Hi, folks! It’s Monday, the day I usually post some installment of my therapeutic memoir project. I also have some final drafting and some original drafting…and some trying to understand what the assignment was and how to do for my final paper for some class.
First thought was, well, my newsletter is such a low earning endeavor, why not just skip it?
My second thought was, what about throwing a stone at two different birds? That way if I fail another class for failing to keep my trauma responses in check, at least I’ll have created content. It worked for the last project, a video, in which I never quite got the hang of understanding or analyzing “go-go Porter Forces! Those five generic Porter Strategies!” But I had a great time editing a video with very silly jokes and talking about pop culture.
The more I go over the work I’ve been doing on and off for a few weeks, and neglected to panic over other projects for other classes—you know like we all do, no matter how faithfully we vow not to—the less I understand what I was supposed to do, what I was trying to do and what I’m going to do.
Except when I woke up and had a great idea.
I wish I could remember an instance in high school when I doubled or tripled up on a project, finding ways to apply the same work to multiple classes. I know my sister did it at least once, in which she was able to apply something to three different subjects. It wasn’t a mere copy-paste, but rather a deliberately interdisciplinary synthesis, before we even know that was Jared Diamond’s whole brand.
Unstructured Qualitative Data
There are three relevant anecdotal segments, which I would use meaningfully in, say, the kind of self-help and how-to-succeed-in-business sub-genre of bestseller. Following in the vein of How to Win Friend and Influence People or Bringing up the Boss.
This is the most similar to my actual work of memoir and newsletter writing, the only work that I can do skillfully, enjoy doing, and also earn money doing while avoiding the danger of stairways.
First, my best friends and mentors when I was in college. They were the first ever guidance I had in my later career of education and childcare. They managed several non-profit and volunteer organizations, including sports camp for the children and youth of our urban neighborhood, an art and music coffee house outreach, tutoring enrichment for the kids in our church—of course we were church people—and this was all while they had day jobs and kids. I was under their tutelage for about three years while I was in college.
The top factor in their success was having a supportive, meaningful relationship with me and everyone else they managed both in business and volunteer work. From this they were able to achieve the second factor of employee development. By knowing all of us well, they were able to recognize and encourage our strengths. They were aware of the many things I couldn’t do, like properly communicate with other people, and once it was established that I knew what my shortcomings were in performing my duties, they focused on being emotionally supportive and did not often remind me of the many ways I needed to improve. This is in contrast to my many unsuccessful management situations, which only even communicated my inadequacies, usually as publicly as possible. By being supported and extended grace in my failures, I felt safe enough to make the effort to improve, and I did improve. In later jobs, when I was under constant pressure and threats of the consequences of being inadequate, I got worse and more panicked until I was eventually fired from dozens and dozens of jobs, many of which went out of business shortly thereafter.
Finally, my friends did the important management task of networking and placement. Understanding that I was unable to navigate the social aspect of finding work, whereas they had a good sense of how to connect people according to needs and skills, they helped me get my resort managing job.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Insteaducation (aka Occident Oriented News) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.