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Musings Report 2018-48 12-1-18 If We Don't Have a Mentor, We Have to Mentor Ourselves
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
If We Don't Have a Mentor, We Have to Mentor Ourselves
I don't have many regrets in my 64th year, but I do regret that I never found/attracted a mentor, an older, world-wise person who took a direct, sustained interest in my development as a human being and in my career/writing.
Very few of us are lucky enough to find/attract a mentor, and this is unfortunate because so many biographies of successful people feature a mentor who appeared at a critical juncture in life to give a boost or opportunity that would otherwise not have appeared.
Even if an opportunity presents itself, without the steadying council of a mentor, we all too often hesitate to take an opportunity that's far outside our comfort zone or experience, or we might quit when it becomes too challenging. Lacking confidence in ourselves, we falter.
In other words, mentors don't just give advice; they instill confidence that we can manage new challenges, bolstering our self-confidence at critical junctures.
A few lucky souls are blessed with parents who act as mentors, or who introduce their children to others who can act as mentors.
If we analyze the upper-classes of societies, we generally find that young people have access to a network of adult mentors. Those in lower socio-economic classes often have fewer examples to follow and a dearth of knowledgeable, worldly mentors.
I use the word "worldly" to describe a broad range of real-world experience. A mentor ideally has experience in business, management, creative endeavors, social networks, foreign travel, and an interest in lifelong learning and personal cultivation.
Adults with limited life skills and limited experience are unprepared to offer advice, since the well of their own knowledge and experience is so shallow. The advice of those adults with limited experienced and knowledge can actually set us back rather than advance us.
While some life wisdom is timeless, career and professional advice can often be out of date and therefore of limited value. The experience of those who retired 20 years ago may no longer be relevant in industries that have changed dramatically.
If we're not fortunate enough to have a mentor, we're left with the daunting task of mentoring ourselves: daunting because we lack the experience and knowledge possessed by an older, wiser mentor.
In other words, we're really not able to substitute our own mentoring for the mentoring of a worldly elder because we lack that worldly elder's knowledge, experience and wisdom--and we lack seasoned professionals' knowledge of our own sector.
Despite these limitations, being conscious that we must mentor ourselves is valuable, as it leads us to cultivate a mentoring perspective: what sort of advice would we give a friend were they struggling with issues similar to our own?
Accepting the role of mentor also gives additional meaning to our searches for resources. In a strange way, we're more thoughtful when tasked to mentor others than we might be when trying to give ourselves advice. Just creating a separation between "me" and my mentoring self is useful.
My own failures to mentor myself at key junctures has made me wary of offering advice. That said, young readers do occasionally write me regarding my books and blog posts, and my basic approach is to encourage accepting risk and uncertainty as necessary costs of advancement, and to regard failure not as "failure" but as a learning process.
The ideal goal of mentoring is to impart some practical wisdom that reduces the odds of making extremely costly mistakes, and to cushion the blows to our confidence that result from losses and failures. If we can help ourselves accomplish these two tasks, we will have done a good job mentoring ourselves.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
America Needs a New National Strategy 11/30/18
Bearish on Fake Fixes 11/28/18
The Politics of Debt-Serfs and Tax Donkeys: Our Only Choice Is the Least Bad Option 11/26/18
The Two Paths to Collapse 11/24/18
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Got through the bureaucratic maze of the DMV -- my Real-ID driver's license is on the way...
Musings on the Economy: Are We in a Recession Already?
Recessions are typically only visible to statisticians long after the fact, but they are often immediately visible on the ground: business volume drops, people stop buying houses and vehicles, restaurants that were jammed are suddenly sepulchral and so on.
There are well-known canaries in the coal mine in terms of recession indicators. These include building permits, architectural bookings, air travel, and auto and home sales.
Home sales are already dropping in most areas, and vehicle sales are softening. Airlines and tourism may continue on for awhile as people have already booked their travel, but the slowdown in other spending can be remarkably abrupt.
All nations are mosaics of local economies, and large nations like the U.S. are mosaics of local and regional economies, some of which (California, Texas, New York) are the equivalent of entire nations in and of themselves.
As a result, there can be areas where the Great Recession of 2008-09 never really ended, and other areas that have experienced unprecedented building booms (for example, the San Francisco Bay Area where I live part-time.)
Changes in sentiment are reflected in different sectors of the economy: people become hesitant about big purchases first (autos, houses) and then start deciding to save more by spending less (Christmas shopping, eating out, vacations, etc.)
Each economic class also responds differently. The lower 60% of households don't have the disposable income of the top 10%, so "cutting back" for them might be buying fewer fast-food meals per week.
The top 10% have the majority of the nation's disposable income, just as they own two-thirds of the wealth. If the sources of their income tanks (the tech bubble pops, etc.), then signs of recession in this class will be a decline in high-cost consumption: luxury store sales, pricey restaurants, etc.
In other words, different classes, sectors and regions of the economy can be recession while others are still doing fine.
As a result, the value of declaring the entire nation in or out of recession is limited. It boils down to how our sector, our class and our region are doing.
From Left Field
Noise Pollution Is a Thing, and It’s Making You Sick (via Steve K.) Peace and quiet is a powerful health hack
Shanghai ‘earthscraper’: World’s 1st underground hotel opens in China inside abandoned quarry
Dynamism has declined across Western economies: Fewer new firms are being started and America’s opening to the world has stalled
Across the West powerful firms are becoming even more powerful: The firms involved in the journey made profits of $151bn and had a median return on capital of 29% last year. An equally weighted basket of their shares—call it the monopoly money portfolio—beat global stock markets by 484% over the past decade.
Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists: You should hire a polymath but you probably won’t find one.
Why the Enlightenment was not the age of reason
When the Tech Mythology Collapses: The industry’s fall from grace may feel unprecedented, but we have a model for what happens when a beloved industry fails us.
How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’
Why Groups are less Effective than their Members: On Productivity Losses in Idea-generating Groups
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
After the Retail Apocalypse, Prepare for the Property Tax Meltdown (via Kevin M.)
The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves: This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.
"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles." Charlie Chaplin
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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