Five Thoughts about Making College Great
Tomorrow, several people that matter a lot to me are starting their college experience. Here are fifteen things I’d like to suggest to them that they’re probably not hearing from anyone else who has been giving them advice on college over the past three months.
You don’t have to know what you want to do right now. You’ve probably heard countless people asking what you’re majoring in and so on and you’ve likely built the decision up into something monumental in your head. It isn’t. For starters, most of the time when a person asks a college student what their major is, they’re mostly just looking for some sort of information about who you are. They’re not trying to judge you, they’re trying to understand you.
As for the vitality of that major, I majored in life sciences and computer science in college and today I’m a writer on personal finance topics.
In short, you end up finding your own path in life and it’s not a path dictated by your college major. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a major that actually lines up with what you’re passionate about. If you’re not lucky, your college degree will mostly wind up being proof that you went to college for some number of years and were able to complete a degree.
Instead, the biggest value you’ll earn in college is the relationships with other people. The friendships I built over the course of my college career form many of my friendships now. I have friends sprinkled throughout tons of businesses and organizations and walks of life now. A relationship I built with my academic advisor got me my first real college job. A relationship I built with an awesome staff member got me a research job related to my area of study. A relationship built with a professor helped me to get my first post-college job – and, indirectly, my second one. I fell in love with my wife-to-be in college. At my wedding, my best man and one of my groomspeople were my two closest college friends.
The people made the impact. Focus on building friendships with good people – students, staff members, professors, deans, everyone. Look for people who are focused at what they’re doing, have some interest overlap with you, and are also seeming like they’re having fun doing it, because those are the people that are going to be great to spend time with and are also going to be doing something great with their life. They’re the kind of people that will make your path better.
The biggest value you can get from your classes is transferable skills. Knowing the ins and outs of organic chemistry might help you if you happen to wind up in one of those rare jobs that utilizes it. The skills you’ve built in the process of actually getting through organic chemistry – those are ones you’ll utilize time and time again.
The value isn’t so much in the actual subject you learn in your classes. The value comes from the ability to absorb lots of information, to process that information, and to think about that information. The value of college is in the ability to manage your time effectively enough so you can do all of that, get strong grades, hold down a job, build relationships, and grow as a person. The value of college is learning how to communicate with people from vastly different backgrounds than you – in other words, try making a friend that lived on another continent.
Time management skills. Information management skills. Communication skills (speaking, writing, presenting). Critical thinking. Those are the things that college gives you a great opportunity to really, really learn, and those are the things that will help you no matter what your path is.
Almost everyone will get as much or more value out of learning how to learn a particular challenging topic or class than they will get out of that specific topic.
Try things you would have never tried before. The social constructs of a typical high school make it very hard for people to dive into and discover what they’re passionate about. Those constructs are largely gone in college. This is the time in your life to try stuff you would have never tried before.
As Robert Heinlein put it, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
College is the best opportunity in your life for trying all of these things, learning how to do them, and stumbling upon that thing or two that really, really lights up your passion.
The only way to fail at college is to sit around your dorm room a lot of evenings watching reruns of Bones or taunting someone on Xbox Live. Do something new, preferably something you would have never done before (and preferably not anything that has a likelihood of killing or seriously harming you).
Keep your eyes wide open for free stuff. The average college campus is teeming with free things to do and food to eat. Look at your school’s event calendar and start hitting as much of that stuff as possible – anything and everything that looks vaguely interesting. It usually is interesting (or at least exposure to something new), it’s almost always free, and there’s almost always free food there.
If the people around you won’t engage in the tons of things going on every evening, it’s a great time to expand your horizons a bit more. Look for the faces you see repeating at these events. It’s a great way to meet interesting people who are actively involved in the world around them.
Plus, most of this stuff is free, which enables you to keep your cash right in your pocket, take out fewer student loans, and get out of college with a smaller debt burden than you otherwise would have.
These are the elements of a life-changing college experience. It’s not about chasing a perfect 4.0 or partying hard all the time. It’s about finding who you are, building the actual skills you’ll need over and over again in life, and finding the people and things that actually matter to you. Good luck.
