9 Things We Regret Not Doing in Our 20s Life is filled with regrets. Ask anyone around you what their regrets are and they usually have no difficulty coming up with many items on their “regret list.” And for some reason our twenties are ripe for a field of regrets. Perhaps it’s because as we get older we look back on that period of adulthood as the height of freedom and autonomy. As move into middle age, we look back and wish that we had made better choices and taken more opportunities. Traveling more – I regret not travelling more, and so does nearly everyone that I have asked. Investing early – How many times have we kicked ourselves for not starting our 401Ks in our twenties, for not putting our excess cash in long term investments, for not investing in our future early. Being more responsible with spending – In order to invest in our retirement or save for that down payment, we would have needed to make wiser financial spending choices. Life is good; don’t misunderstand.
Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of 'Expert' - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology The expert is dead! Long live the expert! Wikimedia Commons How do we judge whether a person knows what he or she is talking about? At least in part, we rely on a set of cues -- titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given -- that have long been bound up in the concept of "expertise". Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the hope that through its openness and its anonymity it could democratize the process of how knowledge gets built and organized. But, of course, this kind of collaboration doesn't itself imply the absence of expertise. So "experts" in the traditional sense (e.g. academic pedigrees) do still matter in this collaborative environment. They write (pdf): "We define an editor e's interest in a Wikipedia article a as the mean similarity between e's search queries and a ... This may be "intuitive" to those immersed in Wikipedia's pages, structure, and data, but it's a new and radically distilled understanding of expertise: An expert is someone who knows something.
For those who were wondering...the academic side of things: Fast Exercises To Find Your Purpose And Passion For Work Sunday night, crammed into an airplane seat, tired, with a headache banging through my forehead, I feel miles away from the topic I planned to write about this week: passion. But I’m going to give it a shot because I’m armed with reams of notes and if I can connect to my passion now, I can do it any time I want. Finding your passion is an essential ingredient of winning armies, companies, and individuals. How can you rapidly connect to your passion and purpose? Want It Carl von Clausewitz talked about the strategic power of passion and Sun Tzu underscored its importance as well. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term “flow,” describes it as “the feeling of total engagement in the activity so that you don't notice anything outside of what you're doing." Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, argues that entrepreneurs out of touch with their passion do things for “prestige.” Find It So, hopefully you want it now (I do!). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
Meltdown This next week and a half promises to be electrifying. We’re on the brink of an epic hurricane, a Presidential election, and either the most disappointing or the spookiest Halloween ever. But right now I’m going to talk about me, about MIT, and about why I haven’t talked to you in a month. Toward the end of September I became noticeably stressed out. “Cory,” I said to my boyfriend, “nobody loves me.” “Nonsense,” he replied, “I love you.” “I want to go home,” I said. Then I watched an episode of America’s Next Top Model and felt better. “Have I always been this crazy?” “Well,” he said, “you’ve always been a little crazy. That afternoon I went to S^3. I have a fantastic dean at S^3. The next week was my primary hell week of the term. After my final all-nighter I woke up to someone waddling down the alley below my window and swearing angrily. Friday evening I went to visit my high school friend Eric at Tufts. The people I met were beautiful. “Why don’t you transfer out?” And we didn’t.
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. What happened? Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. Thomas E.
India's elites have a ferocious sense of entitlement My office is located in an urban village in the heart of Delhi. Originally surrounded by fields where people grew crops, these areas now house apartment blocks and shopping malls. All that’s left of the old village is the cluster of houses in which many of the erstwhile residents live, and where a few small traders have set up offices and shops. Privilege looms large in the southern Indian city of Chennai. It was around 6 o’clock on a late summer day, not yet dusk. Then along came a large SUV, driven by a young and obviously wealthy man. This isn’t an unusual scene in India and it’s not about road rage. Let me tell you another story: my neighbour in the upper-middle-class area where I live is a man who owns luxury hotels. Who could study the rich? Where does this kind of behaviour come from? Who in India would have the temerity to study the rich? There haven’t, to my knowledge, been any such studies in our region of the world. The culture of taking Eating the children’s sweets
Why I Left Google — This Happened to Me ‘It takes courage to grow up and be who you really are.’ — e.e. cummings About 6 months ago, I decided to quit my very good job at Google to explore a different way to live life. I had a loose plan of how I wanted to spend my time, but the main reason I left was that I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but something inside of me was telling me I shouldn’t continue down the career path I was on. I felt strongly that it wasn’t getting me closer to where I wanted to be, though that destination was largely unknown, and I had to get off that road. Each month I stayed, I grew more anxious and, in turn, resentful. When people ask me what it was like to leave, I liken my experience of leaving Google to breaking up with my college boyfriend. When I sat down and really thought about why I was resisting, I realized something about myself that I didn’t like, something that I’m ashamed to even admit now. Oh, and, by the way, that chasing dream finally stopped.
21 Ways You Should Take Advantage Of Your 20s 1. Don’t feel the need to respond to every text message, phone call, and email the second it reaches you. Once upon a time, it took longer than a minute to reach someone. People used stamps and envelopes; they had answering machines they didn’t check for hours, sometimes days. No one will die if you don’t immediately respond to every message you receive. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. All information provided in this article is for reference purposes only. Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. John P. The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. 1.