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Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier
-Albert Schweitzer

And now time to define:

self·ish /ˈsɛlfɪʃ/
–adjective
1. devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one’s own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.
2. characterized by or manifesting concern or care only for oneself: selfish motives.

selfish - Definitions from Dictionary.com

self·less /ˈsɛlflɪs/
–adjective
having little or no concern for oneself, esp. with regard to fame, position, money, etc.; unselfish.

selfless - Definitions from Dictionary.com

Lets take moment to look at both of these definitions. Neither seems particularly great. Both ignore a integral part of the equation, either yourself or everyone else. I’m going to take a moment to redefine and explain myself, but first I’d like to share what I’ve said before on this topic.

As a post-grad wanderer you are stuck negotiating for jobs, fruit, friends, relationships, and your own sanity. You spent all this time getting to know yourself, so be a bit selfish. Compromise doesn’t mean that you don’t get what you want, just that everyone involved gets something.

Getting to yes, negotiation is more than a courtroom skill.

To look at this from a selfish angle, people can and will enhance you. Interact and learn from everything around you. Feed yourself.

Generational babel

Now, depending on how you look at it, thinking about nothing is a very selfish act. You are putting your non-thought, your personal resources, into doing nothing, except maybe consuming a commercial. This is selfish.

Putting yourself first. [discovering your social core]

You must put yourself first, alongside others. Put yourself first and get to know yourself, take some time away.

Putting yourself first. [discovering your social core]

The journey toward a core interpersonal discovery:
Putting yourself first, with another.
Putting yourself first, alongside others.
Putting yourself first, alongside everything.
Being first and selfish (in a good way) because of and with everything and recognizing it.

Putting yourself first. [discovering your social core]

Take the two definitions that we began with and blend them together.

devoted to or caring for oneself, without regard to fame, position, money, etc., concerned with interests not only your own.

What can we call this? Above, in the quotes, I sometimes use the words selfish and selfless in their traditional forms. Other times, I’m using the mashed up definition directly above to describe what I think the potential of selfishness is.

Live to learn. Work to live. Live for others selfishly.

This entry is coming from an interesting experience I had yesterday. Shedding light on my cultural background and growth I realized that your environment can really influence impulses. I found myself wondering why I picked oranges over minorities.

I’d just enjoyed some nice gulps of water, post workout. I was waiting for my fair weather friend to change. I say fair weather because she ditched driving me home because the roads were getting poor and I was left to wait for a fair weather bus that was a cycle late. I digress. While waiting, I looked at a photo representing the writing/academic center for the campus I work on. I noticed something peculiar. What do you notice?

I saw oranges. I was so tickled by my discovery that I asked the same question of miss fair weather. Turns out everyone is white in the photo, this being what she noticed. Stumped, I asked her to look harder. By time the oranges were of mutual discovery, she was antsy to leave and I was fumbling for my own explanation of our differing perspectives.

Was it that I came from a college with beyond Caucasian diversity around 15% (not to mention other missing groups)? Was it that I don’t remember seeing much color in my suburban environment? Why did I choose oranges over minorities?

It hit me though, in one of those I got it before but now I really understand it kind of ways, that our life experiences are unique. Not only unique, but they are the molders of how you see the world. It was important to realize that all the education in the world hadn’t taught me to see, instead I was blind. We will see things differently, all of us. Your boss or supervisor that just doesn’t seem to make sense, probably isn’t doing it on purpose. This experiential intelligence is hard to measure because it has as much to do with how much you experience as it does with the quality and variety of an experience. In the work setting, the ability to recognize this is the biggest step in being able to manage up (7 ways to manage up or Managing Up: An Overlooked Factor in Career Success). In your personal life it can help relationships grow and drama dwindle.

Can we challenge ourselves to see things differently? If you saw white people, begin looking for the oranges, and vice versa. I think too often we find ourselves in conversations where we are more concerned about the other person not seeing the oranges that you did. Instead, why not notice that they saw something different and wonder why you didn’t see it at all.

Life is one big learning opportunity. If you aren’t listening you might just always end up with a bunch of white people or oranges for that matter.

I spent most of last week in Seattle, which is why my posts were so sparse. I was there for both a conference on experiential education and some personal meddling. My significant-other, Gregg, had taken the initiative a few months earlier to begin co-coordinating our conferences. We had one methodology, decide on a city first then conference second. Which of course we mixed up priorities. Then this is where he and I are different. Conference search, for me, meant days online looking at all the options possible. Cities first, then maybe find time to see what conferences were there. Plus I had some ideal, that nagged me during the search, that this was an opportunity to find a conference that had topics that I was really into (I scraped our strategy basically to look for the most perfect option) I’m exhausted all over again just thinking about it, aren’t you? As my list grew, Gregg’s list got smaller and he really was only considering the city because he thought, if someone else is paying why be so concerned. You can start to see a trend.

It might begin to look like I’m heading down the road of dissing the “open-minded-free-spirited” bunch but I am in fact pinning the tail on a much larger donkey. This post is for all of us and all those times when we find that “going with the flow” is really a guise for being indecisive. This causes tension in most everyone because being completely narrow-minded or open-minded isn’t really ideal, yet our society rewards making the most perfect “right” decision but only after being open minded enough to consider every option. We are destined to fail, how can we be both at the same time?

Through my whole process of looking, looking, looking, I exemplified my tendency to wander. While I was looking, Gregg forced us to make some decisions on his ever shortening list. In the end, my tactic led nowhere. City first, conference second had us removing more options from his list. We were left with one, Seattle, which was on both of our lists since the beginning (a slap in the face). Plus the conference was applicable to both of our work positions. I grumbled at the decision.

Part three of all of this was the beginning phases of looking at graduate programs. I thought, wouldn’t it have been better to have chosen an area with more college options? Quite the opposite was true, at least for me. Since the Seattle area didn’t have the plethora of options of say Boston, I was able to satiate my desire to look at all of them. I ended up visiting all applicable programs offered in my broad areas of interest at each of of the institutions.

There is a growing lesson from this. I could over analyze this whole ordeal but I’ll keep the lesson simple. Settle more often. Settling for Seattle led me to find the first graduate program that seemed to take into account all my interests, plus the institution is highly rated. I discovered an article in Psychology Today while in the beautiful Seattle library, just as I was wrapping my own head around this conclusion. Click here and check it out!

Here are some tips they suggest:

How to Make Options Your Allies

You can outfox your evolved emotional makeup.

* God is not in the details: Practice making decisions quickly about small things and routine purchases. Limit the time you spend comparing specs. Build confidence in your “gut” by attending to it.
* Don’t dwell: Refuse to spend too much time regretting a decision or blaming yourself for a poor outcome. Instead learn from your mistakes and determine to do better.
* Keep your expectations realistic: Needing it all is guaranteed to make you unhappy.
* Risk a wrong decision: Fight emotional paralysis by seeing that even making the “wrong” choice is often better than making no choice at all; you still learn through trial and error. It is better to blunder your way through life than to avoid making decisions.
* Don’t look back: Engineer your decisions so that they are binding and irreversible: Force yourself to buy final sale items or draw up a contract with family or friends stating that you will not reverse course on a larger decision.

This whole topic relates right back to a previous entry about focusing your options, specifically regarding those close to you. It seems like although settling has a negative connotation we must settle and focus in order to actually have time to experience something. Play to your evolutionary strong points and keep it simple stupid.