Continue reading Five Thoughts about Making College Great …
From The Simple Dollar.
Gift Giving: Don’t Penny Pinch the Romance out of Your Marriage
Gift giving is common in relationships. However, gift giving can cause frustration for the frugal. Can gift giving fit into the frugal marriage?
Continue reading Gift Giving: Don’t Penny Pinch the Romance out of Your Marriage …
From The Dollar Stretcher Featured Content.
Gift Giving: Don’t Penny Pinch the Romance out of Your Marriage
Gift giving is common in relationships. However, gift giving can cause frustration for the frugal. Can gift giving fit into the frugal marriage?
Continue reading Gift Giving: Don’t Penny Pinch the Romance out of Your Marriage …
From The Dollar Stretcher Featured Content.
Overcoming Severe Social Anxiety
Chris emailed me with the following question. I originally planned to include it in a reader mailbag, but I felt such strong sympathy for his situation and others in that type of situation that my answer to him kept growing and growing until I realized that it was a full post all its own.
I am 34/ male. I feel very awkward in public. I don’t read books, I think what others might think why I am reading this book. I don’t browse stuff on my iTouch as I think others might look at what I’m browsing/ reading. The only thing I can do is: quickly browse my iTouch playlist, put my headphones on and listen. I even turn the brightness down in my iTouch so others can’t see anything (just in case!). I have always been like this as far as I can remember. This causes me to waste a lot of time and I want to change this. What do you recommend? Any courses I should take or books I should read or sites I should visit?
Chris, you’re clearly suffering from a severe case of social anxiety. I’ve suffered from it in the past as well and I have multiple friends who have the same thing in various degrees of severity.
Social anxiety is incredibly painful – and it’s also incredibly costly. By being so reclusive in social situations, you miss out on countless chances to interact with people, build friendships and relationships, and grow as a person.
I overcame my own social anxiety mostly through a ton of practice and a lot of failure. Among the first things I did was work on creating a false appearance of confidence in public places. I didn’t feel confident at all – I felt like I wanted to do much like you do, hide somewhere and reveal as little as possible about myself.
The first thing you need to think about is what is the worst case scenario and is that worst case really so bad. I found that most of the time, I was being reclusive and afraid for no good reason. The worst thing that can happen if someone sees what you’re listening to on your iTouch is that they just think “I don’t like that music” and they move on with their life. In the end, that’s almost indistinguishable from what’s going on now – and arguably better than looking like the guy who’s being ultra-secretive with his iTouch. On the other hand, the best result is someone peeks, likes what they see, and says so, giving you the opportunity to meet and relate to someone else.
For most little things like that – what book you’re reading or what music you’re listening to – there’s almost no social drawback from letting others see what you’re reading or listening to as compared to intentionally trying to hide it. Just simply imagine watching someone else who is just sitting there reading a book or listening to music or someone trying to hide what they’re reading or listening to.
In fact, that points towards the first tactic of getting over social anxiety (at least for me): change your attitude. Look around you. Watch what they’re doing. Are people being condemned for what they read on the bus or what music they’re listening to or what clothes they’re wearing or what they’re saying (within reason – I mean, there’s probably condemnation for the lunatic yelling on the bus)? No, there’s not. It’s seen as normal – likely more normal than the person trying to hide everything about them.
You’re not perfect, but no one else is, either. Every single person in the world makes social gaffes. Guess what? Your life won’t end if you do, too. In fact, most of the time, social gaffes end up being a positive – they’re endearing to others who recognize that the other person is human and makes mistakes just like they do.
Start small. For you, not hiding your iPod Touch might be a first success, or openly reading a book that interests you. Next, make it your mission to say hello to at least one person you don’t know each day. Or two. Or three.
Move on from there to watercooler-type discussions. Focus on actually going to such informal social gatherings and listening. Encourage yourself to make one comment a day – focus on that. You don’t have to be the talkative one, but just focus on that one small step.
For me, the thing that helped a lot was participating in a social group. In your case, the best option for that would probably be volunteer work, like working on a Habitat for Humanity house. These types of situations foster the types of simple and easy social interactions that you’re striving to practice. A day building a Habitat house not only helps the world, but it helps you break through your social anxiety.
