self-dev Archives

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“You Don’t Know As Much As You Think”

Last updated on March 19th, 2017 at 11:47 pm

Hopping aboard any digital sharing bandwagon was always a struggle: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook. Before that: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga.

So on. So forth.

I didn’t gravitate towards voicing my opinion on pop culture and politics

Or what I had for breakfast. Didn’t think this literature was worth the digital space of 1’s and 0’s it took up. I made attempts through the years, but never felt strong doing it.

It’s easier, I think, to catch this early wave of social sharing that leads to YouTube sensations and pop-culture-websites-to-book deals when your parents convinced you you’re a unique snowflake whose opinion carries weight, even if it’s the opinion of a 12-year-old girl who’s never wanted for anything except a pair of Louboutins. Or your parents taught you education isn’t an institution but a street market in New Delhi where grades can be haggled over, and that your spot on the “A” soccer team isn’t hinged on being one of the best 11, but because of the $3,000 donation towards the booster club’s new bleachers.

My first day of work, ever, I wore pleated Dockers, a checked shirt and plastic Payless shoes, the latter of “Buy 1, get the 2nd ½ Off” sale. My father sat at the kitchen table, putting on his socks, which is where he attended to all things foot-related. He offered one nugget of advice, one sock already wrestled up his calf, and the other in his hand: “Don’t talk back. Listen first. You don’t know as much as you think.” The idea stuck with me.

Not always in a good way

It’s held me back times when I should have stepped forward. When I was the smartest person in the room (admittedly, a tiny room). Instead, we’d follow the leadership of someone who didn’t think from A to F, never mind A to Z. Who struggled to spell “piss” and do it when confronted with a toilet. But she was bold and fast and not scared to look foolish. She stepped forward and there’s merit in that.

Anyone with an Internet connection can step forward now. We’ve all got a soapbox. We just need to make the choice: shout at every passerby, refusing to be drowned out by everyone else clamoring for attention? Or do we whisper, so that the few who want to listen, must lean in? If the latter, we better make our message worth the lean.

Answering that challenge is difficult. To quote the hipster I overheard at the Last Bookstore on Spring and 7th in downtown Los Angeles: “it’s all so completely derivative, man.” He might be right.

A Byproduct of Self-Dev

I’ve never shied from the fact that I’m a byproduct of self-dev. I’m the amalgamation of those self-help aisles in Barnes & Noble with placards that boldly proclaiming LEADERSHIP and MANAGEMENT and RELATIONSHIP, always questioning whether this iteration of me, with the cheap haircut and hand-me down clothes, is in fact the best version of me. I’m also the byproduct of all those times I listened when maybe I should have spoke, not because I didn’t understand the words but because I wanted to stay inside myself, and take it in.

It’s left me behind those who can form an idea and Tweet it out to the Universe with naught a thought. I’m still calculating. I pause — “Is this what I’m really thinking? Is this how I actually feel?” I’m not far behind though. Everyday for these last few years, I’ve grown a little more confident. Still listening, still taking in all in, but with a little more hand raising. A little more, “I’ve seen this. I’ve done this. I can lead the way.

Photo Credit: Shuo Wang

personal development

What You Listen To Can Change Your Life

Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 03:25 am

Ninety percent of my car rides I spend listening to “self-development,” a convenient grouping for the countless interviews, TED talks, and commencement speeches on my iPod. These last three months, as I steadily increased the number of times I bicycled to work in lieu of trapping myself in a steel cage with wheels, I’ve missed out on hours of their words of encouragement.

In their place, I’ve traded for the sounds of morning sprinklers on pathetic strips of grass adjacent to sidewalks and apartment complexes, the rumble of earth movers beneath the stretch of the 10 across from Palms Blvd, and the whine of car horns as drivers blow reds and cut lanes sans signal. These are the sounds of the Los Angeles morning, the harmony to the melodious bike chain whirling beneath my seat and clacking against the gears. The sounds aren’t particularly educational or inspiring, but carry their own brand of tranquility, stillness in the chaos.

Seth Godin recently published a blog post entitled Can an audio book change your life? that inspired me to once again wire in. In the post he said:

“One of the key factors in both surviving this time and figuring out how to shift gears was my exposure to (as we called them then) books on tape, particularly the work of Zig Ziglar. I listened for sometimes hours every day. I’ve been grateful to Zig every day since, and I still listen regularly.

Wiring (Back) In

I started plugging in earphones for my bike commutes, tuning out the morning sounds as people I admire drop some knowledge while I pedal to work. (The first two pieces I listened to was the Charlie Hoehn interview on Blogcast FM and Tim Ferriss’s interview of Neil Strauss for CreativeLive, two interviews that have been on my queue for a while.)

