Giving advice to others isn’t always about the other person. A big part of it is a way for you to see something inside yourself.

When a person is seeking guidance, you can only help them insofar as your own experience and the outcome you would want in their situation. There’s a lot of projection happening because of how you perceive the situation and how you would handle it.

There’s nothing wrong with offering, especially when someone asks, and it can actually be a great way to remind yourself of the things you need to do. In many ways, giving advice to others is really giving advice to yourself.

Where both of you can benefit is when the person is seeking feedback you hadn’t considered. It forces you to look at a situation from a different angle and stretches your mind to new places.

Just don’t be frustrated when the person doesn’t take to your advice right away. It’s more of an a-ha moment for you while they’re just trying to figure it out.

I spent more time in school, as a student, than I care to admit. Now, as a teacher and infoglot, this shouldn’t be something to look down upon and I certainly don’t denigrate anybody looking to get educated.

I loved every moment within my many years of education, even wishing there could’ve been a way to be a lifelong student (there is–you just need to marry someone rich).

However, learning happens outside of the classroom walls and a part of me feared leaving its familiarity for the unknown. It was an attempt to hide for as long as possible.

When the realization set in, it was time to break comfort zones and embark on adventures that would put me in touch with something else. I spent a lot of time volunteering for programs that assisted the most vulnerable and in need, while participating in events run by organizations seeking change.

My social circles expanded to get a taste of many different strata of society, becoming familiar with how they all work. It re-enforced my idea to be an educator, which was largely decided based on my passion for learning, as a way to expand horizons for future students. It isn’t necessarily to be a guide (my scope is limited), but to get them in touch with those who can guide and mentor.

Admitting to what I was hiding from is the moment I set myself free.

Anytime I feel a reluctance to venture out from my position, it could be an effort to hide something. The question is always what and the answer is to face it.

Every morning when I wake up, there’s a list of a thousand things to do running through my head. It divides itself with things I need to do, things I want to do, things that I’ve been putting off and back-burner projects I’d like to finish.

The problem is there’s enough in the “things I need to do” list that will last another lifetime or three. It can get overwhelming to the point where no matter how much I accomplished during the day, it never feels like enough.

With the never ending systems out there, many of which include motivational boosts to encourage task completion, the problem always feels like a mismanagement of time.

Yes, that can be the case, but mindset is an even bigger problem.

A thousand things cannot be done in a day.
They can barely be done in a year.

Being defined by level of “busy-ness” is also a meaningless trophy whose only prize is regret.

To ease into a mindset that feels less overwhelming, it pays to heed a lesson from Warren Buffet:

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”
He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

Take that level of thinking to life: if there were only 20 punches that could be made for an entire lifetime, what would they be?

The thousand things to do would suddenly shrink tremendously and adding any others would require some very careful deliberation.

Every time I get off track, I’m reminded of this lesson.

Studies have suggested using a pen and paper provides a different result than sitting down at a screen. The premise is a tactile object in your hands (the pen) lights up a different part of your brain, as you form each letter.

The argument is your memory and cognitive abilities for reading are better when you handwrite.

However, continued argument is works written by hand have more depth than those written with a keyboard. Handwriting forces you to slow down and flesh out your thoughts as you put together each letter.

In the world of notes and our memory, I will give way to the experts.

In the realm of producing depth (another way of saying “better”) work, a red light goes off in my head. The problem is not paper vs. digital, but the way writing is taught in both mediums.

When we teach to write by hand, we teach journaling, freewriting, offer prompts, workbooks and all sorts of activities to shut down the conscious mind. When we teach typing, we simply teach people how to type on a keyboard.

We do not apply the same rigor to the keyboard as we do to the pen.

Creativity requires a person to get out of their own way and trust their subconscious. This can happen on paper and the screen if one trains themselves to do so.

After all, pulp fiction writers (and prominent writers today), trust their subconscious enough to just sit down and let the words flow out. The medium by which they do it is the one most convenient to them. Some are still using typewriters, but it doesn’t follow using  a typewriter is the key to being a prolific writer.

Handwriting is fine (hell, I can still do cursive and shorthand), but don’t confuse nostalgia (or preference) with process.

The tool is not the key to creativity, just the conduit.

Is our schools and society have a way of killing our desire to do so.

The books we read in school eventually turn into study pieces, which are dissected and analyzed to the point where we create classrooms full of fake-readers. Pleasure reading is relegated to the side for those who still have that innate spark to get lost in a text, even though it may not be “real” literature.

