Category Archives: The Ones Where I Try To Give Advice

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A Metaphor Concerning a Family Card Game

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Holidays at the Smith household are pretty amazing. We spend a lot of time playing the card game Uno.

That’s not completely accurate.

I spend a lot of time trying to convince my family that we should play Uno. I really like it. It’s a very simple game. It’s mostly about luck – what cards you draw and what cards others play. But I have a strategy.

My family doesn’t believe in the strategy, but the numbers speak for themselves. Over the past few days, I have won the most games (the numbers are even more striking when you don’t count Dad’s wins when he cheated and when we played by my brother’s “house rules”).

I don’t think that I’ve cracked Uno. That’s not very likely. Like I said, it’s mostly a game of luck. And I don’t think my strategy is ground-breaking. It’s just a plan. It does two things for me.

1. I always know how I’m going to play a hand. No matter the cards in my hand or the cards in my opponents’ hands, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I do all the thinking well before I ever pick up a card. It saves me from making mistakes during game play.

2. I never worry about what else is going on. Obviously, you can’t control the cards that your opponents get in Uno. But if you have a plan, any plan, then you are controlling all that you can. Therefore, there’s no reason to worry about what else is going on; you can just play.

That’s what a good strategy does. It gives you a plan, and it frees you from worry.

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A Life-Changing Incomplete Thought

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What if we woke up one day and someone told us that all of the stuff we were doing in preparation for that really important life-changing thing was the really important life-changing thing?

That’s a little confusing.

Let me put it another way.

You might be busy building a social media platform, training for a marathon, dating in an attempt to find a life-partner, getting a degree for a job, starting a business, or starting a movement. Currently, I have a couple of things like that on my plate. I am trying to get a degree. I am starting a student organization on campus. I am trying to build a platform as a blogger. And it’s hard. And a lot of time, I think my real effect on the world will happen when I have my degree, when my student org is running by itself, and when I have over a thousand people following my blog.

There’s a really great war novel I once read where these soldiers are training for war by using video games, but you find out in the end that the video games were the war.

That’s how life works. The life-changing part happens while we are trying to get to the part we think is going to be life-changing.

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Commit

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I like to take time to figure out my life. I do so every once in a while. That’s part of the reason my posts were absent in the last week.

But. Taking time to figure out my life basically never results in figuring out my life.

What it actually results in is me watching insane amounts of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix, eating leftover pizza, and staying up much too late.

My incessant need to figure out my life presupposes the assumption that there exists some group of people who have figured out their lives. That’s a false assumption. So every minute, every hour, every day I waste “figuring out my life,” I could be spending doing life.

I do a lot of talking. I like to think that I’m also the type of person who does a lot of doing. But I want to get better about it. I’m always thinking about how the things I’m thinking about doing relate to my career goals and my long-term visions for my life. That’s useless. I have no idea. Three years ago I thought I was going to be spending my next eight years in higher education, getting a PhD. Today, I am writing this post on break of an internship at a charter school in Columbus.

We can always change roads. It’s always an option. But while we are on the road we are on, let’s go somewhere, let’s do something, let’s leave a legacy. Or, you know, we could just sit on the side of the road, watch How I Met Your Mother and wonder what we should do with our lives.