Literal criticism.
In life we study, interpret and evaluate ourselves against the others and perhaps most importantly against our current situation. Egotistic criticism in ways is similar to literary criticism, usually informed by social theory, which in the current internet driven world is the philosophical speculative discussion about ourselves based on our social networks, number of insignificant friends, photos of funny kittens and clout.
Effective egoistic criticism can only be performed if you take away all of the external factors and evaluate yourself against your life and your goals. Who are we without our clout and what can we achieve if we start from scratch, knowing only what we physically know? Well, as a 21 year old, I am about to find out. Having finished my 12 months long internship at a leading car manufacturing company in the world, I moved for yet another summer internship, this time at a leading investment bank in the heart of London.
I am yet to write my final thoughts about my 12 months as an engineer, but all I can tell you right now is that there is an easy way in life, and I’ve found it. I most certainly don’t want to explore it, because that would be as bad as losing my integrity.
The only thing we have in this world that is utterly and intrinsically our integrity, If we give that away, we may as well stop fighting, because losing that battle is what loses the war. There’s nothing worth that.
-Georgia Mason, Deadline
My goal for this summer is to evaluate myself against my current situation and the others in the environment I am in. So far, I feel like I have stepped down from the path to Mordor but am not yet headed back for the Shire.
Skewed social behaviour. Space as an app.
I get excited about flying, hotels and rental cars. I meticulously track my air miles and flights, logging all the details of every flight I take in FlightMemory. I am happy to be spending hours in the air and nights in hotels around the world, and that’s where I feel most at home. It’s a strange concept for most of my friends and peers but the sense of not belonging anywhere physically is not your standard social behaviour. People look at you weird when you tell them that you love hotel rooms for their impersonal anonymity and the dry smell of cabin air on LH726, your favorite flight from MUC to PVG, especially when you can explain all the benefits over LH728. For some reason our society is not yet geared towards the idea of not belonging to an allotted arbitrary piece of space.
Reading Paul Carr’s firs blog entry about his quest to stay 33 nights in Las Vegas, each in a different hotel has made me understand that, we who abandon borders and mortgages are in fact pioneers of a hybrid between physical space and the cyber space. Actually reading anything by Paul Carr makes me ponder about that, about the society we live in and our mindset of anti mobility. It’s only the bravest and most intelligent people in the world who become expatriates and who travel the world leaving only carbon footprint behind, the rest of us is stagnant. But there is very little the vast majority of us does about it because of this sense of belonging, the sense of being tied down to something. Hardcore nationalists will argue that freedom means owning your own house, two cars and a handful of kids. In my opinion that’s the exact opposite of freedom. Freedom is 3 months at the Intercontinental in Hanoi, Hertz’s Audi A5 in Dallas and a StarAlliance HON status anywhere you fly, and it’s a freedom you can get with your family too.
Most of my life exists in two locations, the internet and my wallet. Everything else is an add-on. House, car, bed, garden, postbox they are like apps. If you like them you can hang on to them but few months down the line there will be a better app, and then you upgrade. You are the platform and you should define the space.
It’s time to start evaluating the year, looking all the experiences, the things I learned and mistakes I have made. For me 2010 consisted of 3 major events:
1. Finishing 2nd year of university
2. Finishing my stint as an LSU exec member
3. Starting my year long internship at Jaguar Land Rover
All these events have brought something to my life and allowed me to develop myself in one way or another but I still feel like I haven’t achieved enough this year. 2010 was an extremely boring and uneventful year for me but I will be evaluating the year in full detail later.
So I officially declare that it is the time to move on as 2011 might be a very exciting year!
The Cyber World War I is slowly starting. Every media outlet is buzzing about wikileaks and the whole world apart from few brave anonymous people have turned against Julian Assange. A man who is simply following what has been written in the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.
Now, when you think about it, it actually works. Every agency, every company, every single person which is trying to disrupt the natural flow of the information is taken down by the Internet itself. Let it be Visa, http://www.aklagare.se or PayPal, they have all turned against the free flow of information and they are paying for it, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon is shooting at them from every place on the Internet, and with an army of millions, Operation: Payback is in full combat mode.
Jeff Jarvis has summed this whole situation up and I couldn’t agree more:
I can use Visa and Mastercard to pay for porn and support anti-abortion fanatics, Prop 8 homophobic bigots, and the Ku Klux Klan. But I can’t use them or PayPal to support Wikileaks, transparency, the First Amendment, and true government reform.
Live long and prosper Internet.
So I just finished my first week of work in a new departments, but more about it later.
It’s freezing ! There is snow and ice and polar bears on the streets. I am going to Poland for the weekend tomorrow, and guess what, it’s -20C / -4F over there. I have loads to do, a lot of people to meet and a lot of shopping to do so it should be awesome. Plus it’s generally a nice break from work. I hope that the airports will be open and flights will be on schedule.
In life we are always looking what’s ahead of us, we try to leave the past behind and move on. However, there are a lot of changes and challenges waiting for us, no one can figure whether they are right or wrong, they just exist and that’s what’s fun about it! Sure you can stick around, look for signs, evaluate the warnings and make a Pros and Cons list, but in life you have to take your chances because this world keeps on turning and quite literally nothing stays the same.
I star work in a completely new department tomorrow. As part of my work contract I will be spending the next 3 months in a completely new environment with completely new people and a different skill set required.
Am I terrified? No! I love change and throughout my life I’ve had to deal with it all the time! I usually follow these 3 simple steps:
1. Be open. People in your new environment will be as eager to meet you as you are to meet them. Introduce yourself to everyone and try to keep an open relationship with everyone at the beginning.
2. Be curious. Learn and explore, the best thing you can get out of a new experience is… experience! New skills, knowledge, contacts and ideas - none of these will hurt you!
3. It’s temporary. This one depends on how you live your life! I am spontaneous and hate stability and stagnation. I love to be on the move, constantly exposed to changes and new experiences. I never stick around doing the same thing or living in the same place for more than 2 years - so if you want, you can believe that every new challenge and experience is temporary!
You don’t have to feel trapped, changes can be good !!
Today I realised that I have been working continuously for 20 weeks. This might not seem like a lot but it is for me. 20 weeks of work at a big engineering corporation provides me with invaluable experiences, it allows me to master my game, to be my own gamemaster, an arbitrator, moderator and organiser. I am learning new things everyday, every minute spent at work is an experience, an experience which pushes me towards the dark alleys of the real world. As an engineering student I am still trying to figure out what I want to do when I graduate, which direction I am going to take. It’s a tough decision and strictly speaking once you enter a profession your exit options are pretty limited. Sure, being an entrepreneur is always an option, but once you have established yourself as an expert in a field, once you have dedicated 10 years of your life to a domain, it’s hard to change. And I see this all the time at work, people who are afraid of change because they don’t know what’s out there, because they have a family to support and a mortgage to pay. I don’t have any of that so I will play my game until I checkmate myself.
Keep looking, don’t settle. Do what you love. Stay Hungry, stay foolish.
Steve Jobs: How to live before you die.
