Yesterday night I read a post from Brain Pickings on why you don’t need to go back to school.  Of course, I did go back to school at the University of Minnesota for a business degree, and before that a degree at St. Cloud State University, so what I’m about to say is probably self contradictory.

I don’t think most people benefit all that much from going to school.  I should say, I think you can learn everything outside of school without being there.

Without a doubt in my mind, I’ve learned more about philosophy, writing, marketing, finance, economics, public policy, business as a whole, and a myriad of other subjects outside of school than in.

The argumentative among you may quickly point out that you needed school for the building blocks to go out and learn those things.  To a certain extent that is true.  I think most people, myself included, need some instruction in learning how to read, write and especially do mathematics.  Yet those things aren’t life long pursuits, they are taught in elementary and at higher degrees throughout high school.  After that, depending on the intricacy and expectation of your chosen vocation, you will get further and further down the paths of those subjects.

The key is getting people excited about learning.  And that’s the rub, you can’t get people excited about learning.  They have to BE excited about learning.  That comes from within.  You can certainly help people along by *almost* connecting a few dots for them, then letting them finish the job and understand the general elation that comes from figuring things out. But overall I think it’s more of a personality trait than an education system flaw.

Still, teachers that can foster those with the predisposition to learning on their own are far too few.  I’ve had a handful at best.  The power of an inspiring teacher who EMPOWERS people to use their own ability is worth their weight in Californium 252.  They are just too scarce.

So why did I go back to school if I was already learning so much on my own?  Multiple reasons, but the main is that as a society we haven’t evolved to the point where we can objectively critique peoples’ skill sets without the lowest common denominator comparisons (degrees, experience.)  The LCDs aren’t bad either, but they are the only real way to evaluate for some institutions.

There’s a problem there, however.  We are very quickly moving toward a society that values formal education less and less due to the costs of higher education and the less than encouraging prospects of paying off that debt with a more financially rewarding position.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met with a graduate degree who can’t make it work for them.  The problem there is that getting a degree isn’t a ticket you give to an employer that they recompense you for your time.  It’s a table stake of many higher level positions, but table stakes don’t mean you win the hand.

I do think we are in a bubble period for education.  I don’t have kids at this point, but I have already thought about their best path moving forward.  The best path that I can see for most people involves figuring out, as quickly as possible mind you, what you want to do.  That’s what kills most people in terms of jobs, they don’t know what they want and wait too long.  It’s never TOO late to do something, but realistically knowing what you want will help you focus.

After figuring out what you want there are a few choices dependent on your vocation prerogative.  If it’s a doctor or lawyer (hint: not a good time for this) or other higher end degree, the best thing to do is get into community college where you can transfer credits to a state college or similar institution and finalize your BS with extremely high grades.  You should be actively trying to keep costs low until this point, because the next part is expensive.  At that point, depending on vocation, get into the best school you can with some thought about final salary and where you want to work.  Pay the money for the best school, it’s worth it.  But that’s only half the battle.  The key here is to not focus on education only.  Go find people doing what you want to do simultaneously and interview them for information, volunteer for work with similar types of work, take advantage of extracurriculars corresponding to the work type, join the school organizations supporting that work or start your own.  DO.  Make your story so you can sell it later.

On the other hand, for other types of jobs, there is a much easier path.  Skilled trades to me seem like a great way to live your life, knowing what I know now.  The path to get the role is much faster and you can use the amount of time and opportunity capital to build a portfolio that will see you comfortable the rest of your life.  The key here is knowing to do it early.  If you start working at 15 like I did (McDonald’s, before that it was actually mowing lawns at 13) and start saving $1oo or $200 per month and putting it in a Roth IRA or other retirement account, steadily increasing it as your income grows with professional experience, you will undoubtedly be a millionaire by retirement.  It’s pretty basic math, and not all that difficult in terms of actual contributions, but it works.

I’ve oversimplified this into a two path ideal, there are many more options of course.  I’ve also looked at it from a financial standpoint in the vein that whatever you WANT to do, you should do so in a way that you and your family are secure.

