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Friday, November 30, 2001
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 Friday, November 30, 2001
started 11/30/2001; 3:08:30 AM - last post 11/30/2001; 1:39:53 PM
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Doc Searls - Friday, November 30, 2001 
11/30/2001; 7:08:30 AM (reads: 5148, responses: 5)
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@Risk 
Peace, George
| | THE BEARER OF THIS PASSPORT HAS TAKEN THE FOLLOWING PLEDGE: |
| | - I shall love all.
- I wholeheartedly pledge to respect anyone's religion, nationality, faith, culture, language, etc...
- Never shall I cross a border to conquer or impose an ideology.
- In no way will I take part or interfere in government politics, but will assist in every way possible to bring about better understanding without creating any conflict.
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| | By coincidence, this petition from the AFSC also came to my attention this morning. Check it out. (By the way, money donated to AFSC tends to get where it's supposed to go, which is nice.) |
| | And if you're wondering how my pacifist sympathies line up with George, Eric and David (we'll leave Paul, John and Ringo out of this), it's that I think peace gives us more world to uncover and more gods to poke fun at along the way. |
Truthrolling
| | David Weinberger, who was not only a fellow philosophy major but went and got his Ph.D. in the subject and even taught it to college students, has a very thoughtful addition to the conversation about Truth that Mike Sanders launched yesterday. My fave line: |
| | Truth is a way of uncovering the world. |
| | If you can't stand it when I make fun of your god — then I think you're misunderstanding my greatest truth. |
| | Then head over to Tom's blog for more. And then back to Mike's blog, where he seems to be staying on top of this whole thing. |
Shucks
| | So I go over to Scoble's blog and read about his sojourn to Seattle, and how he's fooling around in Bellevue on a T1, courtesy of Microsoft, and somehow connecting that to a study on sex and how he's not getting any while he's on the road, and I'm thinking this guy's good, and then there's this subhead: "Someday I'll be as good as Doc." |
| | And I'm thinking, like, what? He's saying that I'm "talented" and have "time." Jeez. |
| | This is all so weird to me. I don't think I heard a meaningful compliment from a teacher until I was a junior in high school and Pastor Schmidt said something nice in English class about something funny I wrote. I think the next kind remark came when I was a junior in college. Every year I had about the lowest GPAs you could get and still move on to the next grade. I got my New York State Regents Diploma (a state high school diploma you get for passing tests for each class) by taking a special test that I passed by one point. I was late for my graduation because I didn't know until the last minute if I'd passed. My SATs were also the lowest in my whole social network, by a huge margin. I'm still embarrased to say how bad they were. At the end of my freshman year in college I had the lowest GPA you could have, to a hundredth of a point, and still come back as a sophomore. And I did it again the next year. I don't think I ever got better than a C in a class other than Art or Music or Gym until my junior year in college. That was when I became a philosophy major and discovered my talent as a bullshit artist. I even made the dean's list one semester. Couldn't believe it. |
| | Bullshitting served me well in advertising, PR and marketing, which is mostly what I did when I wasn't a journalist through most of the last thirty years. Oh, somewhere in there I told jokes on the radio. I didn't get paid for that, though I did get paid for selling advertising — and fired when I couldn't sell enough (though I kept telling the jokes for free on the same station, which tells you something). Now here I am. Draw your own conclusions. |
| | Anyway, Scoble, dude: you're great. Nobody Scobleizes better. Keep it up. |
| | (By the way, all that took twenty-one minutes. I've got nine more budgeted for the day.) |
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Patrick Connors - Re: Friday, November 30, 2001
11/30/2001; 2:06:18 PM (reads: 510, responses: 4)
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So what's your point? I did worse than you in formal education by a long stretch, until I discovered that the universe doesn't care about your degree. Lots of people do, but the universe doesn't.
Just go out there and do your thing. Get seen, and get good (or even Good Enough), and the recognition will follow. I was startled recently by being referred to as 'the professional musician' in a room where I wasn't the best singer or player by a long stretch.
Just go do your thing. You already know that, but we all need reminded from time to time.
Keep up the good work, and thanks.
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Doc Searls - Re: Friday, November 30, 2001
11/30/2001; 4:32:29 PM (reads: 606, responses: 1)
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It isn't just the universe that doesn't care about formal degrees. Employers don't, either. Nor friends. Nor lovers. Nor kids.
But I kinda knew that going in, which is one reason I knew it was okay for me to suck for so many years at being a cog in the mill we call school.
My point, I think (lemme check and see if I had one...), is that I'm still surprised to find myself referred to in flattering terms, especially for just being myself and doing what I do. I guess I saw myself being set up as some kind of high standard when there is so much in my ample history to make that ironic.
But yes, it is good to be reminded every once in awhile. Being ourselves is what we're all best at. The constsant challenge is to become better at that. Which is what I want Scoble (and everybody) to do.
Took me a long time to learn that one. This blogging thing is still teaching me, in fact.
John Taylor Gatto, the great schoolteacher and scourge of compulsory schooling, says the purpose of education is not additive — to fill the kid's head with curricular content — but subtractive: to "remove everything that prevents a child's inherent genius from gathering itself." I love that line.
By the way, the one thing I regret about my formative years isn't that I sucked at school, but that I never became a musician. So you have my envy and admiration on that one.
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Patrick Connors - Re: Friday, November 30, 2001
11/30/2001; 5:39:53 PM (reads: 661, responses: 0)
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So go learn! I didn't become a musician myself until I was in my mid-thirties.
There's always, always time to learn. There may not always be time to reflect on what you learn, but as long as the mind is capable, we can learn right up until the moment we die. It's one of the great things about being human.
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