Haters Gon’ Hate

Posted on May 20, 2012 by George

In response to a couple of negative comments on my post Anything is Better Than Nothing, I’d thought I’d clarify what I was trying to say.

I think university can be great. I like it here. I think there are plenty of good reasons to go to university, and plenty of students who go to university for the right reasons.

I also think our education system is failing in a big way. It’s good at giving people a solid understanding of academic subjects (and I’m not denying those are important), but its terrible at preparing people for ACTUAL LIFE and teaching them how to be happy and successful. Academic subjects are important and I enjoy learning them, but if you’re not happy, who gives a shit?

When I said university ‘narrows your mind’, I wasn’t talking about the particular academic subject your degree happens to be in. I was talking about more important stuff.

To give one example: your possibilities as a graduate. I’ve never received a single piece of career advice from anyone at uni which acknowledged the existence of any post-graduation options except ‘get a job’ or ‘go do postgrad’. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those things if that’s what’s right for you, but you’ve been duped if you think those are your only two options. (I can’t say either of them appeal to me.)

Another example: Loads of people I know are planning to do some extended travelling after they graduate. 9 times out of 10 though, when they tell me their plans they’ll end it with a sigh, and say something like ‘then I guess I’m gonna have to come back and face the real world’… i.e., come back and do something they don’t want to do because they think it’s their only choice. That’s an attitude makes me nauseous, but it’s so common! And I think it’s ridiculous!

How many graduates can’t get a job? How many people go to uni with no direction or purpose and leave feeling no better? How many people are just plain unhappy? Isn’t that fucking absurd, that you can go through 15+ years of an education system that’s supposed to prepare you for adulthood and still feel that way?

This is all stuff I could write much more about, but I guess that’s what this blog is for.

I hate blog posts which do nothing but link to someone else’s site and add a bit of commentary, but this quote from Tucker Max says it better than I ever could:

After I was done [selecting a research assistant from hundreds of applications], my overwhelming emotion was profound sadness. And not because I thought the majority of people were stupid or annoying or anything like that. Not at all–I was sad because so many of these people had genuine desires to work to improve themselves and do something good with their lives, but had no idea how to actually do that.

To me, that doesn’t speak poorly of them; it means our social and educational system has failed them. If a young healthy person is interested enough in life to even get to the second round of this process, but is still totally clueless about how to accomplish something in their own life…that means they’ve been failed by the people and institutions around them.

I acknowledge the fact that I’m just a 21 year-old nobody without much life experience. I don’t claim to have all the answers; all I’m trying to do with this blog is document my search for them.

The tone I’ve been going for in is “I’m in the process of figuring this stuff out”, not “I know everything and think I’m better than you”. The fact that people have accused me of the latter means I’m failing as a writer, I guess. Oh well, the only way to get better at something is to practice it.

PS Fuck the haters.

How to be a Creative Genius

Posted on May 13, 2012 by George

I find it difficult to be creative sometimes. I’ll sit at my desk, laptop open or guitar in hand, determined to write something inspiring (words or riffs), but nothing will come out. If I’m writing, I’ll spend hours agonising over my first sentence, barely able to extract four words that I’m happy with. On guitar, I’ll try to come up with an original melody, but my fingers won’t obey, and all I’ll produce is transparent rip-offs and pentatonic clichés. Try as I might, I just can’t produce any ideas.

“Writer’s block” is one way to describe this feeling we’ve all experienced, but that term falls short. Creativity is for everyone, not just starving artists. In fact, for anyone looking to excel and take their life to the next level, ideas are the fuel that will get them there, and failure to have them is paralysing and frustrating. Call it “creator’s block”.

The usual response when faced with creator’s block is: ‘try harder’. Dig deeper, and commit even more of your mental energy to extracting those ideas from the back of your mind. They have to be in there somewhere! But of course this never works, and if anything it just makes things even more disheartening as your efforts remain fruitless.

After years of frustration with the ‘force it’ method, feeling totally stuck for ideas in all kinds of areas, I finally stumbled, by accident, across a powerful realisation that changed things. Ever since then, I’ve had no trouble producing and acting upon ideas for all sorts of situations, and it’s turned my life around.

The realisation was this: I already have loads of ideas.

That’s right: I have thousands of ideas! What was I doing trying to conjure up new ones when I already have more than enough? In fact, not only do I already have more ideas than I could ever possibly hope to act upon, but I’m coming up with new ones every single day. I have so many ideas I don’t know what to do with them. I’d just been looking in the wrong places.