It’s no secret, or surprise, I find issue with this approach and have been doing my best to mitigate it in my own classroom.

Could you imagine if we treated watching movies, or tv shows, the same way?

“We’re going to watch the first five minutes of the movie, then do a quiz with some questions to make sure you were paying attention. Tomorrow we’ll do another five minutes and another quiz.”

“You’re going to select one of the following shows and write an essay on one of the following topics…”

“Pay attention as you’re going to build a diorama of your favourite scene.”

Actually, it might not be a bad way to get people off their addiction to binge watching. Just make them write “chapter” questions and over analyze every move the director and actors made.

Then we age and for those who still read after their schooling, there is a pressure to read something pragmatic or recommended. Reading that cozy mystery for the sake of “just cause” seems out of the question.

Reading challenges that are meant to encourage people to pick up some books have a flaw built into them: they encourage volume over pleasure.

Even those who select a modest amount, say 12 (one per month), are consumed by getting to that number more than just enjoying the book in front of them. As someone who has used these challenges to encourage a higher volume of reading, I felt myself moving away from thicker books I would be interested in, which would take longer, to shorter books that would keep me on track to hit my target.

At its heart, the real problem with reading for pleasure is too many people are trying to tell you how to do it.

We need to revert back to our childhood instincts:

Ignore the latest bestseller, the hottest buzz, the recommended lists, the “you have to read this” crowd and the “that’s not real literature” crowd.

You can even ignore my book reviews as those are just my opinions based on my personal tastes–just like every other book reviewer. Nothing more.

Pick up a book.
Dive into it.
If you like it, keep reading.
If you don’t, put it down and grab another.
If you liked it, don’t feel ashamed.
If you hated it, don’t feel ashamed.
Grab another.

In the buzzing of a room, having a conversation with one person is incredibly difficult. It requires you to ignore the noise while focusing strictly on one voice.

However, your brain is hardwired to keep an ear out and will continuously register other noises in the vicinity. When a noise coming from elsewhere has something in it that will perk your interest, your current conversation dies.

The focus is gone.

This can be incredibly frustrating as anxiousness to listen elsewhere takes over. As the person doing the talking, it’s upsetting to watch the attention of someone in front of you float elsewhere.

However, if both parties are attuned to the vibe of the room, it presents an opportunity to move the conversation. The sharing of ideas is rarely done in a focused, static manner, but rather a dynamic, scattered form.

It also opens the floor to have others join in.

Just be aware that not everyone will bring something of value and too many people will make it impossible to continue.

The challenge of any creative field is getting your work exposed to the right audience. Frequently.

Mind you, before someone even considers getting to that point, they better have spent a great deal of time mastering their craft and building a volume of work. Without those two, no amount of exposure will be of any benefit.

Where many go wrong is confusing exposure with working for free because those two are very different from each other.

As a magician, I would offer my services for free a few times a year to causes I felt in tune with and where I was happy to do so. There was no monetary or publicity benefit to me on those gigs and I never advertized doing them.

Every year, however, I would get emails from students at the local college here asking if I would be willing to do a free gig for their major marketing assignment/event. There was always the promise of “tons of exposure” including “live tweeting the event” and other sorts of nonsense. It was always the same impersonal copy/paste email from the year before (name changed at the bottom).

My response was always no.

Why would I work for free (which is what they were asking) when I could book a gig identical in nature that paid my fee? After all, this wasn’t an audience of carefully curated people who book magicians on a daily basis. If that were the case, then I wouldn’t be working for free, I’d be auditioning for potential bookings.

That’s the difference between free and exposure.

Exposure is working for an audience who can actually impact your future. Sometimes there is no monetary exchange, but that isn’t always the case. Free is either somebody just trying to get something for nothing or believing in the cause enough to offer time and energy for it without the expectation of anything in return.

I had someone recently ask me to volunteer for an organization that I didn’t support in any way because “it would be good for my resume.” I had to refrain from laughing because this person had no idea what was even on my resume and didn’t consider volunteering for this organization would be a detriment if I put it on there.

Another person asked if I would be willing to give a talk at a conference, but they would be unable to pay. I agreed to this one because it’s a conference I was already interested in, allowed me to refine my current talks with updated insights and put me in front of other conference organizers.

Oddly enough, the way I found people get the most exposure is to spend inordinate amounts of time on their work while saying no to all requests outside of it. They don’t exist in a vacuum, but their field of vision is so narrow that it seems to attract everyone.

There’s nothing wrong working for exposure, or even working for free, provided it’s on your own terms and you understand the difference between the two.