School – The Lazy Employee

Lingering Thoughts

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

– Confucius

This past couple weeks something was in the back of mind: Do I progress forward in my career or level up in my education. I do have my master degree (apparently a thing now a days) but there are job opportunities that would require a Phd. At the same time there are other job opportunities that value career experience.

When we first get out of high school, we could either further our education, get a job, or do nothing (absolutely nothing, no progress). We been taught that a degree is important because it leads you to more money, but for those who don’t know how to play the career game (which I’ll explain in another post) you might be losing entry level positions to those who have more experience than you. It’s frustrating! That’s why some may go for their master degree or even their doctorate. There is a flip side to that, and that is the fact that some positions require a level of degree to even apply. Experience and education is intertwine with each other that creates such a difficult for most millennial to get a working career going.

Even those who have settled in the career may consider advancing it, but that still proves to be difficult to progress. We have to stick it out and be patient for that higher position (which is hard for most millennial, me included), but adding education to work life, social life doesn’t jive. Some degree programs also interfere with the work life that makes it even harder to even attend. So there lies my dilemma, do I stop working just to pursue my higher degree or do I I continue my career field.

After talking to my friend about my dilemma, I came to the conclusion that education allows the door to opportunities to be open, but experience solidifies obtaining those opportunities. Additionally, my friend mentioned that at some point in progression of life, education and experience ends up not mattering at all. He posed me this question: A person with a bachelor’s degree, a person with 5 years of work experience, and a person with 2 years of experience & an associate degree who was recommended by an awesome boss; among the choices who would you choose if they all posses the same skill knowledge?

In all honesty, I would pick the recommended person, just because if the boss is awesome then it means that the person that they picked is equally awesome to work with. I’ll explain fitment in another post, but I am curious, which one would you choose? A person with experience, or with education, or nice fit in your job site regardless of experience or education?

“Your not dead yet” : Knowing Failure

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho

I was so distraught when I found that I have a D in chemistry in my first year of college. Additionally I wasn’t really doing so great in my other science classes. Before this, I was heavily in science since elementary. Chemistry in high school, I believe I average a B (I have to check back on that). What also really got me to that state is the fact that I needed to retake this class to get into a program but also the fact I told myself I was destined to become a Pediatrician. I was dead set and determine ever since middle school (more on that in a different post).

Grades — Chem 162 Grade D. Took it again and got a C+. Took Chem 273 and got a D. I could’ve quit there, but I determine there was a lot of things happen and one is that I didn’t work hard enough.

I came to a realization during this time of my life was that I didn’t learn something back in high school and I had to take a quick crash course in college: Learning how to study. This what I was missing back in high school because most things came easy for me, so I hardly failed (there was this one time in high school Human Physiology and Antonym that the teacher failed the whole class but I believe it was some teaching tactic). But the more important thing that came from this realization is knowing failure and knowing what to do with it.

Some people, experience failure more often than other people. I know someone who is scared to do anything because of the fear of failure. But experiencing failure quiet frequently doesn’t equitation knowing failure. It’s like saying that since you breathe a lot, you should know the intricacies of how oxygen travels into the alveoli of the lungs and through what mechanism does CO2 is excreted out. (Kinda shows my medical background) Anyways, experience it frequently does not mean you know it.

Knowing failure means knowing the options of failure, and how to correct/overcome them. It sounds like a pessimistic way of thinking and can viewed as a negative but it’s more so problem solving. I often told my friends when they are deciding what to do, the worst thing that could happen is that they could die. In the game of chess, you would often think what’s your opponent best move, and how to either prevent it from happening or work around it.

The thing is about chess is that everything known (except the other person’s choice, so that isn’t much a read), but take for example a card game like Texas Hold Up (The interesting thing about this post is that I am currently writing this while in Vegas). Everything can be calculated out but it isn’t certain what the outcome will be, that’s where we know what is failure meaning. we know what where we going to failure. If we are able to correct the failures or avoid them, prior to them happening. That’s the ultimate reward of knowing failure is increasing the chances of winning.

What is your life’s failures? Is it possibly your most valuable learning experience? Did you find a better place?

So you know your failures, what’s next? The thing two things is finding our passion and exploring our strengths.

Lazy Gear: Rocket Book

One aspect of being a lazy employee is to be organize, which means having a planner of sorts. Anything can be a planner per say, a piece of scratch paper, a napkin, or even the back of envelope. Now all of these choices are cheap and easy to get to, but at the same time easy enough to get lost. This isn’t lazy, because what if it was something important written on there, like an money making idea, a plot twist to your writers block, or just the number for that date on Saturday night and you lost it. Great, either you have to spend energy to look for it, or chalk up as a lost and thus overall spending more effort than you should’ve in the first place. Thus, a note book should suffice, but finding that right note book might be a little hard.

20180701_214655 — This is what it looks like after I scanned it in.

For the lazy employee, it has to be easy to carry, compact, and does more work for you. I present to you Rocket Book! I picked up my rocket book sometime earlier this year, and I haven’t gone back to any other notebook for a long while. It’s fairly compact that comes with 32 pages. Now it first seems not a lot but the thing about these pages is that they’re reusable. They are made of specialized material that allows you to write using Pilot Frixion Pens and then afterwards wipe it off. Now it doesn’t make sense to write something important to be erase, the thing about these is that, your able to quickly scan the pages with your app to allow easy upload to your e-mail, drop box, or other things as a pdf or a jpeg. These means less clutter and waste for you, and more things to keep around.

RB 2018-06-24 08.59.31 — What actually gets scanned in. This is before I wrote that stuff in the other pictures.

The con though is that Frixion pens, are great pens, and are erasable (seriously awesome part), they aren’t my cup of tea of pens that I like to use. I am getting use to it but the thing about Rocketbook is that you have to allow the ink to dry for 15 seconds. Which means it can be troublesome for left hand writers. Another aspect to it too is that you have to give care to your book. i.e. you can’t leave ink on there more than a month or it stains horrible, or to not be very abrasive or else you you remove the coating that allows for the erasable nature of it. Just like a white board, you can write all you want but over time, the ink and the coating it is on, doesn’t get clear and it becomes a little darker than when it was brand new. If you don’t mind any of those things, then this book is perfect.

The company that makes these book are constantly in R.D. and just recently came out notepads in similar function which I picked up. You can pick up your Rocket Book at Target or on Amazon. You can also view this product and more at their website.