Let me explain:

You’ve probably heard the idea before that your brain has two different ‘modes’. Call it logic vs intuition, thinking vs feeling, left-brain vs right-brain, it doesn’t matter – what’s important is that your brain can only be in one of these modes at any given time. To have loads of ideas and be creative with ease, you switch between modes as appropriate and learnt to let your creative mind run free with minimal interference from its logical counterpart.

If this sounds a bit too abstract, I’m about to show you two tricks you can use to harness the power of your creative mind. Both are ridiculously simple but life-changing, and I can’t recommend them enough.

The first trick is (drum roll)… carry a pocket notebook and pen with you wherever you go, and record your thoughts as you have them.

Sorry if that’s a bit anticlimactic – it’s pretty well-known advice, but that doesn’t change the fact that almost no-one actually follows it. It took me 21 years to give it a go, but now that they have, I’m kicking myself for not trying it sooner.

As soon as I started carrying a notebook on me at all times (and I mean at all times), I was amazed by how many worthwhile thoughts and actionable ideas I have in any given day. I’d just never paid them much attention before, letting them idly float past, telling myself I’d remember them when I never did. As it turns out, idea generation has never been my problem. What I actually needed was just better techniques for managing my ideas and acting on them.

Your subconscious mind is always at work behind the scenes, processing, analysing and examining. It produces more thoughts than it can handle, and can’t help but spill some of them into your conscious awareness. Normally those thoughts are transient and short-lived, but capture them by writing them down and you’ll find that some of them are really worth remembering.

The creative brain favours quantity over quality. Most of the ideas in my notebook are crap – I probably produce twenty bad ideas for every good one. Who cares? Bad ideas are harmless if unused, and a small price to pay for the occasional gem I find among them. Shutting them out is impossible without shutting out good ideas too, because deciding which ideas are good or bad is the job of the logical mind, and activating that part of the mind deactivates the other part and blocks any ideas from showing up at all. Like acid and alkali, the logical and creative minds are strong on their own but worthless when combined.

When you look at in this light, the ‘try harder’ approach to creativity is the worst thing you can possibly do! It’s like trying to hammer a nail using a screwdriver. You can go shopping for bigger and better screwdrivers, experiment with different hammering techniques, maybe sharpen the nail, but none of this is going to fix the fact that you’re using the wrong tool in the first place. You’re response when you don’t get the results you want is to do more of the things that don’t work. Madness! (I call this the ‘war on drugs’ strategy.)

So if you want to become a creative genius, learn to turn off your logical, critical brain and just let the ideas flow, collecting as many as you can without a care in the world for their quality or viability. You can fire up your critical circuits later to sort through your ideas and refine them, just don’t let it get in the way and stop the ideas from emerging in the first place.

‘Carry a notebook around with you’ is all very fine and well, but if you want to really get to grips with how powerful your creative brain can be, I’d recommend a technique called free writing. This is an approach to creativity which I learned from Internet marketer Ed Dale (as mentioned in my previous post) which has not only tripled my productivity and creativity but has absolutely transformed my life. And it’s simple, so incredibly simple, which makes its power that much more impressive.

To free write, just follow these steps:

Decide what you want to write about (optional), and grab a pen and paper or open up your favourite text editor.
Set a timer for 10 minutes, or longer as needs be. I usually use e.ggtimer.com.
Start writing as fast as you can, and don’t stop until your timer rings. Don’t pause for a millisecond to worry about the quality of what you’re writing – just allow every thought to spill out onto the page. If your hand stop moving at any point, you’re doing it wrong; type ‘blah blah blah, I can’t think of anything to write’ if you have to. By forcing yourself to keep writing, your brain will catch up.
When time runs out, stop writing immediately. Get away from your desk and go do something else.
After a break to take your mind off what you’ve written, come back and view it with fresh eyes. Only then can you activate your logical brain and start editing, refining and perfecting what you’ve created.

Now, when you write using this method, you’re going to produce some truly terrible content at first. It’s going to be rambling, disjointed, misspelled drivel, but that’s the whole point. What matters is that you’ve turned your creative brain up to 11 and given it free rein to produce anything and everything it desires without any interference. Only afterwards is it safe to come back with your logical circuits engaged so you can make sense of what you’ve written and work it into a form that you’ll be happy for the world to see.

Free writing is a powerful technique, and its benefits are huge:

Firstly, it allows you to write more content with less effort and stress. It’s certainly massively increased the amount I’m able to write, because I was far too used to toiling away with ineffective left-brained methods. Every post so far on this blog has begun its life as a free writing session.

Secondly, free writing is a valuable tool for personal development. Remember when I said in step 1 that ‘deciding what you want to write about’ is optional? Free writing with no predetermined purpose will give you all sorts of insights into the inner workings of your mind, give clarity to the problems you’re facing and help you work out how to solve them. Even if you have no interest in writing for publication, getting your unedited thoughts out on paper like will have a huge positive impact on your life. I try and do it at least once a day.