I started this post in hopes of discussing learning on your own, but it morphed into thoughts on education.  I’ll dive into learning on your own more in the future as this post is getting long.

The last month has flown by.  Buying a house entails a lot of work and alterations, with no end in sight.

Generally speaking, my days look something like this:  Wake up around 5am, do exercises, take Stella outside, eat greek yogurt, go online to see NBA scores and pay bills or take care of emails, go to work, work a lot, maybe get to the gym over lunch, work more, don’t get enough done, take work home, walk Stella, watch NBA game until roughly 9pm, read two chapters of a book and go to sleep.

That’s roughly it.  On the weekends we’ve been trying to get the house in order.  We just had the roof replaced last week.  I’ve been setting up all our utility accounts and organizing all the leftover minutia from the move.  We bought a lawn mower, did yard work and Teresa tilled the garden.  We have to plan out getting a fence in the next few weeks as we want to just let the pup run outside without supervision.  There’s also another dog on the way!

Bloomington seems like a pretty nice place to live all said, we’ve meet quite a few neighbors and there are a lot of areas to explore, so far so good.

This weekend is the National Restaurant Show, which means I’m working through it.  The show is actually pretty fun, but it’s tough to leave when there is still so much to do around here, and frankly I could use a rest!  Still, it’s been a lot of fun the last few weeks, just not much time to write about it.

A week ago, I hit my thirtieth birthday.

Honestly, that’s a pretty significant milestone.  I’m not one to pay much reverence to 1/365 days in a year, but three decades worth of living deserves some retrospection.

The first ten years of life are really a blur.  You don’t actually start forming memories until roughly five years old.  At that point you are still learning so much that it’s tough to retain a lot other than general ideas about growing up.  The second decade you start to become independent and form your own prerogative on life.  It’s mostly wrong and self centered at that point, but you’re still growing and learning to stand on your two feet.  The next decade, your 20’s, is when life really becomes yours.  It’s also when the world will give you a good kick in the ass as well.  You start working and trying to build.

Looking back, I’ve had a fair amount of accomplishments thus far.  I’ve done the things I set out to.  My mom sent me a few messages congratulating me on some of those things, but I responded that I was just getting started.  And that’s true.  I have a lot of goals, the biggest one is to keep learning.  I see so many people every day and the ones I really respect are still striving to learn and get better at what they do.

That sounds like an easy goal, but it’s not.  When you start to actually get the things you want, that you’ve been working for, it’s human nature to ease up.  Staying hungry is hard, but that’s what you need to do.  Life is so much better when you’re learning, when you’re curious to take on new challenges and add value to other peoples’ lives, as well as your own.

I’m also humbled by the incredible friends I’ve gained in the last 20 years.  I’ve got friends that I met 24 years ago.  Friends from high school and college that I see monthly.  They will be there for life, which is not necessarily a common thing.

It’s been a great three decades.  It’s been a wonderful trip and it’s only getting better.  If I can get two more time spans of this nature before shipping off, I’ll be content with that.

It’s been pretty slow on the blog for most of the month, mostly due to a California trip for work and the fact that we finally purchased a home (walk throughs closing, moving, settling, etc.)

We now live in the suburb of Bloomington Minnesota on the West side.  We don’t know a whole lot about the area, but we do like the house.  It’s spacious and there is a lot of room for all the things we’ve been accumulating.  All last weekend we were moving and pretty much exhausted from the work, it was quite an endeavor, but well worth it.

I’ve been working on a comic with a friend for some time.  Truth be known, the comic has gone extremely slowly and I’m wondering how we’re going to progress at this rate.  Regardless, as part of that process I’ve been reading a new comic called Chew.

The first 10 books are covered in a very cool Omnivore Edition.

The story covers off on Tony Chu, a detective turned FDA agent who has a cibopathic ability.  That means he can eat anything and get an idea of where it came from, what happened to it and even learn from the knowledge of that thing.  This comes in incredibly handy as a detective, as he’s able to taste some rather disgusting things in order to track down a perpetrator or get a lead on a crime.