Have something to say. Read the news each day and be aware of what’s going on politically and culturally around you. You don’t have to have mountains of arcane knowledge, just know what the top headline or two of the day is and something about it, or the top sporting event of the day. Do you want to know a big reason why sports are popular? It gives people something to talk about in uncharted social situations.
Ask questions. If you don’t know what to say to someone – and I certainly don’t sometimes – a question usually works very well. Something simple always works, like “do you know what the weather is going to be like today?” or “did the Cubs manage to win yesterday?” or “That’s a beautiful coat. I’d love to buy one like it for my sister. Where did you get it?” You give the other person something easy to talk about, they’re likely to eventually respond with a question, and you’ve started a conversation.
Seek out someone else who is shy. For the longest time, this really, really helped me in social situations and I’ve built a few lifelong friendships out of it. When you’re at an event with a lot of people, look for the other person or two who look like they don’t want to be there. Go up to them and flatly say, “Man, I don’t do well in these kinds of social situations.” Then, follow that with a question and you’ve probably found someone to talk to, someone relieved to not have to come up with something to talk about.
I do not recommend turning to psychological assistance for this. Your question comes off as someone who has some social awkwardness, not as someone who has deep underlying issues. You already have the desire to overcome that awkwardness, and there are a lot of personal steps you can take to start overcoming it on your own without psychopharmacology and expensive bills. Only seek professional help if you’ve tried in earnest many times to overcome this and failed to make any progress at all.
Little steps make all the difference here. It takes a long time to overcome social anxiety, but the rewards of overcoming it are great in almost every aspect of your life: socially, professionally, personally, financially, and otherwise.
Continue reading Overcoming Severe Social Anxiety …
From The Simple Dollar.
Getting Things Done: The Power of the Collection Habit
This is the eleventh entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.
Allen concludes the book with three short chapters discussing the power of various aspects of the GTD system. This first one focuses on how powerful the collection habit really is.
As Allen states it on page 225:
When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete and unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both personally and professionally.
In other words, if your system is reliable, you become reliable, and if you become reliable, you’ll become more confident of your abilities, other people will notice your increased reliability, and you’ll become more valuable in everything you do.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in my own life. Whenever I am operating my system really efficiently, I seem to do a great job of managing all of the stuff on my plate and others do notice this. I tend to see the results of it in the form of better articles on The Simple Dollar and elsewhere, which attracts readers. I get more notes about how today’s article was really good. I tend to build relationships in my life in a positive manner because I’m on top of the feeding and growth that they need.
What makes that happen? In the end, it’s simply the fact that I’m collecting everything that’s incomplete in my life and doing something with all of that stuff. Even if the system isn’t going perfectly for a while, I’m still making sure that all of the open-ended things are either being closed or are moving forward.
That builds trust. That builds self-confidence – and confidence from others. It builds a feeling of control over your life instead of a sense that things are just spinning out of control.
Those are things that constantly help you throughout your career and personal life, not just in terms of building relationships, but in terms of the quality work that you’re able to produce.
One interesting part of sitting down and doing a full collection of all of the unfinished stuff in one’s life – and I certainly went through this myself – is all of the negative feelings it generates along the way. From page 226:
If you’re like most peoplw ho go through the full collection process, you probably felt some form of anxiety. Descriptive terms like “overwhelmed,” “panic,” “frustration,” “fatigue,” and “disgust” tend to come up when I ask seminar participants to describe their emotions in going through a minor version of the procedure. And is there anything you think you’ve procrastinated on in that stack? If so, you have guilt automatically associated with it – “I could have, should have, ought to have (before now) done this.”
This is normal. Almost every functional adult has a big pile of unfinished stuff hanging around in their life. Even highly organized adults do.
Where do these negative feelings come from? Allen has a great explanation on page 227:
But what are all of those things in your in-basket? Aggreements you’ve made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements – they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don’t – voila! anxious and overwhelmed.
This sums up so well why dumping everything in your inbox can be a downer, but processing it can be such an incredible positive feeling and release.
When you put all of that stuff in your inbox, you see all of the agreements you’ve broken with yourself, which is a major downer.