Thirdly, as you free write more and more, your thoughts will flow more easily and the content you’ll produce will get better and require less editing. Like a muscle, you’ll strengthen your creative mind with training. It’s probably weak and withered from disuse after two decades of a school system that emphasised logical analysis and left-brained thinking. Let your creative mind grow and you’ll find it can achieve things your logical brain could never have even dreamed of.

One idea can be all it takes to change the world. Every achievement or invention in human history began its life as no more than an idea in someone’s head. You probably already have a revolutionary idea in your head. Start looking for it.

Anything is Better Than Nothing

Posted on May 3, 2012 by George

I started reading and learning about entrepreneurship and passive income when I was 16. Books like The Four Hour Work Week and articles like 10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job blew my mind, and made much more sense to me than any of the career and life advice I was getting from my parents and teachers. I decided that self-employment was clearly the path for me.

Five years later, I don’t have much to show for that decision. All I’ve really managed to do is read a lot of books and talk a lot of talk. I’ve definitely done a lot in the last 5 years that I’m happy with and that I’m proud of, but not much of it is tangible stuff that I could put on my CV. (Not that I care too much about my CV).

The problem I’ve been suffering from is analysis paralysis. There are so many things I can do with my life, so many avenues to explore, so little time. Which is the right path to take? How can I make the right decision?

Wrong attitude. And it’s an attitude that’s kept me firmly rooted in place in some important areas of my life for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s only recently, in the last half a year or so, that I’ve started to get past it. Only since then have I started to make any real progress in those important areas.

It’s a nice idea, getting it all right the first time and not making any mistakes, but the truth is that the only real way to learn is through experience, and the only way to get experience is go out and try something – anything! Even if you fail (and you probably will at first), you’ve learned far more – and achieved far more – than you would have by doing nothing. The mindsets of I’ll make a move when I have more information and I’m waiting until the is right are pernicious, deadly traps. You’ll never have perfect information, and the time is never going to be exactly right. Do it now anyway.

After months of reading and learning about online business without applying anything that I was learning, I’ve finally started to take action, and have been working my way through The Challenge, a free 49-part course by Australian Internet marketer Ed Dale with the stated aim to ‘show you step-by-step how you can make your first $1 online’. I haven’t made that dollar (or pound) yet, but I’m still finding the course to be hugely educational and enjoyable. (Thanks to Nikolay Piryankov and the student society Manchester Entrepreneurs for introducing me to this course).

This isn’t going to be a ‘how to make money online’ blog (there are already more than enough of those), so I don’t want to spend too much time writing about the specifics of what I’m doing in that area. It’s something I’m very new to, I can’t compete with what’s already out there, and there’s far bigger things I want to be writing about, so if you want find out more about the Challenge, check it out for yourself. I’ll give the brief summary though.

So far, I’ve created a targeted website within a small and very focused niche, with the aim of ranking highly in Google for some specific search terms, thus getting free traffic (visitors). Once you have a highly targeted website getting a decent number of visitors, making money is the easy part.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. So far I’ve struggled to get any visitors whatsoever to the site I’ve created, and I’m already considering giving up and starting over with a new site in a different niche. So what? It would be foolish to expect to get rich off my first ever attempt. I’ve already learnt more than enough about the Internet, search engine optimisation, backlinking, keyword research and all kinds of other topics and technologies to make it easily worth the time I’ve invested.

Even if my experience with the Challenge is a complete and utter failure, I’ll still be glad I did it. Even if I only end up making a few pounds, I’ll be ecstatically happy, because making one pound is the first step on the journey to making a million pounds, and by building my skills and trying different things, my income is only going to increase. (As a student who lives off government loans and the support of my parents, I’ve literally got nothing to lose income-wise.) Any action is better than no action, and I’m so glad to finally be making this first step, no matter how small, because it’s long overdue.

(The Challenge has also taught me one of the most important and valuable ideas I’ve learnt in years. It’s an approach to writing and creativity which has huge applications for all areas of your life – not just online business. But I’ll be writing about that in my next post.)

All the entrepreneurial advice I’ve read (and a lot of life advice that’s not specific to entrepreneurship) emphasises the importance of failure. Fail fast, fail often. It’s the only way to learn. Bill Gates’s first business, Traf o Data, was a flop. Steve Jobs got fired from Apple nine years after he created it. Jimi Hendrix was in countless unknown bands before forming the Jimi Hendrix Experience. When those people go down in history, do you think anyone will care about their failures?

