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Find Your People

foundersatwork.posthaven.com

151–160 of 297 posts

Re: Find Your People

#151

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India. My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding. Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you…

The lifetime value of a college degree in the United States is very high.

College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.

While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.

Re: Find Your People

#152

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

I think it is easier and more obvious for kids from poorer families to figure it out they need to look around and try hard to earn some money. Do you need a laptop? Well you better earn some money to get one. Kids that get everything provided by parents often end up hopelessly lost when time to become independent comes.

And yet so many of them kinda rule the world by running the biggest corporations in the world. Your argument has so many holds, it can't hold water.

Re: Find Your People

#153
post #34

It’s a great speech, but I’ve listened to this “chase your dream” thing for decades. I took career and personality tests but nothing in them fit. I don’t fit. I’ve gotten seriously jaded and live with crippling mental health problems and constant stress because I feel like I failed to find my people and now I just hide from my people. So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to…

I came here to leave a comment related to this. This article has great advice, if you're normal enough that enough of "your people" exist to be able to find them and do something together. But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other peop…

Sounds familiar. Have you looked into ADHD and Autism yet?

Re: Find Your People

#154

> You fall into three groups She lost me at that statement. I hate these kind of reductive statements that are presented as a thoughtful statement. There are vastly more than three groups in that audience (granted, it is self-selected elite University, so the number of groups is still constrained comparatively).

You might as well add other categories about their majors or gender or age groups. I wouldn't call this reductive so much as a way of thinking about a group of college graduates. This classification was never presented as universal, just as a way of looking at things.

Re: Find Your People

#155

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal. No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhoo…

> These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.

It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).

Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.

I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.

Re: Find Your People

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal. No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhoo…

Those other things you mention are also "tracks". Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do. Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you. Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of th…

??? I got a job as a teenager because I wanted to buy a guitar. It had nothing to do with tracks. It's the same for most teens, they want to make a few extra bucks. Let's not forgot the majority of people on this forum were on a track of sorts that differs very much from the rest of the population. Being a bright nerdy kid is not the norm. Teens got jobs and mowed lawns to buy a car, weed, a guitar, etc, not to pad their highschool resume. That is not the norm unless you're at an expensive private school or already in the upper middle class or something.

Re: Find Your People

#158
post #3

Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life. The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts. I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actu…

With respect to private schools, I’m not necessarily against them, but I hate the idea of living in a society where public schools are seen as the ‘bad’ option for the lower class while private schools are for the middle and upper class.

I’ve heard that it’s kinda like that in the US currently but I’m not actually sure. I went to public school in Canada and it was completely fine.

Re: Find Your People

#159
post #147
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Full Time Employment crowd is the people who continue the tracks. Chilling by the watercooler, being paid for 8 hours a day with health insurance etc. while working 2 hours a day and/or bitching about your job. Or just enjoying life after work. These people would be as much at home in Soviet Russia as they would in today’s USA. They want more security. The EU has become the new USSR for this. Lots of protections.…

[flagged]

Do you know who that is? I don’t. So I don’t know if it’s unearned certainty or not.
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