Advice

Cynicism Is Not a Strategy

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It's easy to be cynical – as I'm quite aware.  The economy is tough.  Industries are changing.  Society is altering.  There will probably be another "Transformers" movie.

It's easy to be cynical all the time.  It's fashionable, cool, and makes you look all deep and mature.

Cynicism also doesn't solve a damn thing.  You can be as worried as you want about the career economy, you can be fashionably cynical or really cynical, but here's the basic painful truth:

Cynicism is NOT a strategy.

Being cynical won't solve a problem.  It doesn't make things work better. It doesn't do anything.  At best it can be a shield or an indicator of problems – and that's it.  An alarm doesn't put out the fire, a shield doesn't defeat an enemy.

So ask yourself this – is cynicism something you treat as a strategy?  Is it so core to your identity, actions (or just sheer posing) that it's something you treat as vital, as part of your identity as something that is somehow going to yield results?

It's not.

Strategy is about planning, organizing, measuring, and achieving.  Being cynical doesn't do any of these things.

In fact the longer you remain cynical, the less you get done, and the more cynical you become.  Not a recipe for success.

– Steven Savage

Imagination And Success

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You're a fan.  You have imagination.  It's what led you to make the ultimate historical fantasy baseball team.  It's what let you make Steampunk Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart.  You are a person that gets into information, plays with it, and shares it.

That imagination is not a waste of time.  It is critical for your success.

I've come more and more to the conclusion that success – we're talking career here, but really in anything – is dependent partially upon having a good imagination.

If you can dream, you can solve problems.  If you can imagine, you can find new ideas.  If you can speculate, you can create.

If you have your imagination going, you also feel alive.  When your mind is able to come up with new ideas and have fun, you're enjoying what you do.

Imagination gives you the power to do.  Imagination also makes what you do fulfilling and enjoyable.

So cultivate your imagination.  Enjoy it.  Play with it.  Apply it.  Enjoy and indulge all those strange fannish, geeky activities from fanfic to fanart to web pages and more.  This keeps your imagination healthy and pumped and exercised.

Then, in your career (and indeed all your life) you have this active, powerful imagination to provide you new ideas.  To drive you.  To play with and enjoy all aspects of your life.

All those seemingly useless Role Play games and LOLArt?  That's exercise for the imagination.

Imagination is key to success.

– Steven Savage

Negatives to Positives

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It's easy to figure out what we don't want in life.  You can make a rather extensive list of what's wrong with your life now or what you don't want to go wrong (many of us probably have semi-conciously).

The problem with negative goals is that they're impossible to measure – you have to measure the level of not-badness which is to say the least pretty difficult ("My unhappiness level is 10% below my projected goal!  Yay?").  Goal-setting is important to reaching your goals, obviously, but negative goals will drive you batty because there's no way to measure them.

THe solution I've found? Phrase negative goals as positive ones.  Turn them around and phrase them in positive – measurable – ways.

Don't say "I don't want to work a boring job" say "I will find an exciting job that fits my interests" then detail those interests and traits of a job – and go looking for it.

Don't say "I don't want to be alone" say "I want to make sure I am involved with friends that like my hobbies, and will join a club or clubs involving that".

You get the idea.

This is important in our careers – and even more important in a time of economic downturn where it's way, way too easy to be negative.

Go ahead.  List all the things in your life you're not happy with or your negative goals and rephrase a few as positives that you can measure.

– Steven Savage