The are in this comic is outstanding.  The writing is hilarious and the characters are really enjoyable too.  If you have any interest in reading comics, check it out!

I’ve been putting off reviewing a few books, so I’m jamming two into one post.  They are diametrically opposite ends of the spectrum.

When starting Infinite Jest, I  was actually in the middle of two other books.  Many people read lots of books simultaneously, but for me that’s not a common thing.  I’d started re-reading The Scarlet Letter (which still sits about half way through though it’s an EXCELLENT book in many ways) and also was mostly finished with The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham.

This book has been lauded by Warren Buffett and many others as one of, if not the, best book on investment ever written.  I’m at a point in my life where I still have quite a bit of student debt and other obligations that preclude investing in anything beyond a 401k and a Roth (if I can swing that in a given year!)  Still, I do expect to begin actively investing in the next 3-5 years when those larger debts are paid down.

I’ve always been fascinated with how businesses attract customers and build revenue.  I haven’t ever really been all that fascinated with the financial side of business or accounting.  So I spent little time looking at investment through school, as it was more closely tied to finance.

Once you start to learn about finance and investing, however, you realize how closely tied it all is.  Investing is very much related to understanding which companies will be able to continually grow their revenues and potentially dividends to their stockholders.  Which companies will grow is tied to marketing.

This book covers off on many fundamental pieces of knowledge for investors, such as the difference between investing and speculation.   For me, this remains the biggest lesson of investing.  It also touches on inflation and how stocks and other tradable assets can outperform currencies, defensive portfolio investing, different types of investing and aggression levels, security analysis, and a good array of different real time situations from the era it was published (1949) and some updated situations from the reprint in 1976.

Investing isn’t a particularly hard thing to do.  Being good at it isn’t easy either, because no one can predict the future.  But like index investing I detailed over four years ago, there are good paths to achieve above average returns.  You simply have to be willing to take the time to understand a business and the expectations along with it.  I likely will invest in individual companies outside my 401k and Roth eventually, but for most people, I’d advocate just getting index funds like the Vanguard 500.

If you are interested in learning about investing, this is a must read book.  If you aren’t, pass.

The next book to cover off on is a Fantasy Fiction offering called The Name of the Wind.  Again, this is on the opposite end of the spectrum.  After finishing Infinite Jest, I wanted to read something far easier and more enjoyable.  That book had been difficult and, though rewarding, intellectually exhausting.  It was time to get into something really fun.  Luckily my brother in law David had read this book and really liked it, enough so that he got my in laws to buy it for me for Xmas.

He was absolutely correct about how good it is.  This is Patrick Rothfuss’ first book and he did a fantastic job with it.  It is the story of Kvothe, a red haired youth growing up with his family in a travelling caravan of actors and performers.  It is told from a past tense perspective of the protagonist in an older age.  A man named Chronicler is recording his story throughout.

Kvothe covers his childhood and how he came to learn at the University, meet new friends and enemies.  He covers his trials and tribulations in the inner city of Tarbean and his quest to understand a mysterious group of marauders that took people from him unnecessarily.

This is the start of a trilogy for Kvothe, there are two other books.  The second book just came out this month, and the third will likely not be out for another few years.  I know I’ll read all of them as the start is such an amazing story, and so well written, that reading the others will be a must.

It took me two months to read Infinite Jest, which was about 1,000 pages.  This book was 600 pages and I read it in two weeks.  The amount of words is far fewer, but it was interesting enough that I’d come home from work and begin reading it, stop for dinner and continue on.  Four hours of reading per night happened more than a few times.  It is a page turner and if you enjoy fiction whatsoever, this is a great read.  Highly recommended.

I just picked up the second book at Barnes and Noble yesterday.  It’s a bigger book and I’m excited for it.  I actually bought 13 Redwall books yesterday too.  With the move to Bloomington coming up, it seems like reading will become more common, I certainly hope so.  But that’s a post for another day.

Not much of an ability, in all reality.  To err is human, after all.  EVERYONE you have ever known or will know is wrong seemingly countless times in the course of their lives.  I won’t get into the specifics of what “wrong” is as that’s a long philosophical journey which I haven’t seen the end of yet.

