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Tag: career

  • How to make your kid an avid reader/writer

    How to make your kid an avid reader/writer

    I never post advice for parents, but I thought this title was actually the objective of this post.

    “This is your vacation homework.” my mom would say. When I was a kid, my mother used to prepare vacation homework for me. I was the only kid in the family and didn´t have many friends, so on school vacation, I actually got bored watching TV. Since I was an obedient kid, I would think of my mom´s “vacation homework” as something I had comply with or I would be facing some severe scolding. Most of this homework was reading, and that is the best gift that my mom ever gave me.

    elizabeth street

    Image source: www.elizabethstreet.com

    I was born, grew up, and still live in Bolivia, a country where if you say you´re a writer, people would look at you with disbelief and even pity.  Writers don´t make any decent earnings here, and of course it´s never a good career choice. So as a normal young girl, with very good grades, I went for what I thought was an excellent career choice for me and for everybody else in my family: “Industrial Engineering”. Just the name sounded good, hard, complicated, and something that everybody else could be proud of, with lots of job´s opportunities, good salaries, and all the things that people advised you when you graduate from high school.

    I´ve never received the advice “do you what you love to do, what you´re passionate about” and I wish I had.

    story will continue… 

    P.S. I came up to the conclusion, that in our current lives where we get tons of emails, blog posts, and so on… the shorter the better, so I decided to write short posts from now on…but I will try to make them to sound as complete as possible on their own…

  • Oh men! we´d better achieve our dreams or….

    blog princetontutoring com

     

    Image source: blog.princetontutorial.com

     

    Oh men, If I thought I would had a weekend like the previous one, years ago, I would have laughed really hard. I´ve always envisioned myself writing a novel in the late years of my life. I would say “SOMEDAY I will write a book, when I´m retired, and have time, and blah blah…”, but then one day I just decided to say that is BS!  I will accomplish this dream “RIGHT NOW RIGHT HERE”, not in the near future, or someday when I´m in a retirement house, but NOW, when I have a day job and almost no time. I made the right decision…

    For the past months, I´ve been trying to write my first novel. I started writing short stories first but when I got what I thought an interesting idea for a novel, I decided to give it a go. I decided I was going to put ‘writing´ as number one in my priorities list. No more “extra activities” that would drive me away from it. I would write everyday, if possible, until I actually made a habit of it.

    Then, to not bore you anymore with the process to achieve this goal, I started to research about the process of writing books, how to build up characters, plots, etc. So much material about it, you wouldn´t believe me.

    arcolatheatre com

     

    Image source: www.arcolatheatre.com

     

    Finally, I decided to enroll myself in the Writer´s Digest bootcamp: Agent One-on-One: First ten pages, which basically focused in the first ten pages of a novel. We got a video tutorial from Ms. Paula Munier of Talcott Notch Literary Agency, who was brilliant, the cleverest person I´ve ever listened to. She gave excellent advice of what Agents were looking for and what she expected to find in the first pages of a novel. She also talked about all clichés, and all the times she got to reject queries from writers. I was “Oh my, I´ve never going to make it!” I did some research about her clients, looked in the web for their books, and believe me , those were quality material, beautiful books, written so amazingly that I was “I don’t stand a chance, English is not even my native language! I´ve never going to be at that level” But I was already registered in the course, with 200 $us invested, which here in my country is a LOT of money.

    trinitylgbt com

     

    Image source: www.trinitylgbt.com

     

    So to shorten things, Paula Munier was assigned as the agent who would review my pages (out of five agents in the bootcamp). I was thrilled, maybe she was the toughest one, but the one I´ve imagined myself working with. I sent my pages, expecting to receive a critique that would say “this is not good, you really have to improve, you should consider changing careers, or are you sure you want to be a writer?” I was already mentally preparing myself for that, telling me that I would try not to take it so bad, that I would improve, that this was just a course, and that I was there to learn and to improve.

    What I got was: “Nice work, Easy and Fun to read, Engaging premise, Likable hero, Colorful cast of characters, Unique great style” and I was … My god I was stunned.

    Of course she also described the parts where I could improve, like improving the flow of the scenes, avoiding overwriting, American grammar and punctuation (the British influence of course), and some issues with my second scene.  But nonetheless, I was thrilled.

    kariwolfe com

     

    Image source: www.kariwolfe.com

     

    And true, there is still a lot to improve, but it is all about the HARD WORK, and nothing else. If you want to write, you have to do it all the time. You have to read millions of books, if you want to improve your craft. It´s hard work and nothing else. Revision after revision and craziness along the way of course! I usually find myself about to go nuts when I get into one of those hard “revision” sessions, like I would dream with characters and get traumatized with grammar rules. But it is worth it.

    In the end, we don´t get a second life, we only have this one, we´d better make the best of it. That means we only have NOW and THIS LIFE to make our dreams come true. We’d better devote ourselves and work our asses off to achieve our dreams, or else when are we going to do it? There is no other way around.

    Believe in your dreams and just work the hell out of yourself to make them come true!

     

  • The reasons of being lonely….

