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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Any advice for a regular smart 27 year old youngster, who has chronically underachieved and is motivated to turn their life around. They have a couple years of JC completed, and has no idea what path to take, or really what paths exist.

EDIT: OK, I see I gave slim pickins here. It's not me, it's my neighbor's kid. I've known his parents since before he was born. He's a super smart kid, but like a lot of smart kids, he got kind of jaded about...well, everything. I was visiting the other day and he asked me for advice, and my retired ass has nothing. Any relevant personal experience I may have, became dated years ago.

He's good at just about all subjects. His longest lifelong hobby has been video games. He took a few programming classes and liked it, but the thought of doing it full time as a career would quickly become torture.

He's kind of half-assed things and just realized he needs to get his shit straight. He was thinking something like finance, just numbers. Something solid that's just a career direction. He is going back to school, well most likely he is, but he needs an idea of what path to take. Most of his friends are unemployed/underemployed with computer degrees.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The single most-important thing you CAN do, is understand yourself as profoundly as you can.

Read John Truby's book "The Anatomy of Genres", which is on the 14 story-genres that we form our own meanings of.

He's got a few details wrong

( like mistaking the Wild West village for what Village-archetype is, when real Village-archetype is the Tribal Mother Village,

and he misunderstands humor, as well, believing that the US-culture "drop" ( related to put-down ) is the core of humor, but the entire category of creative-misinterpretation is humor that isn't dependent on "the drop".

Hofstadter, in his "Godel Escher Bach" book, identified that the real shape of humor is the moebius strip: a strange loop.

You walk around in a "circle", and .. discover you're now somehow upside-down??

Surprised-by-improbability, would be near-the-heart of it.

Anyways )

Truby's book is CRAMMED with psychology insights into our forming, our growing-up, etc.

I'd require it of all high-schoolers, planetwide, for their HS diploma:

simply by making people encounter considering how they're forming the meaning that they, themselves, are, would lever humanity up into much greater global understanding/competence, though it'd take a generation or 2 for the effects to become visible...


Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" & Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" are both important, too, because if you know that some of the dimensions of culture they identify work a particular way for you ( ie doesn't-work or you-need-this ), then suddenly, that spotlights something in your nature that has harmony in a specific subset of cultures, and shows you why that is doing this, in you..

( libraries exist: you don't need to buy those, but the Truby books, you'll probably fill with notes.. )

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