It's easy to think that going to all of your classes is enough. The job market is slowly improving, and you'll probably land your dream job in, like, 5 to 7 years, or something.
Life's all about balance.
We wake up, we go to sleep. We inhale, we exhale. We eat, then we...well, you get it.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle requires a balance of consumption, digestion & creation. Your mind & body require equal parts input and output of information, and letting the scale tip too far in either direction can easily skew priorities and obscure your line-of-sight.
Workaholics tend to ignore input, while couch potatoes lack output.
You probably know at least one person who spends an ineffable amount of time reading Buzzfeed and taking online quizzes. You also probably know someone who refuses to leave the office, and continues to work & check emails through every weekend.
Both of these mentalities are equally harmful.
Three in four Americans believe that today’s youth are less virtuous and industrious than their elders.
That's a pretty shocking trend - one that comes with some serious sociocultural implications.
There's a consistent historical mythos of younger generations being attributed as entitled, lazy, and careless, however no one has come under fire for these traits more than millennials in recent years.
In fact, everything from political affiliations to workplace dynamics can apparently be explained by the millennial generation's out-of-touch mindset, apathetic worldview, and general snobbishness towards anything not considered "easy".
So...is it true?
It's not always as simple as "show up every day".
Progressing in your craft takes focus, dedicated training, and resources that many people tend to overlook when they're trying to learn a new skill.
When we don't direct our practices or create reference points for comparison, we often end up feeling stuck - like we're simply going through the motions with no tangible improvements in sight.
Here are a few simple ideas to help get you out of that "forever stuck" feeling we all slip into sometimes.
How do you know when to push your limits, and when to stop and breathe?
This line is a tough one to walk, and misinterpreting your your readiness when learning or practicing a craft can often lead to "master of none" syndrome.
YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Flickr all allow for file replacement - and it seems that this idea is only catching traction.
Think of it as URL real estate a la the dot-com boom - you upload your content, and continue to refine, refinish, and remaster it over time, keeping your likes, shares, and comments tidy all along the way.
Today's post is all about practical (and creative!) applications for empirical concepts.
These ideas aren't meant to literally apply 1:1 to your projects - however I hope you find these to be suitable lenses with which to view and critique your work.
Let's dive in.
People love putting things into neat little boxes.
For things like infrastructure design, this is great. I'm super glad that road space is well defined enough for you to not kill me in your car. I'm also pretty happy with Netflix's ability to read my tastes and present relevant content.
When we're creating, though, it can be hard to disconnect from all the genres, categories, and subreddits. It's easy to think "what I'm doing feels so different from anything else".