I’m not claiming to be the next Gates or Jobs (and I’d much rather be the next Hendrix), but my point is this: anything is better than nothing. Your desire to get it right the first time, to get all the information and learn as much as possible so you can make the perfect decision and suffer no failure or setbacks, is well-intentioned but it will destroy your ability to get anything meaningful done. I’m speaking from experience.

I love reading and learning new things and I don’t intend to stop, but there’s come a point where I need to devote less time to learning and more time to doing. When I manage this (e.g. by starting a blog after thinking about starting one for years), everything else tends to fall into place.

This applies to so much more than entrepreneurship. I’m at the age where most of my peers are just finishing university and entering the dreaded ‘real world’, and I can see so many young people, so many of my friends, drifting around with no idea what they want to do with their lives and not doing anything about it. Instead they’re shying away from the important questions, avoiding decisions and trying to pretend that graduation will never come. They’re hoping that everything will suddenly become clear to them, that they’ll somehow get a bolt of inspiration and everything else will be plain sailing. Is it working? Fuck no!

“Don’t talk to me about graduation,” one of my soon-to-be-graduated friends told me the other night. “Right now I’m planning on moving back home (to the small and boring town we grew up in), getting some shit job and saving up a bit of money while I figure stuff out. I’ll probably go travelling for a few months next year.” I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d gone and got a degree for, when he could have done all of this three years ago.

I can’t really blame him, though. My friends aren’t stupid people, or lazy – I just think they’ve been let down by the society they were brought up in. Our educational system has its merits, but it sure as hell doesn’t teach any of the really important things you need to know if you want to be happy and successful and make something of your life. If anything, it makes things worse. It teaches you to be risk-averse, to fear failure and to try and get everything right the first time. It emphasises procedure over results and ‘follow instructions’ over ‘question assumptions’. Worst of all, it narrows your mind, training you only for a few predetermined life paths and ignoring the infinite other opportunities that might have appealed to you far more.

I’m no guru. I didn’t learn any of this from school, but I certainly didn’t figure out by myself either. Instead I figured it out by reading countless books, blogs and articles by people who are far more intelligent and successful than me or any of my friends, family or teachers. I’m still learning, too – its an ongoing process with no definite end in sight.

Anything is better than nothing. If you don’t know what you want to do with your life, don’t feel bad about it. The only way to figure it out is try things out. If you don’t have a passion, go out and look for one! Apply to a bunch of jobs you think you have no chance of getting, start a blog, learn a new language, learn a new skill like computer programming or a martial art, volunteer for charity, shit, if you’re really stuck for ideas, just go join the library and read until you have some. DO ANYTHING!!!

I’m still at the beginning of my journey. I’m not even 10% close to where I want to ultimately be in life. But for the first time in ages, I’m starting to feel like I’m making progress, however slow it may be. And that’s a damn good feeling.

(If you’re one of my friends, and wondering whether parts of this post were aimed at you: yes, they were. Don’t shoot the messenger.)

Photo credit: William Warby

Life Lessons From Hitch-Hiking Across Europe Twice

Posted on April 24, 2012 by George

I just got back from Croatia. It took me over a week to get there from the UK, as I hitch-hiked almost the entire distance. Sound crazy? What’s even crazier is that I did a similar thing last year, that time hitch-hiking all the way to Morocco.

On both occasions I was taking part in the Hitch, an annual event where hundreds of young people from across the UK hitch-hike across Europe to raise money for the charity Link Community Development. When I explain this idea to people, their responses fall into two broad categories:

A minority of people say ‘wow, that’s a cool idea’, and, if I’m lucky, ‘how can I sponsor you?’. (The answer: www.justgiving.com/millocroatia, and fundraising doesn’t close until June 15th, thankyouverymuch.)

The most common reaction I get, however, goes something like this:

‘You’re going to hitch-hike?!?!?! Are you crazy?!??! You’re going to get mugged/raped/stabbed/kidnapped!!! What’s wrong with you?’

Of course, if you’ve ever hitch-hiked yourself you’ll know that these fears are pretty unfounded, but then most people have never hitch-hiked, so time and time again I’ve had to put up with this annoying negativity. I’d like to put forth a different point of view. Not only was hitch-hiking across Europe (twice) safe and easy, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, I had the time of my life on both occasions and I can’t recommend enough that you do something similar yourself.

We’re too damn scared of everything and everyone we don’t know in the UK. It’s been ingrained into our culture and psyche over the last few decades by a constant barrage of fear-based politics and 24-hour news channels. I, for one, am sick of it, and my life improved the moment I stopped listening to those sources and started trusting my own judgement over that of advertisers. Try it yourself, and adopt a less fearful attitude to the world around you. You might learn a few things.

