Anyone can have a life changing idea

This video should be presented at every art, business, engineering and medical school.  It should be posted to every entrepreneur blog. For anyone who thinks that they are not 'good' or 'smart' enough to have the next great/transformative idea.  This brief talk pushes back and says: YOU CAN.  DO IT NOW!

News Porn

It seems to me that much of the growing antipathy in the nation is borne from irrational fear of anyone who disagrees with someone else's beliefs.  This applies to the fear of 'black thugs' by 'white people,' apostates by believers, conservatives by liberals, etc.  The fear ranges across all dimensions of needs and desires: life, health, wealth, liberty, security, family, lifestyle, power, heritage, etc.

I think if people were thinking rationally we wouldn't have this frenzied maelstrom.  But once triggered, an irrational response is immune from rational engagement.  I fear we now have hundreds of millions of people around the world caught in this irrational 'avalanche' racing towards some apocalypse.  Isn't that what caused the world wars, genocides, atrocities?

How do you reason with the unreasonable? Ideologues, bigots, idiots, ultra-partisans?  There are only a few of them and their numbers could be offset by the mostly sane.  But what if the media has the power to convert the sane into the insane?  Reasonable into unreasonable?  Exaggerating threats, impacts, causes, effects for profit or power; exploiting human tendencies to overreact, disproportionate response or simply intellectually lazy evaluation?

Is the media the difference?  Four TV channels and one newspaper attenuated the news to what could fit, sell advertising motivated by simple commerce and meet broadcast standards.  But now echo chambers have replaced journalism.

Are we teaching kids how to consume media?  We have restrictions on porn - is this 'news porn?'

Thinking about the JA Spark Career Fair

A note I sent to the CEO of EmployIndy regarding the JA Spark Career Fair planned for September, 2016.

I can’t help thinking that career clusters are (or will be) obsolete.

Who would have predicted IT for me when I graduated Purdue with an engineering degree?  But I took a test in high school that did predict I would be good at programming.  Maybe I was analytical.  Liked problem solving.  I also liked risk.  I could have joined the risk taking entrepreneur tech startup cluster if one existed J

Does EmployIndy do any kind of testing like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Interest_Inventory.  The modern version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes

I really liked this explanation of how people pick careers – and just how old the problem of finding a place for yourself in the world is.

In "The Holland Codes," a letter or code stands for a particular "type." Psychologist John L. Holland originally labeled his six types as: "motoric, intellectual, esthetic, supportive, persuasive, and conforming."^[2] He later developed and changed them to: Realistic (Doers), Investigative (Thinkers), Artistic (Creators), Social (Helpers), Enterprising (Persuaders), and Conventional (Organizers)."^[6] Professor John Johnson of Penn State suggested that an alternative way of categorizing the six types would be through ancient social roles: "hunters (Realistic), shamans (Investigative), artisans (Artistic), healers (Social), leaders (Enterprising), and lorekeepers (Conventional)."^[7]

I think the whole cluster idea is wrong – those are assemblies of jobs.  The jobs are what someone is interested in doing.  Maybe there should be leadership, inventing, making things, working outdoors, problem solving, stress averse, helping people, art.  You can be in construction but be in HR – more like a helper than a builder.  I also think it is naive to reduce the range of human interests into eight or so government/economic job clusters.  There are lots more type of jobs, there will be many that go away (say radiologists,) some you can’t predict will emerge (like app developer in 1975) and one-offs.