Tag: Young Adults

A great many people dread the contest. Every performance becomes one, and so does every audition, and so does every interview, and the dread is of losing.

In that frame the panel or the audience turns into the opposition, an enemy to be beaten. The fear grows until it seems to occupy everything.

Four fights at once

Examine the feeling closely and several separate struggles are going on together.

One is with the audience, over whether their attention stays with you. One is with the panel, over whether they continue to see a serious contender in front of them. One is with the other candidate. And one is with yourself, over whether enough belief survives to carry on competing at all.

It is a state of mind

What this dread amounts to is a state of mind, a small and trifling habit of thought picked up somewhere along the way.

Being a state of mind, it can be altered. That is the entire reason for naming it plainly.

It was never really a battle

Then comes the observation that dismantles the first one.

Battles are not what most presentations are, nor most performances, nor most auditions, nor even most interviews. None of it is a competitive sport. The people listening are not competing against you, they are not your enemy, and no fight with them is under way.

What they actually want

An audience is hoping to be entertained.

A room full of business people is hoping, at bottom, to escape with the afternoon intact. Enjoy themselves and they are delighted.

As for the panel at an audition, they have a role that needs filling. They would very much like it to be you.

Going somewhere has stopped being a matter of seeing the sights. Nor is language the only thing pulling learners abroad any more.

What travellers now sign up for is broader and odder than that. Ballroom dancing. Filmmaking. The growing of grapes. In some cases, the making of hats.

Learn a language

Brief courses in everyday conversation are easy to find in the countries where the language actually lives.

And the course itself is not really the attraction. The attraction is that everything happening around you while you study is reinforcing what you are studying.

Learn modern art

Theatre, ballet, modern art, jazz. Every summer the great art cities fill up with people who have travelled in for the short courses that studios across the city put on.

Most of those summer courses are built on a two or three hour model, which hands the rest of the day back to you.

Interesting short courses

The variety catches people out. Shoe design, taught from the beginning. Tea, taught as a subject. Art history, taught over a summer.

Expertise before arrival is required by none of them.

Worth considering before you book

Anyone planning a trip abroad should at least weigh up the idea of learning while they are there. Whatever your interests happen to be, something exists.

There is also a reason this works better than it sounds on paper. A journey teaches innumerable things that no book ever really gets to.

However organised a person believes themselves to be, a reminder about the productive handling of time does nobody any harm. Here are several habits that work against success and are worth dropping.

Too much work

This first one hides well, because from outside it looks like a virtue.

People who are successful and content generally do work hard. They are also clear-eyed about where their own ceiling is. Piling up commitments you volunteered for is not evidence of good time management, whatever impression it creates.

Understand where your limit sits. Nobody is without one.

Technology distractions

The degree of attachment people now have to their devices is close to embarrassing.

Hours lost to social feeds are not how productive people spend an afternoon, and nor do they leave a phone ringing at full volume beside them while they work. Handle the technology sensibly, and apply a little discipline to yourself.

Not having a plan

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. The saying has been worn thin by repetition and it irritates people, which has no bearing on whether it is correct.

What a plan saves you from is the aimless what-shall-I-do-now state that swallows the opening hour of a working day.

Nor does it need to be elaborate. A short list of the things to be done covers it entirely.

Not being focused

Priorities that keep rearranging themselves are a poor habit to carry.

The focused person can tell you, for today, what the first job is, what the second is and what the third is. Holding that focus is how order gets put in the place where the chaos used to be.

A start-up enterprise formed in the expectation, and on the plan, that money will come out of it at the other end is what the term business venture describes.

Small business is the label most people reach for instead, and reasonably so, since these things normally begin with one idea and a modest amount of capital behind it. Backing usually comes from one investor or several, on the hope that profit follows.

It begins with something missing

Ventures are generally born out of a gap. Something the current market does not supply.

That gap may take the shape of a service, or of a product that customers keep asking about, or of something built to serve one particular purpose.

Identify the gap and the thing can begin. What it then needs is a shrewd investor or a small business person with two assets: the resources to develop the new commodity, and the time to take it out to the open market.

Who puts the money in

Initial funding almost always traces back to one investor, and that investor is frequently the owner of the small business, or whoever thought of the idea to begin with.

Later, once something exists to look at, other investors may come in. They bring support and venture capital, which pays for further development and for making the venture better known. Their intention is a larger profit, divided among all of them.