People Are Basically Good

Remember the first time you used eBay? Wasn’t it weird, giving money to a total stranger on the Internet? There was a risk that your trust would get you robbed or scammed, but it didn’t, and if you’re like me you’ve got a huge amount of value from eBay in the 17 years since it was founded.

eBay is a great example of how putting a little bit of trust in people you don’t know can work out in your favour. The company has said from one of the start that one of its core values is that ‘people are basically good’, and the three billion dollars of profit they made last year would seem to suggest that they’re right. So why, then, when it comes to the offline world, is everyone so scared of everybody else?

The percentage of murderers, rapists and psychopaths in the population is pretty damn low, but you wouldn’t think it to hear all these people scream to me about the dangers of hitch-hiking. We teach our children about Stranger Danger, but the real danger is that we’re becoming far too scared of the world beyond our windows, clinging on to our comfort zones and refusing to deal with anybody who isn’t background-checked, risk-assessed and providing two references.

Both years on the Hitch, I was blown away by the kindness and generosity of total strangers all across western Europe. From Spain to Slovenia, people from all walks of life drove miles out of their way to help us, bought us food, taught us their language and on one occasion even took us home and let us stay at their house overnight. Nothing weird or bad happened to us, and not once did I fear for my safety or was made to feel uncomfortable, threatened or intimidated.

What if I’d bought in to the fear of Stranger Danger and decided that the Hitch was too dangerous to take part in? I wouldn’t have met the dozens of brilliant people who made the Hitch so great, I’d have missed out on two incredible travel experiences, and I wouldn’t have gained the massive expansion to my comfort zone that came with them. We have much more to gain as a society from becoming more open, compassionate and trusting in others than we have to lose by becoming more and more insular.

So, sorry to contradict what you were taught in primary school but: talk to strangers. You’ll be amazed how nice they can actually be. And who knows, as you start to give the benefit of the doubt to others, you might find that they start doing the same to you.

The World Isn’t As Dangerous As You Think

If you pay attention to the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world is a dangerous place. This says less about the world than it does about news media. Fear and negativity are the backbone of modern journalism (it sells papers), and the result of taking in all that negativity is you start to mistake fear-mongering sensationalism for an accurate depiction of the world. I made the active decision a while ago to stop paying any attention to the news and I feel much, much better off for it.

(I could write a whole other article about the benefits of avoiding the news, but there’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said in this brilliant piece by Rolf Dobelli, so I’ll just link to him instead.)

I’m not denying that bad things happen, and every murder, rape or abduction is a tragedy and those responsible deserve to rot in prison for the rest of their lives. I just think we need to realise what a tiny, tiny minority of cases these actually are, and adjust our expectations accordingly.

When you start living less fearfully and doing things like hitch-hiking, you’ve got a lot to lose if things go wrong, but you’ve also got a lot to gain if things go right, and the chances of things going right are so much staggeringly higher than the chances of things going wrong that I think you’d be fool not to agree that it’s worth it.

Avoiding Risk is a Stupid Idea

Look, I’m not stupid. Obviously I know that hitch-hiking is marginally more dangerous than getting a lift from a friend, just like driving is more dangerous than getting the train and crossing the road is more dangerous than being chauffeured everywhere in a bulletproof limo by the Secret Service. But so what?

You’ll never get anywhere in life without taking risks. There is no major achievement you can possibly make in your life – getting a promotion, running a marathon, proposing to your girlfriend, hitch-hiking halfway across Europe – that doesn’t come with some element of risk. The trick is to accept that, and know that whatever goes wrong, you can always recover. Life gets a lot more fun once you stop fearing failure and start viewing it as a learning experience. Trying and failing is far, far better than not trying at all.

This is the opposite of what we’re taught in school. Study hard so you can get a safe and secure job, follow our Health & Safety guidelines and I’m sorry, our insurance doesn’t cover that. Get your grades and don’t rock the boat. Of all the deep flaws in our education system, one of the most harmful is that it teaches people to be risk-averse.

We want to live in a risk-free world, where no-one ever gets injured and everything always goes according to plan. There’s nothing wrong with this goal in itself, but there comes a point where we need to start considering trade-offs. Is it really worth sacrificing fun, growth and adventure so that one less person out of a billion dies every year? I’d much rather live in a riskier world, and I guess I’ll have to accept the risk that that one extra person who dies might be me.

Of course, if society learns to be less risk-averse, there will be downsides. More people will die in accidents. Cars will crash, bones will break and safety equipment will fail. Insurance companies will charge more and pay out less. But it will be worth it. The alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about.

