A 30 Year-Old’s Colorful Advice to 20-Somethings

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The Musty Man, who writes an infrequently updated but thoroughly entertaining and well-written blog, uses his 30th birthday as an opportunity to dish out advice to the 20-somethings behind him. But first he protests at the well-worn tradition of older people telling younger people how it all will get better soon:

I don't remember the aged teenager telling the 9 year old me about the tsunami of hormones, self-doubt, clumsy fingers, or faked confidence in the face of complete inscrutabilities like drugs and vaginas. I don't remember the 22 year old telling the 19 year old me about the terrors of cluelessness, the revelation that it's called RAT RACE for a reason, the slow death of doing nothing much, the desperation of trying to find a place that fits and then occupy it when other people are probably trying to do the same thing, how much more complicated relationships are, even, than vaginas. So okay, well-wishers, I'm glad it's all gonna settle down a bit and yes of course it will be nice to have a little more predictability about things but don't think I ain't got my eye on you. You fuckers haven't told me the whole truth once, not ONCE.

Hilarious. From the advice itself, something all students should consider as they work to beat the system:

Habits matter. That whole bullshit host of people who couldn't stop telling you that your high school grades were gonna follow you forever were assholes. Your high school grades only come up now when you bust them out to shock people at work – a lot of dudes are never gonna get over the idea that all those high school grades actually meant something, so they'll still get a little crampy when you point out that you spent all of high school everywhere other than there and still managed to make it just as far up the ladder as they did. That's still gonna be fun for you. The danger isn't grades, it's habits. You're in the style of not paying a lot of attention to much because you feel like you don't need to, and you know, you don't. School is never gonna be a thing that takes 100%. But in the end, you ain't up against grades, you're up against your own self. And trust me – in 10 years, you won't regret the grades but you will regret the bad habits.

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Here's the Musty Man's post on his ex-girlfriends. I recommend it for all men. He says you want to ultimately get to a point where you can be happy for an ex-girlfriend and not just fake being happy for her (i.e. secretly wish her new boyfriend gets cancer in his dick).

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An Appreciative Approach to People

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Appreciative thinking is learning to see the value of things, says Seth Roberts. It’s learning to appreciate what’s good in something.

School teaches us to be proactively skeptical and critical. We’re taught to immediately look for the flaws in experiments or theories. An appreciative approach, by contrast, simply asks, “What’s redeeming about this experiment or idea? What’s done right?”

Some VCs are naturally appreciative, others naturally critical. After an entrepreneur pitch their first feedback will either be, “OK, here’s what I like about what you’re doing” versus “Here’s where I think the problems are.”

I am trying to take a more appreciative approach to people. When I meet someone new at a cocktail party, I am trying to ask myself more regularly, “What’s cool / impressive / interesting about this person?” as opposed to dwelling on their imperfections.

Stay positive, in other words.

I already do this most of the time. But I think I can do this more with at least three types of people:

1. People I perceive as less smart than me. It is possible to learn from someone not as smart as me. It is also very possible that the person is smart in ways I am not and I should try to appreciate that.

2. The type of people who preface every answer with “thank you for sharing.” These are the exceedingly empathetic people. The touchy feely people. The Oprah people. People who love talking about their feelings more than their ideas. It’s too easy to dismiss them as lightweights. I would like to be better at appreciating their approach to the world.

3. Self-absorbed people. When I’m stuck in a conversation with a self-absorbed person who does not realize that he is a self-obsessed asshole, in my head I sometimes play the game, “How long can he keep talking and I stay silent?” I focus in on his obliviousness to the social dynamics of the conversation. As a result I miss out on appreciating actual virtues he may be displaying, let alone listening to and comprehending the words coming out of his mouth.

Here’s to ever more appreciativeness!

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Store Thoughts in the Appropriate Place as Soon as You Have Them

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I have learned one thing from productivity expert David Allen: write down thoughts, ideas, questions, or tasks as soon as you have them.

Many people focus on organizing their information and data. But first you need to collect and store your own new thoughts and ideas. You need to be disciplined about capturing them as soon as they come to mind. It's easy to create folders and wikis on your computer. It's harder to pause a conversation or meeting, or lean over to your bedside table when only half-awake, so you can jot down a thought you may need to remember.

I have pads of paper on my bedside table, on my desk, in my briefcase, and am always scribbling things down on my PDA.

Buried in a Wired article Allen summarizes this philosophy clearly:

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my quasi-scientific approach to sustained laziness is the value of storing thoughts in appropriate places, as soon as I have them. That means parking them where I will later evaluate their merit (or lack thereof) and dispose of them accordingly. Having a thought once is what the mind is for; having the same thought twice, in the same way, for the same reason, is a waste of time and energy. I also found out that having a place for good ideas produced more of them, and more often.

That last sentence is true, too. In my book I talk about how most business ideas sprout forth from your "fringe thoughts" list.

Bottom Line: If you're thinking the same thought twice, in the same way, for the same reason, you're wasting time and energy. Store your thoughts / tasks as you soon as you think them.

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The Days Are Long, But The Years Are Short

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My friend Gretchen Rubin, who created a very touching three minute video titled The Days Are Long, But the Years Are Short about riding the bus with her daughter (all parents should watch it), returns to this phrase in a recent post about the author Laura Ingalls Wilder.

She says happiness is listening to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audio CD with her four year old daughter. Here’s the last page of Little House in the Big Woods, emphasis my own:

 

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

My Mom read all the Little House books to me growing up. My favorite is Farmer Boy which I’ve read several times.

