Read this article on "What Should I Do With My Life?"

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/66/mylife.html

A big huge.. snippet.. from the article:

Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path means closing a door forever.

"Keeping your doors open" is a trap. It's an excuse to stay uninvolved. I call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers. They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling like observers, feeling as if they haven't come close to living up to their potential.

Leela de Souza almost got lost in that trap. At age 15, Leela knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up: a dancer. She pursued that dream, supplementing her meager dancer's pay with work as a runway model. But she soon began to feel that she had left her intellect behind. So, in her early twenties, with several good years left on her legs, she took the SATs and applied to college. She paid for a $100,000 education at the University of Chicago with the money that she had earned from modeling and during the next seven years made a series of seemingly smart decisions: a year in Spain, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., a White House Fellowship, high-tech PR. But she never got any closer to making a real choice.

Like most Phi Beta Slackers, she was cursed with tremendous ability and infinite choices. Figuring out what to do with her life was constantly on her mind. But then she figured something else out: Her need to look brilliant was what was keeping her from truly answering The Question. When she let go of that, she was able to shift gears from asking "What do I do next?" to making strides toward answering "To what can I devote my life?"

Asking "What Should I Do With My Life?" is the modern, secular version of the great timeless questions about our identity. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering The Question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you're not. What is freedom for if not the chance to define for yourself who you are?

I have spent the better part of the past two years in the company of people who have dared to confront where they belong. They didn't always find an ultimate answer, but taking the question seriously helped get them closer. We are all writing the story of our own life. It's not a story of conquest. It's a story of discovery. Through trial and error, we learn what gifts we have to offer the world and are pushed to greater recognition about what we really need. The Big Bold Leap turns out to be only the first step.

One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that they're different. They're not. The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you're rooted in a particular system -- whether it's medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup -- it's often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.

Don Linn, the investment banker who took over the catfish farm in Mississippi, learned this lesson the hard way. After years as a star at PaineWebber and First Boston, he dropped out when he could no longer bring himself to push deals on his clients that he knew wouldn't work. His life change smacked of foolish originality: 5.5 million catfish on 1,500 water acres. His first day, he had to clip the wings of a flock of geese. Covered in goose shit and blood, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. But he figured it out and grew his business into a $16 million operation with five side businesses. More important, the work reset his moral compass. In farming, success doesn't come at another farmer's expense. You learn to cooperate, sharing processing plants, feed mills, and pesticide-flying services.

Like Don, you'll be a lot happier if you aren't fighting the value system around you. Find one that enforces a set of beliefs that you can really get behind. There's a powerful transformative effect when you surround yourself with like-minded people. Peer pressure is a great thing when it helps you accomplish your goals instead of distracting you from them.

"What Should I do with my Life?"

How to do it.

On Richard Branson:

'When Richard Branson's granny was 99, she wrote him to say that the last 10 years had been her best. He should read the book, "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. She had loved it. But most of all, her advice to Richard was "You've got one go in life, so make the most of it."'

'If he is greedy, then it is a craving for turning possibilities, even unlikely ones, into raging successes. "It all comes down to people," he remarks in an interview with David Sheff of Forbes. "Nothing else even comes close." He writes them all, all 5,000 Virgin employees, a chatty letter once a month from his paper notebook, and invites them to write or call him with their problems, ideas and dreams. They do...and new Virgin successes are born.'

http://www.beingdyslexic.co.uk/information/famous/richard-branson.php

Ikiru

From the TIME Archive:
The great strength of the picture is the total seriousness and importance of what Kurosawa has to say: to live is to love; the rest is cancer
—TIME Magazine, Feb. 15, 1960 >>

Today

I skipped work and instead danced to the Pet Shop Boys in my bra. It reminded me of how effing weird are the things I do. Still, it was so worth it. What was not worth it, was listening to Sarah McLachlan's downers and then calling all my friends to have heart-to-heart discussions about the limits of fuckedness, and about what levels of insanity they were prepared to tolerate before asking for help or taking matters into their own hands a la gun. No, I think that when life seems to go to shit, that is when we are not taking matters into our own hands. Stand up and get what you want. It's fun. And then we die.

If only people felt this way about people

Ad:

Reply to: anon-99812220@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-09-25, 1:52AM PDT


Korg Polysix Keyboard Synth
Very cool old synth, Korg's answer to the Roland Juno.
I had bought this, intending to fix it up, but got too busy. Needs a new battery pack, I have the part, but can't be bothered to wire it up. If you are a synth nerd/hobbiest and you want a project, this is for you.

I just want this to go to someone who will love it instead of throwing it out.

mean combo

do not eat tea, a raw carrot, and 4 granola bars in one sitting.

Found this on craigslist.

dreams gone; given up yearning. accept your silence as disinterest.
in quiet mornings, i accept the tears & this aching loneliness.
given up dreams, but not how i feel. truth breathes within.
learning to embrace fear, loneliness, perhaps insight.

i'm sorry, i missed so much--every wind-blown word you said,
every static-filled thought off someone else' line.
everything happens for a reason...doesn't it?

in rilke's words, "have patience with everything that remains
unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to
you because you could not live them...you need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself
experiencing the answer, some distant day...create for yourself
an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle.

Discipline yourself to attain it...accept that which comes
to you with deep trust, as long as it comes from your own will,
from your own inner need, accept it and do not hate anything."
[Letters to a Young Poet]

i know it's true...just wish i could hear from you.
trying to live fully in this moment knowing silence is your answer...
ouch

A brilliant thing I said today

"You're only 18?! Holy shit, -- I'm almost twice your age."

The Dumbing Down of Germany

"A German politician was roundly criticized recently for commenting that only the "wrong people" were having children in Germany. But he was giving voice to an uncomfortable truth about the country’s demographic shift."

Dumbing Down Editor: Ivo Mosley. Publication Date: April 3 2000

From the Introduction:
Never before in human history has so much cleverness been used to such stupid ends. The cleverness is in the creation and manipulation of markets, media and power; the stupid ends are in the destruction of community, responsibility, morality, art, religion and the natural world.

As a result, a kind of numbness has taken over. In the face of an uncertain and alarming future, which holds little inspiration for present living, people fight off gloom and stupefaction by withdrawing into trivia, sensation-seeking, or addictions to money, drugs, or power.

This is Dumbing Down, a phenomenon observable in almost all walks of life; politics, culture, civil administration, the media, science, education, even the law. It is so widespread that a new term has been coined; dumbocracy.

Dumbocracy is the rule of cleverness without wisdom. It looks always for the short-term gain, forgetting that we could be around on this planet for a long time - provided dumbocracy does not get out of hand.

Some insist that dumbing-down does not exist; it is an illusion created by an elite to shore up its own waning power. But elites are a necessity in the human affairs of any great civilization. We should try to get the best elites we can, for when one elite is got rid of, another - often worse - takes its place; those who promise to rid us of one elite are bent on replacing it with themselves. As Franz Kafka wrote, 'Revolutions come and go, leaving nothing behind them but the slime of a new bureaucracy.'