Don’t Plan Too Much – Just Roll With It

I kept a sporadic video diary on my way to Croatia. One clip is of us packing up our bags and getting ready to go after a very uncomfortable night sleeping on the floor of a service station.

‘Here we are near Stuttgart,’ I say in the video. ‘Hopefully we can make it to Croatia today… Slovenia at least.’

I can’t help but laugh when I watch that back, not because it was ambitious but because it turned out to be so wrong – we barely made it out of Germany before sunset, and didn’t get to Croatia for another four or five days. In fact, we ended up giving up the hitch-hiking and getting public transport instead, because we were worried we wouldn’t make it to Zagreb in time for our flight. That’s life.

That’s the thing with hitch-hiking – you can never plan too precisely. Far better to take things as they come, and learn to improvise. Sure, you might fuck up occasionally, but how else are you going to learn?

This summer I’m going to South East Asia for six weeks. That much I know – I have flights booked in and out of Bangkok, but what I’m going to do in between is anyone’s guess. I have a vague idea of where I want to visit and what I want to see, but I know better by now than to meticulously plan it all out or write an itinerary. How can I possibly predict which places I’ll enjoy the most, where I’ll want to stick around and where I’ll get bored of quickly? A little bit of planning might help, but any more than necessary is just restrictive.

This applies to so much more than travel. I used to worry incessantly about the future, and try and plan out my career and future, but of course nothing went according to plan. There’s nothing particularly exciting about my current circumstances, but there’s still no way I could possibly have predicted them when I was applying to university just three years ago.

I used to do as the self-help books told me and carefully plan and write out all my goals for the future, for the rest of the year, for the next 90 days, but they never seemed to help, and I never found that writing down my goals made me any more likely to achieve them. Nowadays I just focus on doing what feels right in the moment – like writing for this blog – and trusting that it’ll take me in the right direction. The funny thing is, ever since I started doing this, I started getting much more done, making more progress towards those goals I’d stopped writing down and feeling a lot happier as a result.

Once again, this goes against what we were told in school. (Readers of this blog will quickly realise that I have a lot of disdain for most of what I was taught in school). We’re told to think about the future, to plan our careers years in advance, and in the UK we’re forced to make decisions at age 15 (in our choice of A-level subjects) that severely limit our future options at university and work because hey, it helps to plan ahead.

Problem is, the world’s just far too big and complicated to predict with any accuracy just how things will turn out. Your oh-so-detailed life plan will never survive contact with the many curveballs and unexpected setbacks (or opportunities) that life throws at you. Or, to put it in the words of Mike Tyson: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’

So stop worrying so much about the future. Just do what feels right – like sleeping on service station floors with no idea what country you’ll be in 24 hours later – and everything should work out okay in the end.

Bad Things Are Always Going to Happen – What Matters is How You React to Them

As we approached Croatia, just about everything that could possibly go wrong, did. What made it more annoying was that it was all our own fault. We got on a wrong train, missed a bus, lost some important tickets, then to top it all off, my girlfriend ran out of money and I lost my wallet, leaving us stranded and helpless until she managed to borrow some funds from her unamused parents.

(Lesson learned: never travel without an emergency reserve of cash, kept separate from the rest of your valuables.)

It sucked, but it made me realise: Kicking up a fuss and letting the stress get the better of me wouldn’t have achieved anything. Anger is never going to get me my wallet back – so why bother with it? In fact, at the times I did let myself get stressed out, all it did was cause arguments and make the situation worse.

Now, I look back on the whole experience and laugh. So what was the point in getting stressed out in the moment? Getting on the wrong train in Slovenia screwed up our plans for the next two days (remember what I said before about planning?), but it ended up meaning that we got to spend an extra night in Ljubljana, which we enjoyed and made the most of.

Anger and stress really have outlived their evolutionary purposes, but for now we’re stuck with them, and the best strategy is to shut them out. You can’t expect everything to go perfectly, and when things do inevitably go wrong, letting stress creep in will only make things worse.

Ultimately, you control what thoughts you let into your head. External events don’t make you angry – you do, by allowing yourself to react to those events with anger.

Of course, changing this behaviour is something that’s easier said than done, but I’m getting better at it every day, and when I do it right it works wonders.

One last point. I can’t really call this a ‘life lesson I learned from hitch-hiking’, because I learned it years ago, but it’s still relevant:

Everyone Should Travel

… because the world is huge, and even if you visited a different place every day starting today for the rest of your life, you still wouldn’t see 10% of what Earth has to offer. Travelling wide is, in my opinion, the single most worthwhile, fun and fulfilling thing you can do with your time, and I believe that if more people travelled more often, the world would be a better, happier, more peaceful place.

