You Can’t Live on a Highway

As my peers and I prepare to leave college, we face difficult decisions related to our future careers: Do I apply for a banking job? Is it better to live in New York with my friends from college, or travel to a new city and find a different scene? When I think about these dilemmas, I often think of them in terms of highways.

The idea is simple. Living life is like driving in a car. Some of the metaphorical roads on which we drive are like highways, while others are local streets or dirt trails. The highways of life are the easiest paths to travel on — the pavement is smooth, and it’s hard to get lost. For most people, high school is a highway. Generally, everyone is on the same track: do well in class, find extracurriculars you care about, and your resume will get you into a good college. Like driving on an open highway, we can put on cruise control in high school and avoid making difficult life decisions. We know where we are going and how to get there.

When we get to college, we still think of life as a highway. Earn a high GPA, become the president of a student organization, and your resume will let you do whatever you want afterwards. I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy the experiences on the highways of life (like high school and college) — but we still see those times in our lives as a means to an end, a way to open the doors for us to our desired careers.

When we become seniors in college, we begin to think what happens after college. We all start to move in different directions. But there are still very clear highways, and we often gravitate to them.

Medical school. Consulting. Investment banking. Fellowships. Teach for America. All of these are common highways of life: they are smooth and easy to navigate. They have applications and a defined career ladder.

And when all your friends are applying for them, it’s easy to think you need to pick a highway too. After all, if you don’t stay on a highway of life, you may find yourself left behind as everyone continues on at sixty miles an hour.

It’s a worry we all have: Just as not going to college will leave you with fewer options, will not going to law school close off doors? We know we could exit the highways of life and find a more unique, local street, but can we get back onto a highway? And even if we can find the highway again, we worry everyone else may already be far ahead of us.

And so we apply to investment banking jobs, and then to business school, and then to private equity. The highways stretch on and they bring our friends and us further and faster, onwards and upwards — life leads to ever more opportunities, and opportunities for more opportunities.

But what we often forget is that highways are a way to get somewhere — they aren’t a place to go. We can keep opening more doors in our lives, but is that really all there is to life?

The highways of life are important. But it’s important to remember that the reason we take them is so that we can get off at the perfect exit: for some people, that may be having a family. For others, it might be moving to a new town or entering a field we love, even if it means sacrificing our future options. You may want to get off the highway now and not attend medical school, or maybe you want to wait until after finishing residency — but at some point you’ll get off.

Think very consciously about which decisions in your life are exits and which are highways, because if you’re not actively deciding when to get off you may not like where you end up.

After all, you can’t live on a highway.

reading books–How will you measure your life

there is no easy answer to life challenges, the quest to find happiness and meaning in life is not new, and not easy.

people  often think the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. but this is like driving a car looking only at the rear view mirror, because data is only available about the past.

error of correlations and the reason.

high correlation of feathers and the ability to fly, people just strapping on wings, jumping off cathedrals and flapping hard. the real breakthrough in human flight didn’t come from crafting better wings or using more feathers, it was brought about dutch-swiss mathematician and his book Hydrodynamica.

the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, don’t settle, as with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

incentive and motivation are two different things, incentive is to make people to do the things you want them to do, but true motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do.

shed some light on this. Many

for many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trapping of professional success in the mistaken belief that

understandig

the balance of calculation and serendipity, expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities. while you are still figuring out your career, you should keep the aperture of your life wide open, you should be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot and continue to adjust your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators.

a strategy –whether in companies or in life– is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy and money. with every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money , you are making a statement about what really matters to you.

so how do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? watch where your resources flow, the resource allocation process.

 

the relationship with your family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. but you have to be careful about

becoming a minimalist~

consumer culture has widely spread out in the modern society and everyone seems to be a victim. a famous quote for this culture is ” we are what we have”. it seems that the house we have, the car we drive, the clothes we wear,  gives us our identity. We want to have all of these, as if having it, we can become something the advertise claims. Buying Victoria Secrets gives us a sense of sexy,  buying luxury cars means we are in the upper class. whatever.