For the sake of discussion, being wrong here means choosing to do something deliberately that is not the optimal situation given an objective.

We are all wrong quite often and when all the cards are on the table, you’d be hard pressed to argue with that.  Being wrong is just part of life.

In business, there are hierarchies of authority which often lead us to bend opinion into what is right or wrong.  People who have gained power in positions of authority are given the right to judge what is the best decision. This is a good thing in most organizations, we need people to make a decision and choose a path to go down.

Where we are led astray is when those people are not willing to admit to being wrong.  Many people in the world, not only in businesses or other organizations, are absolutely adamant about their position once they’ve made a decision.  They can’t be argued out of that position.  The mentality seems to be that if you entrench yourself and never give an inch of ground regarding your position, you are guaranteed victory.  That’s an incorrect assumption, but it doesn’t stop people from having the though process.

Their ego has overtaken their sensibility. They are no longer thinking objectively, but trying to defend their position at any stakes necessary in order to maintain their “rightness.”  I have a feeling that mentally this is not only a subconscious ego manifestation, but a conscious understanding that being wrong too many times could threaten their ultimate fate.

I also believe that some people think by always being “right,” regardless of actual outcome, they will impress peers or people they lead.  After all, why would someone follow someone who is wrong and openly admits to it?

They follow because they know what’s right.

It’s very easy to be wrong, no one is above it.  But to be wrong and be confident in your own person such that you can admit it and change a decision or even apologize if the situation warrants it is quite atypical.

It sets you apart as a leader because people want to trust you and your decisions.  People will not trust someone who blindly makes decisions and defends them to the death even when they are obviously not in the right.  They will lose patience and trust in those scenarios.

So the ability to be wrong is actually a pretty good ability after all.  Hopefully you’re “right” far more often, but when not, accept it and learn from it.

There’s way too much spam on this site.  I have to go through and delete it every few days and it’s not really worth it.  I think I’m going to disable comments on the blog.

In all my work as a marketing professional, hindsight always shows the errors.  The goofs, blunders and odd thinking that led to a piece of collateral, communication, meeting or pitch gone wrong.  And they will continue to be.

What causes all these follies?

What causes otherwise rational folks to make what in retrospect seem like such implausible blemishes?

It’s actually pretty simple.  It’s the environment you work in.

Human error is a constant.  It cannot be avoided and shouldn’t be derided as anything more than imperfection.  People make mistakes, and that’s just part of the deal of being a human being.

Yet the environment you work in can either help or hinder that inevitable situation.  Those that work too fast and expect things to be perfect will normally end up with more errors.  Those with too many people having a say in the final design/finish of a project will usually end up trying to do too much and end up a muddled mess.  Those that embrace management opinion regardless of the situation will suffer a tragic fate of predictability and risk aversion.  Those that dissuade collaboration across functions will suffer from disconnection.

Environments with accountability expected will see people taking charge of their own projects.  Those with recognition will see natural reinforcement of positive outcomes.  Those with strong leadership will achieve their objectives.  Most organizations don’t have the best talent, they have an amalgam of talent levels and the best leadership will construct it in such a way to prosper.

All that doesn’t mean that people don’t have to be accountable for their choices and work.  But the environment is what causes errors to be corrected prior to being an error, or magnifies them after the fact.

I really didn’t know what I was getting into, honestly.

Back in early October of last year, I pointed to a few videos around the idea of “this is water” and after decided that I should read some of his works.  It seemed that “Infinite Jest” was his most remarked and well reflected upon book, so I ordered it.

It came in the mail and I was blown away by the sheer length of it.  I didn’t look at the number of pages or words when I ordered, just kind of assumed it was your average pseudo philosophical life rendering in story form.  I haven’t read Ulysses yet, but this book is pretty much the exact same size.  The book not only had a lot of pages (981), but each one is absolutely brimming with words.  There are hundreds of no paragraph break pages, just humongous blocks of words in Joyce/Emerson fashion.  If you don’t like to read, it would be daunting.