And if you do travel, don’t be afraid to get in strangers’ cars, and please for God’s sake stop telling me what a dangerous choice I’m making by hitch-hiking.

By the way, if you want to take part in the Hitch (and I highly recommend it), check it out here, although the next event isn’t until 2013.

Why Start a Blog?

Posted on March 22, 2012 by George

I spotted a flyer in the Computer Science building the other day for the University of Manchester’s Careers Service. The title was something like this: ’300000 students graduate from UK universities every year. What will you do to stand out?’

It’s a good question, and one that every student should try and answer. I can’t answer it for you, but I can think of one way to not stand out, to blend in with the crowd and be unremarkable: send out a CV to a bunch of graduate recruiters via your university’s careers office.

I know plenty of people who’ve done cool CV-enhancing stuff: chairing societies, winning competitions, voluntary work, but the truth is, no matter how many extra-curricular activities you’ve taken part in, your CV is still probably just a few black-and-white, 12pt Times New Roman sheets of A4, somewhere in the middle of a pile of 1000 similar documents. How can you stand out in that environment?

Pretty easily, actually. Ever Googled your own name? (Of course you have). What results come up? Unless your name is John Smith, chances are pretty good that there’s at some information about you on the front page of the search results. What does it say? That YouTube video of you and your mates doing balloons of laughing gas at age 16 doesn’t seem like such a good idea now, does it? And let’s not get started on the embarrassment that is your old MySpace page.

Now, do think you’re the only one who’s ever going to Google your name?

I can’t believe how few people I know have done anything to control their Internet presence. Like it or not, there’s going to be something about you online, so you might as well control it. I know not everyone has the time or inclination to start a regularly-updated blog or build a huge website, but it’s so ridiculously easy to put something simple up that there’s no excuse really. Hell go to Tumblr or WordPress.com and you can get a good-looking site up for free in minutes.

So that’s my first reason for starting this blog.

I realise that a lot of what I have to say will actually hinder me in some career paths (like in my last post when I said I have no interest in working in the City), but I figure that if anyone is put off by my honesty, they’re probably not someone I’d have wanted to work with anyway.

Secondly though, I hope that what I write can actually be of use to some people. There are far too many pointless blogs out there with no readers that serve only to stroke the authors’ egos. The Internet doesn’t need any more of those, but I like to think that I can avoid falling into that camp. I want to provide value to people.

Plus, I love writing. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on and filling up notebooks and hard drives with scribbles, musings, ideas and song lyrics since I was about 15 and I don’t think I can keep it all in my head any more. You have been warned.

I’ll leave it with this comic from XKCD:

Intro

Posted on March 19, 2012 by George

I filled in the last few sections of the form, wrote the date at the top and signed my name at the bottom. Putting the papers back in order, I read the title one last time: Request To Withdraw From Undergraduate Degree Program.

I hadn’t quite dropped out yet, but it felt pretty real. I’d even told my parents in no uncertain terms that I was quitting university, which had caused a bit of a stir. I put the forms on my table, telling myself I’d hand them in at the next opportunity, and got busy doing something else, wondering what the future had in store for me as a university dropout. I felt equal parts liberated and terrified.

That was in March 2011, halfway through my first year at the University of Manchester. 12 months later, I’m still here. I never handed in those forms. I wasn’t enjoying life as a student, but I had no idea what else I could possibly do, and the doubt and uncertainty kept me firmly in place.

I drifted through the rest of my first year, spending most of my time sleeping in, playing guitar and drinking cheap vodka. Despite having an abysmal attendance record (I went weeks at a time without showing up to a single class) and failing to hand in or even attempt several assignments, I somehow passed the year with a 2:1. I had done virtually no work whatsoever, but luckily my course (BA Economics & Politics) was an utter farce. If you’re considering coming to Manchester to study that course, I could write you 1000 words of advice, but for the sake of this post I’ll condense it to one: don’t.

Two weeks before I was due to come back to Manchester and start my second year, I found myself in Prague, wandering from bar to bar with some other British kids I’d met at a backpacker’s hostel when a realisation struck me like a bolt of lightning:

‘What the FUCK is wrong with you? What possible reason have you got to stay on your current path? Do something about it.’

That night, back in the hostel, I typed out an email on my phone, sent it to my department, and a fortnight later arrived back in Manchester as a First Year again, this time enrolled on a BSc in Computer Science. I’d wasted a year’s worth of tuition fees, and given up a place studying abroad (the only thing on my old course I’d been looking forward to), but I haven’t regretted the decision for one second. I shudder at the thought of where I’d be if I hadn’t sent that email. I enjoy my new course, am actually doing some work this time around, am learning a lot, and my life is much better in all kinds of other ways too.

