While college is, by all means, a great institution with so many possibilities for both abstract learning and specialized training, I think that the adults in our lives would have done well to maybe put a few asterisks on all of that college-related screaming. Perhaps the advice to hedge our bets a little and not encourage Bradley McBroDude to take out a 40,000-a-year loan to major in communications at the second-lowest-ranked school in Florida just so he can have some solid plans on graduation day would have been smart, as now we’re essentially a generation who has bought mortgage-level debt with no actual house to live in, and often no jobs to support it.
It’s not about the big decision, are we going to work or are we going to have a family; it’s often about the little decisions like am I going to leave this meeting earlier to pick up my daughter from school, am I going to skip something in order to be present at something that matters to my child. And businesses need to acknowledge that, not just for mothers but increasingly for fathers.
You know, we just brought in, we just hired Lisa Belkin from the New York Times. She’s been writing a column there called Motherlode about parenting. And we are renaming the column Parentlode, because we want to acknowledge the fact that I work with many men with young children, and they’re also a big part increasingly of their children’s lives. And as a culture we need to acknowledge that. And when we acknowledge that, it’s going to be easier for women to be able to do the famous juggling act.
There’s a tremendous amount of redefining of success and happiness going on in the world, and I think we women are leading the way, because let’s face it, you know, men define success in a very unhealthy way, you know, working around the clock, having a heart attack in your fifties, and that’s the price you pay for the corner office, and we are saying no, we are going to do it differently. And as we are doing it differently, I think we are going to make a big difference for women who are following us.
I really believe that we women especially are so afraid of failing, that so often we don’t try new things, because the chances of failing are always there. And my mother always kept saying that failure is not the opposite of success, failure is a stepping stone to success. That was one of her favorite things to say.
I have a business partner who’s a man, who says it’s okay, our policy needs to be that it’s okay for a woman to cry at work but not about work.
Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.
— Tina Fey (via quotewhore)
Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.
— David Byrne (via quotewhore)
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
— Walt Disney (via quotewhore)
Stop looking for the meaning life. Your life has the meaning you have decided it has. There is nothing more. Many people are so busy chasing the extraordinary that they miss out on the beauty of the ordinary. The meaning your life has, the purposes you find to occupy your time are not divinely appointed. They are not destiny. Meaning is derived by the attention you give to the decisions you make each and every day. The quest for meaning is the result of so much unnecessary drama and angst.
— The Zen Humanist (via mangostreet)
(Source: zenhumanism, via mangostreet)
The two had been married for less than a year when Jurich founded SunRun. “We said, `Why don’t we approach our marriage like a portfolio? One of us will go really high risk and one of us will go safe,” she explains. Murray went into private equity so that his wife could start her own company.
There was a magnificence in the way she approached everything in her life. Especially her role as mother. She brought me up to believe that there was nothing I should be afraid to try while at the same time making it clear that she would love me not one iota less if I failed.
We rarely hear about the little acts of love that exist between partners, where there are no plot twists or last-minute obstacles. There are few films, few books about a woman who packs a lunch for her husband every morning and cuts the crust off his sandwich, or the man who works an extra job at night for two years so his boyfriend can attend law school, or the couple who lies in bed at night and asks each other how their day was and really listens. Sure, that might be a component of the story, but it is sure to be drowned out by the conflict and the thrill that we want to see. And there is nothing wrong with that, we like excitement. But sometimes it’s hard not to miss the attention paid to the little, unglamorous acts of love that make up a true partnership.
We have learned much about education since today’s schools were created. We know now that what students learn and what they are taught are different, and that learning is what matters. We know that children learn different subjects at different rates, some slower and some faster. We know that children have different learning styles, which make different methods of instruction more or less effective for them. We also know that today’s new technologies offer the prospect of individualizing education for each child and gearing instruction to the student’s particular learning style and most effective means of instruction. In the years to come, we will be challenged to rebuild our schools to reflect these realities, largely because our information economy, which focuses on achieving common outcomes rather than seeking common processes, demands it. Our schools will shift their attention from teaching to learning, time-based to outcome-based education, and mass instruction to individualized instruction.
The thing is that you can’t change people’s behavior with social media, but you can use social media to understand their behavior and to accelerate it,” Rosenblum says.
In this brave new world, the role of advertising agencies would change as well. Instead of being a pack of well-paid liars, ad agencies would act more like consultants, helping companies figure out how to fix their businesses and improve their brand reputation based on actual accomplishments.
Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.