However, those things are really just stuff. They are nothing expect stuff. Attach too much meaning to the stuff, means nonsense. Back to buddhism, only we get rids of the unnecessary materials in our life, we can possibly find ourselves.

 

so focus on things that make myself happy instead of pleasing others, leave time for myself instead of wasting it on others.  

2013/5/9: kind of lost motivation going on

so shamed of myself, today, Howard came to check my work, and I shamelessly just reject him, saying… I haven’t done that.

it has been a month, I still reluctant to go any further, why??  maybe just because I have lost interest,

no it is a interesting project. but maybe i just hate to do the dirty work, but who will do it without me?

so working hard then you can get a better job option.

Come on, don’t go to any happiness, put your effort on the job~

the scare

people all surround you, seems so beautifully outside,

but no one asks their scare inside. everyone has his/her own unspoken scare, sharing it makes others feel better. So it may be ok to start with me.

I have scare,   I am not so confident about myself. actually I am the only one in my family who has ever lived outside china, even outside Zhejiang province.

what would happen to me if everything is not going off so right?

am I getting the symptom of entitlements ? maybe yes, I have a strong sense of entitlement

I need to work my ass off to keep

那一天 仓佳

 

      那一天，闭目在经殿香雾中，蓦然听见，你诵经中的真言；

 

　　那一月，我摇动所有的经筒，不为超度，只为触摸你的指尖；

 

　　那一年

那一天》

      那一天，闭目在经殿香雾中，蓦然听见，你诵经中的真言；

 

　　那一月，我摇动所有的经筒，不为超度，只为触摸你的指尖；

 

　　那一年，磕长头匍匐在山路，不为觐见，只为贴着你的温暖；

 

　　那一世，转山转水转佛塔呀，不为修来生，只为途中与你相见。

，磕长头匍匐在山路，不为觐见，只为贴着你的温暖；

 

　　那一世，转山转水转佛塔呀，不为修来生，只为途中与你相见。

poem–when you are old

when you are old and gray and full of sleep

and nodding by the fire, take down this book

and slowly read and dream of the soft look

your eye had once and of their shadows deep

 

how many loved your moments of glad grace

and loved your beauty with love false or true

but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

and loved the sorrows of your changing face

 

and bending down beside the glowing bars

murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

and paced upon the mountains overhead

and hid his face amid a crowd of stars

Poem : I loved you –Alexander Pushkin

I loved you, and I probably still do

the flame, perhaps is not extinguished

yet, it burns so quietly within my soul,

no longer should you feel distressed by it

 

silently and hopelessly I loved you

at times too jealous, and at times too shy

God grant you find another who will love you

as tenderly and truthfully as I.

 

 

 

 

never underestimate people near you

I have a tendency to be very confident about myself, though brought up in China, I am culitvated all the skills necessary to be modest and polite. But deep down in my heart, I have a totally different view.

But recently, I went to a concert on friday night, just to learn some new stuff and get myself a refresh. at that time, I listen to a very beautiful piece of music  played by violin and cellos, the violin play is apparently an Asian, concluded  from both her appearance and her name. She is beautiful, classical chinese beauty, long and straight hair, white face and red lip. But she is not the one I am going to talk about

After the piece is played, the composer stund up, he is the one who I always come across when I had my meals in lakeside. Apparently, we have the same habits of eating in the corner of the dining hall. Though we never conversed, we are familiar with each other in a silent way. He is such a talent!! he is such a great composer, even he is just 22, his work has been widely played by others.

also he has a warm heart. He volunteered to help children without privilege life to learn piano.  Listening to his music and reading his words, I truly can feel his warm and pure heart.

 

besides, linkedin notified me to check some updates from my friends. Going through linkedin is a very strange experience, because though the content people are showing may be too good to be true, but they are facts and truths. People are great~~ when I looked at myself, I don’t have the courage to change my linkedin profiles, because simply, I don’t have the contents!!

 

Now I need to make my life more interesting, not only by attending different things, or extracurricular stuff, but also in my professions, my creations and my truly real interest.

I hope I would succeed in making myself a better and interesting person to hang out.