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Here’s Gretchen on why you should keep a one-sentence daily journal.

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Assorted Musings

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About once a month I post a splatch of assorted musings — thoughts too short to justify full blog posts, too long to fit into Twitter (where I micro-blog a couple times a day), and always half-baked. What follows are cheap shots, bon mots, and quick thoughts….

1. What is it that's so appealing about the "tortured genius" archetype? Has easygoing depression always been endowed with hipness? If an artist is insanely happy and optimistic about the world, does she lose credibility among her fellow artists? Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, touches on this a bit in her excellent TED talk.

2. When explaining dissatisfaction in a romantic relationship, women frequently say, "I've always thought I liked you more than you liked me."

Reciprocity matters. In friendships, it's not ideal if I consider you my best friend but you don't consider me your best friend. Either way, true friends don't spend much energy trying to decipher how much the other person "likes" the other.

But in romance this is paramount, especially for women. Women seem to pay closer attention to whether the like or love is flowing bi-directionally at the same clip. And she will stress if she feels her level of love is not being reciprocated by the man.

The problem is that men communicate their like / love in ways different from women, making an apples-to-apples comparison nigh impossible.

"Love" is an intentionally vague word — it allows us to avoid having to communicate the finer fluctuations in our feelings, but at the risk of those finer fluctuations being misinterpreted.

3. For writers or journalists, Dan Baum has been posting some terrific stuff. Here he is on why you should never accept a comment "off the record." Here's an interview with him about freelance writing. Here are failed proposals he pitched to magazines. Here are all his Tweets, well formatted, about his getting fired as a staff writer at the New Yorker. Tons of inside dirt.

4. Pick-up artists believe women are attracted to men who display aggressiveness, narcissism, and general asshole characteristics. The pick-up community also concedes that you needn't be an asshole all the time — just when you're spitting game at women. But can you really turn off the alpha game once you've turned it on? Isn't there a risk of asshole-tendencies, originally developed to help you on a Friday night, infiltrating your overall character during the week? I bet you hard core PUAs have weaker male friendships than their non-PUA counterparts.

5. People who preface points with, "The point I'm trying to make is…" too frequently give a sense that they're not effectively making the point. Just say "My point is" instead of "I'm trying to…"

6. Perhaps people use religion as their token "irrational" vice – that is, to be rational all the time is too high a burden, so religion is our one out. It's similar to people who say coffee is their one addiction. (H/t Tyler Cowen)

7. Why isn't there a kissing school / kissing tutors? A place where you can practice kissing with a paid instructor of the opposite sex in a private room? The key is it's not just for couples. It's for single people who want to practice kissing. It seems like there's a business opportunity here if you can ensure it doesn't devolve into prostitution.

8. Meghan Daum, in her column on commencement speeches, writes, "One of life's greatest, saddest truths: that our most 'memorable' occasions may elicit the fewest memories. It's probably not something most commencement speakers would say, but it's one of the first lessons of growing up."

I've written elsewhere that the most intense social bonding happens when we least expect it, i.e., not during the carefully manicured moments or celebrations.

9. It's revealing whether a woman enjoyed her high school years. Happiness in high school has most to do with the success of your social life. Women who loved high school probably had a successful social life. To have a successful social life means you were "in" (in vs. out group dynamics reign supreme). To be "in" usually requires adeptness at emotional manipulation. Research shows teenage girls use verbal attacks and emotional bullying to establish power structures.

So if an adult woman tells me she had a wonderful high school experience — God forbid "the best four years of my life" — it might predict certain undesirable qualities.

(The male high school experience is less intense, less emotional and more physical, and thus a less useful predictor of adult personal qualities.)

10. Speaking of criticism, it's hard to take it when it's about self-perceived strengths. And yet this is very important to hear. Also, the hardest type of criticism to hear is when it's half-true, half-false and hits at a deep, private insecurity.

11. On nouns and grammar. We say, "Is she a lesbian?" We do not say, "Is he a gay?" We say, "He is gay." Lesbian is a noun. Gay is adjective. Lesbian feels more domineering. If I say he's gay, gay is just one of several pertinent adjectives. If I say she's a lesbian, she is neither man nor woman — she is this other type, lesbian.

Another random spotting of a new noun: "a water." E.g., "Can you get me a water?" instead of a "water bottle."

12. Government does such a good job at running things into the ground. Amtrak, education, social security, medicare. Here's a long article on how the government has totally fucked up the U.S. Postal Service. Read it and weep. Up next: General Motors!

13. Having "more experience" than someone else is not by itself enough. It's about how well you can draw the appropriate lessons from the experiences. It's about how well you can distinguish specific experiences as generalizable versus anomalies. I'd hire the reflective 30 year-old over the unreflective 50 year-old with more experience any day of the week.

14. Consider three individuals. One is lower class. One is middle class. One is upper class. The lower and upper class persons are most likely to spend money on "unnecessary stuff" — a fourth pair of shoes, the impulsive ice cream cone on a hot day. Of course they do so for different reasons. The middle class person is more likely to be frugal.

Another thought on money. In poor families it's more common to give cold hard cash as a gift. In rich families to give cash as a gift is seen as unimaginative, even offensive. I think the intuitive explanation here is the right one — when you don't have much money cash is more important than symbolism. "It's the thought that matters" is an expensive principle. So, attitudes toward gift giving are probably an accurate reflection of class.

15. I do feel a strong community sense from the familiar strangers I see every day at the gym. The familiarity factor. This type of community is not to be dismissed just because there's no interaction among its members (I've never spoken to them).

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