Sunday, March 16, 2014

Random thoughts and learning

Over the past year I have learned many important things I think are worth sharing.  Hopefully these tidbits will be worth something to others as well.

It takes exactly eight minutes to warm a bottle of homo (3.5%) milk.  Young parents have a whole new set of stresses to deal with but also a whole range of new assisting technology available too.  Automatic bottle warmers, network enabled video monitoring, and Internet help forums are only a few of the things I had wish I had twenty years ago. On the other hand, Internet bullies, social network predators, and infinite access to global information make guidance and parenting much more difficult.

School is overrated. When I entered my first round of post-secondary education nearly thirty years ago (*cringe*) the accepted and proven way to get ahead was to 1) get a degree, 2) get a good job with it and then 3) earn your way to the top through promotions in the classic way.  Boomers institutionalized that process, gen x accepted it, gen y rebelled against it and Millennials just bulldoze past it.  Today, the Internet and all its connected facilities make it possible for bright young entrepreneurs to bypass that old process.  They get an idea, then learn it, master it, and build a business out of it… often while they are still in high school.  The number of C-level executives in their twenties is impressive.  Note to Boomers and Gen X… the rules have changed.

It’s always a good day for a tutu. Seriously, life is too short to fill it with unfulfilling activities and stress.  Play.  Enjoy. Revel in life. Work does not have to be boring and oppressive. The most productive and successful people I know do not see their work as ‘work' at all.  When making a living is consuming your entire life, it is time for a change.

Power is shifting.  There is a global revolution going on through several fronts. The planet’s youth are all connected in spite of the establishment efforts to control communications.  The Internet cannot be contained – that ship has sailed, genie is out of the bottle.  Citizens in Beijing and London and Toronto and Kiev and Cape Town can share ideas, form alliances, and rebel in amazingly coordinated ways.  When companies do bad things they are no longer buried by corrupt media and governments.  The information is in the blogosphere within seconds and replicated instantly.  World governments, you no longer control the masses.   Individuals now have all the information, and information is power.

I’m only dancing.  Entire concepts of relationships have been shattered and re-imagined. You could put all kinds of labels on it but the fact is that labels are irrelevant to most of the twenty-something people I know.  They are much more focused on the concept of loving who you love and ignoring what the rest of the world wants to call it.  That level of free and open respect may take a while to catch on, but it is here and it is real.

The world is tiny and your friends are only a click away.  I thought I was progressive when I knew I had several on-line friends in other countries.  That is now old news.  Your teen aged children and a whole generation of ‘Millennials’ have friends all over the globe and don’t even know where they actually live.  Country borders are irrelevant and there is no real difference between on-line and off-line friends. 

Those are the highlights as I ramble out a stream of consciousness.  They may seem like random and disjointed thoughts but that is the other thing I have discovered… information happens in blobs, not streams.