I’ve been expanding my comfort zone with my home-based business for the past year. I don’t know at this point if the business itself will be a success or failure, but I have learned so much about shaking things off and moving on. I have gotten so much more comfortable dealing with people, and I’m learning my strengths and weaknesses in an entirely different way.

By the way, that turtle rocks!

I’ve been thinking about it lots recently – feeling like I have no more energy to go outside my comfort zone. Even though I recognise that all the great things in my life have been a result of doing just that.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure it’s a continuous process – you gotta keep doing it or you go stale.

Reminds me of that awesome cartoon from hyperboleandahalf, where she laments the fact that ‘being an adult’ is something you have to keep working on, not a trophy you win once and display on the shelf http://bit.ly/cN31fS

Thanks for the flotch

Hunter.

This is what I faced as an employment field, to quote from the article: “Exhibit A: Ideologically blind graduate students working for universities that require their labor but then fail to value it. Exhibit B: The life of the professional researcher who writes for colleagues, not for a general readership; who’s rewarded for asking manageable questions, not for examining the big ones; and who values theoretical knowledge over practical wisdom. Exhibit C: The wasted lives of adjuncts.”

…

I’m currently making films and I carry out to an extent his definition the person of integrity, but you need a touch of the hustler entrepreneur to make a living, unless you have a different kind of patronage (non-profits, publishers, etc). Entrepreneurship is often a sin among academics: which is why they always need somebody else to write their paychecks. (E.g. the “Poor Dad” in Kiyosaki’s book).

For example, the nomadic academic he describes could find a way to market her research so that her project gets well funded and supported. She could, for example, contract as a researcher or consultant for a game design company (ever played Rome Total War, or Civilization?) But instead she apparently waits tables– which compromises her “integrity”. She’s doing it wrong! She could do her cartographic research 24/7 if she finds a market for it: which is what enterepreneurship is: [finding or creating] and serving markets.

It is also peculiar that the paths the author disapproves of are in the realm of art or nomadic academia, whereas his lofty heroes fulfill more of a secular bishop role: steady and stolid dispensers of philosophical wisdom (like himself).

I disagree also with his privileging of philosophy, but that’s what all philosophers do– they tell you how philosophy is the greatest thing ever, like Tom Sawyer’s fence painting

By the way, my wife works as an adjunct and her life is far from wasted: the adjunct paycheck stabilizes the finances that let us pursue art and freelance work. If she was a full professor she’d have to sit all day in committees and give up doing what she loves most. So you can patch together something that works for you rather than divide the world in blocky chunks with no apparent cross-pollination. I think many of his observations are extremely keen, but ultimately his model oversimplifies things grossly.

He lacks granularity and refinement and a postmodern mix-match perspective. I bet you he grew up pre-cyberpunk. Self-correct and self-repair, cyborg!