I couldn’t resist.

It’s only my second post, and there I go busting out the your mom jokes in the title already.  But in all seriousness, your mom actually has a lot to do with what I’m about to say, because the odds are good that A) She is one of the reasons I’m writing this, B) She will not like this post, and C) She will not like any ideas that you may take away from it.  (Although, to be fair, when you were 8 and you told her you didn’t like her spinach casserole, both your opinion and any hopes you had for a democratic vote were promptly dismissed. ) Allow me to explain.

Why The Stack of Papers On Your Desk Is Your Mom’s Fault

Growing up, your mom probably told you to respect your elders, avoid talking to strangers, wash your hands before dinner, and stop taking her red lipstick and squishing it between your toes, one at a time.  (Maybe that was just me.) Usually, you listened.  You might have indulged in one last guilty tube of sweet, sweet Maybelline pleasure before all was said and done, but eventually you listened.  Why?  Because mother knows best.

Years later, mother also knew best when it was time for you to start applying to college (Do you want to work at McDonald’s for the rest of your life?  I didn’t think so.  Now, dear, which campuses do you want to visit first?), she knew best when you were up against the wall to finally declare your major (What are you going to do with a degree in Anthropology?  Better to pick something more practical, and travel to all those “foreign places” once you’re established and settled and are financially comfortable), she knew best when the job offers started rolling in (Everyone’s the low man on the totem pole at some point.  All of your hard work will pay off in the end, if you just put in the time), and she knew best last week when you felt your first pangs of job dissatisfaction, the all-too-familiar manifestation of the mundane, soul-sucking routine affectionately referred to as the daily grind (Welcome to the real world, honey.)

Well, I’ve got news.

Your mom didn’t know best.  As a matter of fact, your mom’s advice sucked.

Social Conditioning, A Toothless Neighbor, Long Walks On The Beach, and How The Three Relate

Calm down, calm down.  No one’s saying that your mom is some evil force of nature.  (Although, I wouldn’t rule it out completely.) Your mom is simply an unsuspecting victim of the phenomenon called social conditioning.  Or, as I like to call it, The Unconscious Removal of Your Every Brain Cell Process.  Social conditioning works in tricky ways.  Defined by one of modern day’s most reliable sources, Wikipedia, social conditioning is “something that homogenizes a large amount of people into a certain distinctive mold and if you don’t know what homogenizes means, go look it up at dictionary.com.”  Okay, so I may have added that last part.  In simple terms, it basically means letting others boss you around, without you even knowing it.

Let’s take the following example to illustrate.  Imagine your real-life neighbor to the right of you, whoever s/he may be.  Preferably, s/he wears flannel shirts, is missing several incisors, swears at the lawnmower with a lit cigarette dangling from the right side of his/her mouth, has a pitbull named Spike and enjoys long walks on the beach.  If you don’t have this incredible fortune, do not fret.  Any old neighbor will work just fine.  Now, imagine that your neighbor comes over one day, knocks on your door, interrupts you in the middle of a steamy sweat session with your other neighbor’s spouse (damn, caught red-handed), and thrusts a checklist of demands to be met in your flushed little face.  On it are the following:

1) Trade-in your Honda for a new Acura.  Acuras are better and, by extension, you will be better.

2) Have a kid already.  I’m tired of looking at your vacant lawn.  It needs a swingset.

3) Don’t start coming home from work everyday until at least 7 or 8pm, you lazy underachiever.  You only get to relax at home are two days a week, Saturday and Sunday, after you’ve finished any take home work that you have.  Idiot.

4) Buy me a dog.  Because I say so.

5) Stop being such a tool.  You suck.

What would you say to your neighbor?  Probably something along the lines of “Go to hell, you (insert expletive!) You’d slam the door, be in a state of utter shock for a moment, laugh hysterically for hours, and then be the proud new owner of a long-standing, inside joke with your other neighbor’s spouse that you have now affectionately nicknamed “underachiever.”  (And maybe ponder moving to another neighborhood.)

While that might seem ridiculous, in reality, this is nearly identical to what happens to you on a daily basis, but on a much larger scale. Instead of it just being your neighbor, making ludicrous demands, it’s actually millions of people all at the same time.  But instead of telling you directly, they tell you indirectly through setting example, forming judgments, showing approval and disapproval, and instituting a plethora of social consequences.  And for the icing on the cake, instead of instantaneously performing high-powered ninja moves on the offenders at hand–as we might likely do to our neighbor–we actually listen to them.  We turn around and say, Sure, skippy, I’ll get right on it!  I might have to put myself in debt, never quite feel satisfied with myself and let a piece of my soul die each and every pain-filled day in order to fulfill your requests, but hey, if that’s what I’m suppose to do, then I guess I’ll just do it. . . what other choice do I have?

