do posts, in the form of tweets and status updates. What's lacking is our active discussion of them. And this is key to processing all that information that we are bombarded with daily. People need to discuss and develop ideas. This is the outlet for them.

Why men really aren't in trouble

This blog post is in response to the CNN article posted by William J. Bennett today titled, "Why men are in trouble."

What we are currently witnessing in trends and statistics -- that women are getting more college degrees and experiencing more rapid job growth -- is not because of men's downfall in society. Rather, it's a shift in society, and men are still leading this shift.

Statistics that state that from 1970 to 2006 the number of men with college degrees dropped 17%, that there are three women with degrees to every two men, and that women have experienced a 38% greater dollar earning growth than men since 1970 make it appear as though men are getting trampled by women. In reality, however, it's just that men have been sitting back and waiting for women to just catch up.

Men aren't being lazy, there's just not much for them to do these days. Women want to do it all (yet, still, they later complain about how much they have to do).

Really, though, it has always been in men's best interest to have women succeed; it means less work for men (simple math: two breadwinners versus just one) and less having to hear "anything you can do, I can do better." Women finally feel like they are out there, in the real world, making the big bucks, proving they can do things -- but, really, they seem to be still falling short.

Why? Because they're just following the rules, the rules that are over a century old: go to school, get your degree, get a job, get married, have babies, get your babies to college, then start saving for your retirement fund. When we live a life that goes from Point A to Point B to Point C... what happens when we get to Point Z? That has been the unsettling thought for this generation.

Seth Godin recently posted that we are on the brink of the industrial revolution's death and the connection revolution's birth. Sir Ken Robinson, on that same hand, has been zealously speaking far and wide about the reform of education. What both these brilliant minds tie into this conversation is that there is a developing change in how we approach work and school. So the fact that women are only now able to master the old paradigm of reading the textbook, going to class, taking down the professor's chalkboard notes, then going home and studying them for the exam (Point A to Point B to Point C...) does not mean they are taking over -- it means that they are still lagging behind.

In a related article, Hannah Rosin writes that "men are struggling to stay relevant in this rapidly changing economy, as manufacturing jobs disappear." The fact that manufacturing jobs are disappearing isn't a bad thing. Rather, it is giving men the wonderful opportunity to step back and think. From this thinking, many men appeared to have turned to entrepreneurship. For each month in 2009, for instance, 340 out of 100,000 adults started a new business. 

New businesses are certainly a good answer to the high unemployment rate in this country, but it appears women are falling short in that realm. Not only are just 30% of business owners women but they are not doing much for earning high revenue and creating jobs. 

What this generation of adults needs to consider is that technology has granted us the wonderful opportunity to visualize and communicate concepts in a remarkable way. A generation more heavily dependent on technology will understand the world in a different way than generations before. (So perhaps all that time spent playing video games actually goes towards a greater benefit!) This opens a lot of doors to a lot of new possibilities. The people stuck in the old way of doing things are not going to be aboard the train that is going a different direction.

Women are just following the rules. Men are looking for ways to break them. 

So do we need men? Of course we do! Should we belittle them, deprive them of their masculinity, and chastise them? Of course not! 

There is no need to act like power-hungry, blood-sucking robotic vampires. This is not a man's world, and this is not a woman's world. Men need women just as much as women need men. Sometimes, women will be better at some things, sometimes men will be. The fact is, however you skew the statistics, both genders can always bring more to the table. 

We want more...

A professor sets an aquarium tank onto a table in front of his class.

He proceeds to fill it with a bucket of big rocks.

After filling the tank with all the big rocks, the professor asks his class, "Is this tank full?" 

The class nods.

The professor then takes out a bucket of pebbles and fills the tank with them. The pebbles fall into the crevices between the big rocks. 

He asks his class again whether the tank is full. 

As before, the class nods.

The professor grins and takes out a bucket of sand. This bucket of sand fills the crevices between the pebbles.

"Is it full?" he asks.

The class doesn't respond.

Finally, the professor takes out a bucket of beer, and fills the tank with it.

Having done all this, the professor looks at his entire class, and asks, "What's the moral of this story?"

A student responds, "There's always room for beer."