The plan that should come first

Writing a formal business plan at the outset is the recommended practice, and its job is to set out on paper what the business is for and where it intends to go.

A plan that works will also carry a measurable method for finding additional capital and for lifting profitability.

It carries one further thing that hopeful founders tend to leave out. A way to get out, if the business fails.

Being the favourite grandchild carries one pleasant duty, which is sitting down and working out what to give her.

There is nothing conditional about her kindness, and that makes her easy to love. Your arrival, and the arrival of the whole noisy lot of you, delights her. A woman like that has earned her smile, which is why choosing something for her feels less like an errand and more like a pleasure.

An appetizer set

Nothing pleases her more than the family filling her house. Nothing else in the cupboard means quite as much to her as that expensive china.

And there lies the difficulty. Every time the china comes out she is faintly tense, because somewhere in the room a young one might knock a piece off a table.

A good ceramic appetizer set solves it. She can fill the house, feed everybody, and put the anxiety down for the evening.

A handmade pillow

Personal means hours, not money. She notices effort, she is mindful by temperament, and gratitude comes easily to her.

Sew her a small pillow and embroider something onto the front of it that means something in her life. A building she loves. A map of a place that matters to her. If gardening or the outdoors is her pleasure, then a tree or a flower.

A coupon book

She is fond of a great many things, and the ones she is fondest of carry no price at all. They cannot be bought.

Which is the argument for coupons you have made yourself. Print them or write them out, then laminate them so they survive.

The fact that your hands made them is most of the gift. A few to begin with: one hug, a twenty minute walk together, a visit that happens immediately, an hour over afternoon tea.

Some rules of life are never written down anywhere, and they will carry you past almost any obstacle you meet. It makes little difference where the obstacle sits. It may block a career, a relationship, a social life or a private one.

Apply these principles and the thing in the way stops being the end of the road.

Treat every obstacle as a challenge

Reclassify the thing. Call it a challenge rather than a problem, and it becomes far easier to get past.

The difference lies in what you expect of it. An obstacle understood as a threat will be avoided. An obstacle understood as a contest is something you intend to win.

Go to a specific counsellor

Whatever has gone wrong, in a relationship or at work, somebody handles that exact thing for a living. They can be approached.

A career blocked calls for a career counsellor. What you gain is an expert opinion formed outside your own head, and objectivity of that kind is frequently what produces the solution.

Change your approach and your way of thinking

Sometimes nothing is wrong with the obstacle at all. The flaw is in the approach being taken to it.

Examine the situation properly, and ask whether anything in your own conduct or your own actions could be done differently to useful effect.

That is frequently the whole of the matter. The obstacle never moved. The approach did.

Being yourself has a plain enough definition. What you say is what is true for you. The ideas and the thoughts you order your days around are your own. Something then becomes visible in you from the inside out, and other people read it as certainty.

Why pretending costs so much

Anyone in the world who is not doing this is hunting for that same assurance about who they are.

The reason is not mysterious. Stop being you, and the thing you have started attempting is to be something you are not.

Sustaining that has a price, and the price is charged internally. Stress arrives. So does confusion. So does a competitiveness that has nowhere to go, because the person being forced into existence is not you.

Where the habit was learned

Look at the crowd of people around you who have no idea who they are, and the origin of the habit becomes visible.

Nobody sat us down and taught it. As children we absorbed it: that in this society attention has to be competed for, and so does affection, and so does respect. Above all we absorbed two instructions: that a person must become somebody, and that a person must fit in.

Every one of those lessons carries a person away from what they already were.

The part of you that does not change

How you appear from outside will shift across the years. That is ordinary, and no cause for concern.

What sits underneath does not shift. There is a child in there still, unspoiled, fresh, playful, wide awake. At that depth, a person is not a version of life. They are life.

People who have stopped performing are simply what is true about them at that moment. They talk out of that inner place, and nothing about them needs managing.

It gives other people permission

Here is the effect that is easy to miss. Dropping the performance does something to the people around you, because it frees them to drop theirs.

Allowing another person to be who they are, and treating that as their right, is precisely what opens the same room for you. The two movements are one movement.

And anyone who recognises the genuine article in you will respect you for it, for the simple reason that it is what they are looking for themselves.