On the flip side, though, once you have all of those promises sitting there and you actually go through the process of dealing with all of them, it feels incredibly good. Why? You’re finally living up to all of those promises you made for yourself and all of the bad feelings you have associated with yourself and all of those promises are just swept away.
I find that when I start to get behind, I really get deeply upset with myself when I collect everything together. These moments are probably the most negative ones in my life because I criticize myself harshly when I see such a pile of unfinished stuff.
Yet, with every item I process, I feel better. Each item I collect and then deal with goes from being a broken promise (a negative) to a fulfilled one (a positive). It also often reaffirms a positive reputation with others, because quite often that fulfilled promise benefits others in some way.
What usually happens is that it feels so good to start running through these processes that I almost become addicted to it. I burn through my inbox, processing all of it, then I tend to stick to the system furiously for a while, coasting on all of the good feelings.
In fact, the only time I tend to fall behind with it is during times of extreme crisis or extreme time management situations where I have more things going on than my calendar can hold. It is in those situations that stuff starts slipping through the cracks and the system starts to fall apart.
A recent example of this was in the second quarter of 2010, where we had our third child, final book edits were due, my father became seriously injured, and my book was released in a period of about seven weeks or so. Add into that a ten day trip right in the middle and I simply found myself slipping behind.
That’s why going through this book and the whole GTD process starting on June 1 was a huge lift to me. I went through the collection and processing myself as I wrote these pieces and it was a huge personal lift.
I really can’t recommend this enough. Put aside a day – preferably two, make it a weekend – where you just collect everything you need to get done. That should take about a third to a half of a day. Then, spend the rest of that time processing it. Do the simple things. Come up with plans for the bigger things. Trash the things you really don’t want to deal with.
It’ll be incredibly cathartic. You’ll come out of that timeframe with a much more positive feeling about your career, your life, and your relationships.
In fact, I’ll bet you’ll label it as one of the best things you’ve done in your adult life.
On Friday, we’ll talk about the power of the next action.
Continue reading Getting Things Done: The Power of the Collection Habit …
From The Simple Dollar.
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
You can make money writing. Get paid to write about topics such as current events and news, parenting, recipes and cooking, relationships, dating advice, weight loss tips, pets and pet care, how to articles, organizing, homemaking, decorating, sports, outdoors, gardening, remodeling, travel and vacations, computers, web deisgn, dieting, pregnancy, work [...]
Continue reading Get Paid For Anything You Write! …
From Frugal Simplicity.
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
You can make money writing. Get paid to write about topics such as current events and news, parenting, recipes and cooking, relationships, dating advice, weight loss tips, pets and pet care, how to articles, organizing, homemaking, decorating, sports, outdoors, gardening, remodeling, travel and vacations, computers, web deisgn, dieting, pregnancy, work [...]
Continue reading Get Paid For Anything You Write! …
From Frugal Simplicity.
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
You can make money writing. Get paid to write about topics such as current events and news, parenting, recipes and cooking, relationships, dating advice, weight loss tips, pets and pet care, how to articles, organizing, homemaking, decorating, sports, outdoors, gardening, remodeling, travel and vacations, computers, web deisgn, dieting, pregnancy, work [...]
Continue reading Get Paid For Anything You Write! …
From Frugal Simplicity.
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
You can make money writing. Get paid to write about topics such as current events and news, parenting, recipes and cooking, relationships, dating advice, weight loss tips, pets and pet care, how to articles, organizing, homemaking, decorating, sports, outdoors, gardening, remodeling, travel and vacations, computers, web deisgn, dieting, pregnancy, work [...]
Continue reading Get Paid For Anything You Write! …
From Frugal Simplicity.
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
Get Paid For Anything You Write!
You can make money writing. Get paid to write about topics such as current events and news, parenting, recipes and cooking, relationships, dating advice, weight loss tips, pets and pet care, how to articles, organizing, homemaking, decorating, sports, outdoors, gardening, remodeling, travel and vacations, computers, web deisgn, dieting, pregnancy, work [...]
Continue reading Get Paid For Anything You Write! …
From Frugal Simplicity.