Nothing’s changed me more than this unparalleled access to greater minds by simply plugging in earphones and touching play. Self-development audio books, interviews, and speeches have gotten me through more than commutes. I remember the summer before moving to Los Angeles, I listened to interviews every morning as I cleaned chairs and swept floors, prepping the restaurant before the first customers strolled in for an early lunch. Those interviews inspired me to continue injecting heart into my work, especially when it was difficult, and I was made better for that. For people who don’t listen to self-development for whatever reason (as Seth puts it, “People who haven’t tried it don’t want to. It feels a bit off-putting or mesmeresque to intentionally brainwash yourself with content designed to change your outlook”) the way I see it, there are only three alternatives for your commute (except of course, for silence):

You listen to the news. The news gives you a macro lens on current events upon which you can take no action, other than use in topical conversations with strangers who have nothing else to say to each other.

You can listen to music. While relaxing or enjoyable, in the long run, doesn’t provide much value (other than knowing the current pop sensation).

You listen to self-development. Which if you do over and over again, will create and alter life-long habits, by surrounding yourself with smarter people who’ve done greater things.

The latter, who is by far the most beneficial, has also never been much simpler as long as you have the right tool: Clip Converter.

A Shortlist To Get Started

After that, it’s a matter of curating what you’d like to listen to. I started a short list below. (I wanted to wait until I curated a monster list, separated by categories, but realized something was better than nothing, and a shortlist was more accessible than a monster one I envisioned):

Another thought on the benefits of audio: I recently completed a Career Mastery pilot program created by Scott H. Young and Cal Newport. It was a four-week email course, where they explained the principles in writing and you completed “homework” that was emailed back to them. At the end of the pilot program, Scott and Cal conducted a “graduation webinar.” I struggled with the material for four weeks, and it wasn’t until the webinar that the concepts and theory really struck home. Hearing multiple examples of ideas in practice untangled the concepts for me, and for the first time since I joined the course, I had a clear idea of what I could accomplish with the strategies and how to go about it.

Choosing Who Surrounds You

There was a time when we couldn’t chose who surrounded us, or what ideas we immersed ourselves in, other than through books. But even that was limited, by access to the right books. Essentially we were locked to our context and our environment. Today we can pretty much immerse ourselves in anyone’s thoughts, and open ourselves up to whole new planes of thinking, without so much as leaving our computers. With unlimited access, it’s never been so easy to change our lives, and any excuse not to, falls on ears filled with the voices of people who already have.

Photos Credit: Jacob Bøtter

personal development

Defining Self-Dev: A Glance Through Someone Else’s Lens

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 04:00 pm

At LAX in the baggage line stood a family of six: Mom & Dad, the boy (7-years-old and the eldest,) two girls and a baby of unidentified gender. Behind them, the things they carried: Dora the Explorer roll-y bags, cheap carnival-won plush animals popping out of backpacks like Whack-a-Moles, Samsonite luggage and a car seat. The kids were quiet. Elephant-dart tranquil. When Mom asked them to stand aside, so they could get everything sorted, they obediently did so. With even the softest palette of primary colors, Norman Rockwell couldn’t paint domesticity this serene.

Yet the parents looked absolutely haggard. Pacquiao could warm up on the bags beneath Mom’s eyes. She wore a hand-knit scarf the color of Kansas’s skyline that accentuated the lines by her eyes. Dad raised a hand to push back his thinning black hair, and exposed the pouch of a Once-Upon-a-Time baseball player. He kept the weight at bay for years with after work jogs and heavy-weight/low-rep lifts, but now when he returns home he’s tripped up worse than an AT-AT Walker on Hot, by a toddler-barrage fighting for his attention.

I always (half-) jokingly said I’d like five children. I have three siblings already and thought there was room for yet another little person to look up to me and adore me, as I’m vehemently assured my brothers and sister always did. A family of seven would have been wonderful.

Watching the spectacle at LAX was the first time I examined the possibility of raising five children through the lens of a parent, however. The idea, now, requires revisiting.

Revisiting ideas through a different lens is why I track the books I read, and ideas as I read them, in Evernote and here. At different junctures of life and career, the lens changes — we change focal length by moving closer or further from the situation, we shift the curve of our trajectory, or there’s new clarity when something was once opaque. It’s an exercise in self-development and self-awareness, but more importantly, it exercises our ability to understand others. To empathize with others.

Isn’t that what self-development is? Seeing the world through someone else’s lens, and realizing that we are not always right, and they are not always wrong?

Photo Credit: Katja Kemnitz

career

Time To Get Back To This

Last updated on November 2nd, 2021 at 05:17 pm

Time to get back to this. Yes.

I’m moving large chunks of the “Moving to Los Angeles” posts to another blog, one geared towards Los Angeles, the entertainment industry, and personal finance.