Getting Respect Without Getting your Ph.D.

We’re all guilty of it.  For years, I thought that the only way I could command more respect from the world was to pursue higher degrees of education.  Titles = authority.  Authority = power.  Power = respect.  Respect = Affirmation that society is pleased with the decisions you’ve made.  In turn, you’re now pleased with the decisions you’ve made.  You can feel good about yourself now.  Good job.  *Pat on the back followed by sigh of relief*

That was all good and nice, until I more recently discovered something else.

By pure and utter accident, I suddenly discovered a new way to command the respect of others, without jumping through all those hoops.  This new type of respect doesn’t come from conforming to what the flannel-wearing neighbors of the world want you do do.  Au contraire, sir and madamoiselle, this type of respect is garnered from, ironically, doing the exact opposite. That’s right.  The exact opposite.  Middle of the road?  Nope, loserville.  But exact opposite?  Rockstar.

Let me give you an example.

I used to sell advertising for an international, multi-billion dollar magazine.  I won’t be modest; I was awesome at it.  My natural ability to talk to anyone and make that anyone feel like someone within a span of 4.5 to 6.7 seconds served me, and my sales numbers, rather well.  My clients loved me, and I was getting contracts signed like a little banshee.  So what was the problem?  I got bored.  Not only did I get bored, I was dreadfully bored. I started feeling like every day I spent making someone else a bunch of money (and me only seeing a small percentage of it), I was another day dumber.  By that, I mean I was giving up yet another day of learning or experiencing something new in exchange.  I started to feel stagnant.  I wasn’t improving upon myself (my BS skills, maybe), and I felt the lack.  There was a real opportunity cost at stake.

So what did I do?  Just as any sane person would do, I quit.  Immediately.

In an effort to put myself back on the learning/growing/self-improvement track, I decided to go back to school, but in order to do so, I’d not only have to give up my income, but I’d have to take out a sizable amount of student loans.  And I was all for it.

Everyone thought I was crazy.  Why don’t you at least keep your job part-time, they’d say?

My response?  No.  I don’t enjoy it anymore. And that was that.  Instead, I did a little research, and finagled my way into a graduate assistant position on campus.  I reasoned that this would not only pay for my schooling and provide me with a nice little stipend, but it would also allow me to segue back into the world of academia quite nicely.  And that’s exactly what I did.

A few weeks later, I had an even better idea.  Why not take out some additional student loans, save what I can, and spend the summer in Chile?  Travel is, in my opinion, the best form of education available, so taking a little extra in a loan for the explicit purpose of facilitating my travel seemed perfectly logical.  And that’s exactly what I did.

Meanwhile, everyone else wasn’t sure if they thought I was crazy, or if I was genius.  You shouldn’t take more student loans, Ashley!  You have to pay this stuff back, you know.

My response to that: What are you doing this summer?

Usually, the answer involved part-time work at a restaurant, and one or two weekends at Ocean City, New Jersey.  This was all of the knowledge I needed to justify my decision.  By the time I returned home from my summer in Chile, I had hiked the Andes Mountains, sipped whiskey off of floating glaciers in Patagonia, frolicked in wine vineyards, hung out at Pablo Neruda’s house, taught English in a Chilean university, taught English in a Chilean high school, sampled new varieties of alcoholic beverages, improved my Spanish, met people from Brazil, England, Uruguay, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Australia, Argentina, Colombia, Sweden, Holland, Canada and people from all over the United States, lived in a hostel, made out with the front desk guy at the hostel, lived with a host family, did NOT make out with anyone in the host family, learned to dance Cueca, became a pro at using public transportation, ate lots and lots of animal intestines, discovered I liked eating lots and lots of animal intestines, acquired a Chilean boyfriend (separate from the front desk guy), later acquired a different Chilean boyfriend thus forcing me to learn to break up with the first one in Spanish (interesting), made a ton of lifelong friends and memories, learned about another culture, and, oh, did I mention being able to put “worked for United Nations & Chilean Ministry of Education” on my resume?  After all was said and done, all of those experiences plus the added bonus at no extra charge of world view and intercultural competence cost me approximately $3,000, with $1,000 of it being my plane ticket.  It could have been done much cheaper, as well.  Would you say that those things were worth it?  I certainly would. Perhaps the most common statement that I hear from others is, “I’d love to travel, but I don’t have the money.”  While that may seem to be the case, it actually isn’t.  Rather, it’s a case of spending the money that you do have on other priorities.  To put this in perspective, if you were to give up your daily Starbucks habit at an average of $4/day, for just a year, you’d already have more than 1/3 of the money for that trip, for a total of $1040.  Ask yourself where else can you easily cut back for the remaining 2/3, and then implement it immediately.