Are the shelves at home overflowing with bits and pieces? Is it a struggle to turn up a matching pair of shoes, or two earrings, let alone one hairpin?

Here are three ways to get a house better organised, and the pleasing thing about all of them is that they repurpose something you already have.

Binder clips in the freezer

Take a handful of binder clips and clip your bags onto the freezer shelves.

It is a little fiddly at first, keeping the bag sealed while you fix it to the rung, and practice sorts that out. What you get back is time and space, and a freezer that looks considerably more organised than it did.

A magazine rack for pot lids

Once the pans themselves have a home, the lids still need one, and lids are what turn a tidy cupboard back into a jumble.

The walls inside a cupboard are the right spot and they are almost always going unused. You can buy a dedicated lid holder. Or you can save the money and give an old magazine rack a second life doing exactly the same job.

A cutlery organiser for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes are among the most germ-laden things in a house, which is not what most people expect of an object they put in their mouth twice a day.

What they need above all is to dry out properly between uses, and a crowded pot does not allow it. Take an unused cutlery organiser and give every brush its own compartment. Each one gets air on all sides, and nothing touches anything else.

Three small changes, no purchases, and a house that is easier to live in by the weekend.

Are you financially prepared to turn thirty? A checklist tells you whether your finances are heading the right way, which is different from knowing whether this month went well.

Tracking your progress against the same list each year makes it much easier to see what you have completed and what is still waiting.

The career check

Start here, because this is where the money comes from.

Ask yourself the plain questions. Do you enjoy what you do? Is your pay rising at a decent pace? Then review your skills honestly and work out whether you have been keeping up or quietly falling behind.

Your career supplies a major portion of your income, and for most people all of it. Knowing where you stand in it lets you estimate the level of comfort you can expect when you eventually put your feet up.

Medical expenses

What is the picture with yours? How much are you actually spending on your health, and do you hold health insurance?

Health costs are among the largest surprises anyone gets hit with. They arrive without notice and they arrive large. Being prepared for them is a different activity from hoping they do not come.

The emergency fund

The most important question on the list is whether you are ready for an expense you did not plan for.

Have you got enough set aside to cover three to six months of expenses? That is the benchmark. An emergency fund is what rescues you when money is needed in a hurry, and having one changes an emergency into an inconvenience.

Long-term investments

Saving protects you. Investing is what builds wealth, and they are not the same job.

The piece points at mutual funds and describes them as high-return options. Treat that description carefully: returns vary, are not guaranteed, and past performance settles nothing. The sounder half of the advice is the balance it recommends, between equity investments on one side and traditional schemes such as fixed deposits and recurring deposits on the other.

Saving regularly and early in a career is what produces a sufficient amount in the retirement fund by the time the golden years arrive.

As ever, none of this is advice about your particular situation. A checklist tells you which questions to ask. Someone who knows your circumstances answers them.

A hero is not born. A hero is self-made, and that distinction is the whole of the subject.

The qualities below are not exotic. Every one of us possesses some measure of all of them. What sets the hero apart from the rest of us is not having virtues nobody else has. It is being the fullest embodiment of the ones everybody has.

Courage

The first quality and the foremost. A hero overcomes his fears and meets a challenge directly rather than circling it.

The claim made here is strong: that not even the faintest trace of fear is left lingering in a hero’s heart. Whether you accept it fully or not, the direction is right. Courage is not the absence of the feeling, it is the refusal to let the feeling decide.

Sacrifice

This one stands apart from the other virtues, and it is what makes a person’s deeds noble rather than merely effective.

A hero is willing to put aside their preferences and their personal comfort at the moment those things become an obstacle to a higher cause or to the welfare of other people. Note the condition. Not always, and not for display. Whenever it becomes necessary.

Determination

For a hero the word impossible always breaks apart to read: I am possible.

What follows from that is an unflinching determination, and a belief in one’s own ability without a whiff of doubt about it.

Compassion

A true hero is empathetic, showing considerable tenderness towards anyone who is ailing or in distress.

The mechanism is worth naming. Compassion here means setting aside the thoughts that are oriented towards yourself, and taking up an attitude that serves others instead. It is an act of attention before it is a feeling.

Honesty

In everything a hero undertakes, honesty is the base the rest is built on.

It earns the respect of other people, and respect is what allows a person to lead followers towards the goal rather than merely instruct them. Courage without honesty produces something else entirely, and nobody follows it for long.