I knew going into it that it would take significant amounts of time as many better read people stated that it took them a month to read it.  I began reading it on my honeymoon in Costa Rica.  Over the course of those two weeks, the book truly engrossed me.  I ended up reading roughly half of the book in those two weeks.  Then upon arriving back into the cold winter Minnesota, my speed drastically slowed.  All said it took roughly two months to read.

To the story!  Due to the size of the book, I had many people ask me to explain the book to them when lugging it around during travel, etc.  Unfortunately that’s really hard.  Infinite Jest is a woven tapestry where every chapter is a thread.  In the initial chapters, you are somewhat lost as there is little cohesive nature, save introduction to the first protagonist (?) of the story, Hal Incandenza, and his family which the Bluths of Arrested Development has absolutely nothing on in terms of peculiarity.

Hal and his family’s story revolves mostly around a tennis academy setting in Boston, where Hal contemplates the current goings on after traumatic events of his past.  Hal is a phenomenal young player and potentially going to the big show tennis circuit, but his life is an ongoing rut of working out and getting high, with little room for much else.  He’s interesting in his enviable intellect and pragmatic approach to the tennis grind, but describing him as a protagonist isn’t really sensible.  This book rarely shows the typical story lines associated with other books and there are no real heros, or villains for that matter.  But the world Hal lives in is very sterile and the characters there are shaped by the drive to succeed, all of them have more or less “made it” in terms of livelihoods.

The first few hundred pages of the book absolutely riveted me because I’d never seen such an obtuse approach to putting a story together.  Slowly over time the threads began to interweave and present some semblance of a story arch, but it was plodding and intellectually challenging to maintain all characters (some are throwaways, some are integral, but you really don’t know at the time.

And the characters!  Wallace takes time to give minutia level detail to many throwaways as well as intricacy to all aspects of the book.  It’s almost frightening to imagine how Wallace approached this in the three years he worked on it.  You have to read the book with two bookmarks, one for the actual text and another for the 300+ footnotes, which are annoyingly not kept on the bottom of the corresponding notated page.  There’s good reason, some of the notations are mini chapters and would actually deviate from the story itself, still it’s a labor…of love.

The book bifurcates in the middle to include another pseudo protagonist, Don Gately, who works at a house for reforming drug addicts very near the hill which houses Hal.  This portion of the book describes another area in Boston where people have far from “made it.”  They are mostly in various stages of recovery and have pasts that represent the worst of human tendency.  Again, the amount of detail presented on all characters and different activities within their lives is surreal, and keeping things in perspective is difficult.  Adjusting to the style of writing took me a few hundred pages, after which the book was as interesting as an idea is it was a plot.

Attempting to describe the plot line seems futile, as it is so unorthodox an explanation still seems of little value, but here goes:

Hal’s late father created an entertainment video that was so incredibly compelling that it could stop people in their tracks and hypnotize them forever due to the irresistible nature of the tape.  Tapes at that point had overtaken television due to strategic alterations in the expectations of consumers, by the way.  The North American continent had actually combined into one larger group of allied geographies as one continent, yet the Quebecois contingent had a group of wheelchair bound anarchists attempting to deviate from the larger alliance who brutally eliminate people in their way in order to find and use this tape for their own means (likely overthrowing government and claiming their lands?)  The book is essentially an exposition on the characters surrounding this tape and how they intertwine over the course of past and present.

That description leaves out an immense amount of material, but really, how do you condense a novel of 484,000 words that meanders to and fro, in and out of ideas without any regard?  You can’t really.  You can only describe it as an immense and interesting read, though certainly not for everyone.  I know many people that would be EXTREMELY dissatisfied with the ending of the book, but ultimately the holistic value of the book isn’t meant to be measured against more typical story archs.  There is a lot of value here, but not for all.

To give a better idea of the complexity of the book, here is a cool chart showing the interrelation between characters, as well as some other visualizations from Brain Pickings (which by the way if you like to read is a really great blog.) Oh and another, more in depth chart.