The point here is not to brag.  The point is to illustrate how being creative–and doing things a bit unconventionally–can pay off exponentially. This, in sum, is the principle of the increasingly popular concept of lifestyle design.  Lifestyle design is a new art form, in a sense, that has hit the ground running.  As the name implies, it means to design your life, but more accurately it means questioning and challenging the standard work-life template of nine-to-five misery–and all the rest of the goodies that come with it–that the effects of social conditioning (AKA your mom) have imposed upon us all.  Lifestyle design begs the question: Isn’t there a better way? (There is.)

Lifestyle Design & Why This Should Matter to You

I predict that with principles of lifestyle design in conjunction with Gen Y putting these principles to use, the land of nine-to-five will soon have seen its hey-day, business suits will become as antiquated as top hats and men’s wigs, and many a dry cleaner will be forced to close their doors.

Already, we’re seeing a whole new breed of entrepreneur spring up among us.  These are people who are thinking intelligently, and with deliberation, about how it is they wish to spend their time each day.  For these new entrepreneurs, money no longer becomes the number one end goal, but time and mobility become two equally important decision-basing factors.  What this points to is a drastic shift in the line of thinking: Quality of life versus quantity of life.  When adding in the components of free time and mobility to the compensation package, we see how new entrepreneurs consistently come out ahead.  In the legendary book by Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week, Ferriss discusses this concept and breaks it down into a distinction between absolute versus relative income:

“Absolute income is measured using one holy and inalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar.  Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year and is thus twice as rich as John Doe, who makes $50,000 per year.  Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. The whole “per year” concept is arbitrary and makes it easy to trick yourself. Let’s look at the real trade. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income, John is four times richer.”

This is a very valid point worth some serious consideration.  It’s about building a business around your life, instead of the reverse.  It’s about living in the present, instead of planning to enjoy the future 45 years down the road once you retire.  It’s about examining your life and your goals, and figuring out a way to make them possible now, not later. It’s about living a life that’s truly aligned with your values, opposed to spending the majority of your time doing things that are important to other people, instead of important to you, and it’s about looking for something you’re passionate about, and then looking for a way to make a living out of it.

Are you living your dream life, or are you barely surviving your daily routine?

If the answer points to the latter, I’d encourage you to do the following:

1) Sit down.  Make a list of the top three things you do with the majority of your time.  Is it sitting in an office?  Dealing with customer complaints?  Suffering through useless meetings?  Daydreaming out the window?  Kissing other people’s butts?  Making some pompous idiot coffee?

2) Stay seated, you antsy little future entrepreneur, you.  Now make a list of the top three things you wish you were doing with your time.  Be realistic.  For me, this includes travel, reading and writing.

3) Compare and contrast the two lists.  Is there any overlap?  If so, great.  Capitalize on it, and see how you can create even more overlap.  If not, think critically about what you’d need to do to transition from spending your time doing list number one, to spending your time doing list number two.  A lot of times, it’s not as complicated as people make it, but it’s an issue of fear of the unknown.  And if fear is an paralyzing factor, ask yourself what’s the worst that could happen?  The majority of the time, if something doesn’t turn out the way you planned, you can always go back to what you were doing before, content in knowing that, at the very least, you didn’t sell yourself short by not giving something a chance.

You don’t have to do anything drastic, but it’s about taking small, deliberate steps toward living a life you want to live, versus living a life you think you should live.  So, no offense mom, but when it comes to that, you’re the one who knows best.

Are there any of you out there who took the leap, and couldn’t be happier you did?  Share your story!  Did the opposite happen to you?  Share that too!

Disclaimer: Under no circumstances should the name Skippy, as used within the context of this article, ever be uttered from your lips in real life, or risk getting punched in the face immediately by any and all bystanders.

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