The funny thing is though, I’m still not that opposed to dropping out. I’m under no illusions that I need a degree to be successful, and I have absolutely zero interest in working in the City, becoming an accountant or lawyer, wearing a tie every day or going down any of the other paths that social conditioning and your parents would have you believe constitute ‘success’. (Mum and dad, if you’re reading this: sorry, but it’s just not going to happen).

Most careers advice I hear from recruiters, professors, parents and peers makes me cringe. The majority of students I know are dead-set on some moronic socially conditioned path, obsessed with ‘building their CV’ and other-such superficial nonsense, steadfastly reassuring themselves that by ticking off the boxes they’re told to tick and jumping through all the hoops of higher education they’re entitled and guaranteed to a fat paycheck and a happy life, AKA a dull office job or a lucrative career in middle-management.

Fuck that.

The world is changing and education has failed to change with it. There are plenty of people who’d deny this, but I can’t be bothered to argue with them anymore. Actions speak louder than words, after all, and I don’t need anyone else’s approval to live the life I want. I plan on sticking with university for the time being, but completing my degree is far from integral to my plans for the future, and the second I get a better offer than my current situation, I’ll be dropping out in a heartbeat. Which brings me to the point of this blog.

A few months ago, I read this brilliant article by Michael Ellsberg, a guest post on the blog of Tim Ferriss. I’ve since read Ellsberg’s book too, which is also brilliant. If you haven’t heard of Ferriss or Ellsberg, close this webpage and go and read whatever you can find by them immediately because I promise you they have much more value to add to your life than I do at this moment in time. The article is awesome and I can’t recommend it enough.

Read it yet? Cool, welcome back.

Ellsberg focuses on the somehow controversial idea that universities do a woefully poor job at preparing students for the real world and don’t teach the real keys to success in life. He then prescribes a course of action that you can take to give yourself more momentum and direction than a BA ever could, for a fraction of the cost. Sounds good to me.

The gist of it is that you decide what field you want to excel in, learn everything you can about it (this needn’t be expensive) and showcase your learning in a blog like this one, all the while building up your skills and network of contacts until you can find a way to get paid to do what you love. That’s what I’ll be doing here.

Step one of Ellsberg’s process is to ‘Choose Your New Field Of Learning’. For me this is an easy choice. I’m going to be learning what I can about entrepreneurship, online business and passive income. As previously stated, I have no interest whatsoever in a standard career path. I’d rather work for myself, even if it meant being poor, than surrendering control of my life to an employer. Online seems to be the way to go – given that I’m an unashamed computer nerd, I might as well play to my strengths. (My first online venture is in its early stages as I type this – we’ll see how that goes)

I’m also passionate about personal development, like everyone should be, so I’ll be sharing what I have to say on that topic too. I know I’m only 21, and definitely don’t claim to have all the answers, but I hope I can bring something worthwhile to the discussion even if it takes me a while to find my voice.

Finally, there’s travel. Remember when I said I want to be self-employed? This is a big reason why. I visited six new countries last year, bringing my total up to 25, and that’s a number I only want to increase further in years to come. Ideally I’d like to double it, maybe even triple, or I could follow in the footsteps of Chris Guillebeau and try to visit every country in the world – I haven’t decided yet. Whatever the case, I doubt these goals are very compatible with conventional employment and the 40-hour workweek.

I think that travelling far and wide is one of the most fun and fulfilling ways you can possibly spend your time, and that if more people travelled, the world would be a better place. I’m far from unique in having this desire, but to a lot of students I know, ‘travel’ after graduation is a swan song, a final enjoyable stint of freedom before settling down into the dreaded ‘real world’. I don’t know where this notion came from, that ‘the real world’ consists of cubicles, commutes and sedentary lifestyles and that anything else is a distraction, but that’s a worldview I’ll never subscribe to. Despite what most news outlets and careers advisors would have you believe, the real ‘real world’ is an amazing place, and exploring its thousands of cultures, climates, lifestyles and languages seems to me to be a much more worthy pastime than fine-tuning my CV and ironing my suit for job interviews. So I’ll be writing about travel, too.

(I also still haven’t completely abandoned my childhood dream of being a world-touring platinum-selling rockstar either, but even if that doesn’t work out, I still plan to get some music of mine up online sooner rather than later.)

Whew, nearly 1500 words! When I sat down at my laptop I was only planning to browse some blogs for a little bit before going to bed. I get distracted easily. Anyway, I’ll be posting an account of what I’m doing and learning on here. I hope you enjoy it! Right now, I need to sleep.

George's Blog

A blog of personal development, entrepreneurship and heavy metal.