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    Image source: micuadernitoverde.blogspot.com

    The last posts I´ve been writing about inspirational and self-improvement topics, or at least that´s what I was trying to do, and I actually have managed to evade the “happy loner” topic for a time…

    I´ve always told myself what a happy loner I am , and I am, really, but sometimes I can´t help but to question myself “why I am a loner”. I actually get this question many times from people that surround me.  I´m 32 and most people that I know are either married, getting married or in a happy relationship. Don´t take me wrong, I´m not against of relationships, but in some way I feel that I´m not ready yet….as silly as it sounds.

    I´m so focused in achieving the life of my dreams, of doing the things that I´ve always wanted to do, that I actually feel that I couldn´t do good in a relationship. I would have to achieve at least a part of the goals that I´m trying to achieve right now. It´s like needing to find myself before sharing my life with another being….

    For instance, I´m not ready yet to settle down and form a family. I want to do so many things for myself before I get to this part. I know, you may be saying, but you actually can do many of this stuff while you are in a relationship and you don´t have to sacrifice one thing for the other… well the thing is that I would actually need to find somebody who could fit in my life style…. and that´s a little hard…

    And what is my life style? Well,  I´m working to get a working -nomad-traveling life style, I haven´t got there yet but I´m on my way to do so, that would mean that, at least, this person would have to have that same kind of free spirit… am I wrong? I haven´t met anybody like that in my social environment yet…

    Su just patience, I tell myself, just enjoy the moment that I have, and take advantage of the many things that I can do while I´m in this “loner state”, after all, one has to get the most of every moment in life, right?

    What do you think? Maybe some advice would be nice 🙂

  • HOW HARD IS IT TO BE PERSISTENT?

    So, PERSISTENCE, what is the definition of PERSISTENCE?

    The Oxford dictionary says

    “the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition”

    Well, we can understand this meaning, it is simple, and everybody knows it, but can we understand it well enough to apply it in our lives?

    Since I remember, I use to make plans for improving my life; I would make things like these ones:

    1. Make a written, signed contract where I compromise myself with improving in all aspects: losing weight, going to the gym, learning mandarin or Italian (whatever was I felt I needed to learn at that time), read 3 books per month, learn this or that, etc.I would get to do this for a couple of days, maybe a week and then I would get weaker and I would just forget it.
    2. I would also do more detailed plans, I would write my resolutions in a paper, make detailed plans to achieve them and even set daily goals. I would buy a diary or notebook, just specifically for this purpose. I would start with all my enthusiasm and then the same would happen, I would forget it or just get consumed with the daily routine.

    So this is the summary of the dozens of times that I have tried different approaches. Some methods would work better than others, but always at the end I was swallowed with the everyday routine.

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    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

    At this very moment, I´m with one method, I have a little notebook at work where I write the hours of the day and try to assess every hour I let pass, so I just put a happy or sad face next to it when I feel an hour has been productive or not. Until now, it´s been lasting more than any method. But, I must admit it, there are hours, even days, where I forget about this thing and I find myself filling hours with sad faces trying to remember what I had done before. I hope this method lasts….

    But, besides this, I have actually realized the following: I´ve been persisting in improving my life, trying different methods but with the same idea: improving. So I have accused myself many times of not being persistent enough and it´s is true, in some ways… after all, the most difficult thing to achieve in life for me has being persistence.

    But the idea is to persist right? And I have persisted in figuring it out these methods, even when they didn´t work, I would look for another one… little step by little step, mistake by mistake, and at the end NEVER SURRENDER…

    And more than anything never stop persisting in trying to achieve our dreams, no matter how our methods are, but never give up on our dreams, never forget them….

    I would like to finish with this quote:

    “If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of Persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked seventy times and get up off the floor saying, Here comes Seventy One!”

    DeVos, Richard

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    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

  • Why daydreaming with open eyes is actually good…

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    I´ve always daydreamed with open ever eyes since I have a recollection of memory. If you don´t know what I´m talking about, maybe you should read this Wikipedia definition first: (just to be sure we´re on the same page)

    “Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one’s immediate surroundings, during which a person’s contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.”

    When I was younger I remember daydreaming while I was trying to “study” for school, maybe it was out of boredom or maybe I was trying to evade the “studying” aspect of that moment.

    I used to dream about what I was going to do when I grew older, how my life was going to be and how would things be that If I were different, if I were richer if I were prettier and others things (the “if I were prettier” dreams were a result of my poor self-esteem at that time but now I have another concept of beauty…). I used to spend a lot of time on this, of 3 hours of study I would spend half of it dreaming about everything and nothing…

    As time passed, I started to get stronger ideas of what I wanted to do with my life… do you think I stopped daydreaming? Not at all!, until now I still continue daydreaming all the time even when I´m at work….is it because I really have nothing better to do other than spending time imagining about the things that I would like to achieve or the type of life that I would like to have? Not really, actually I´m always struggling to find time for everything…

    It’s because of my nature, I´m a daydreamer by default but I´m proud of it because it actually keeps me in focus in the goals and dreams I want to achieve. If I weren’t frequently remembered by these dreams, I would probably let common life pass by me, forgetting my main ideals and where I´m heading for.

    From the perspective of loner, I don’t know if this really applies to “my type”, to my personality that tends to be more distant from people in general and perhaps more focused on my own objectives, but this is just a theory and maybe it would be nice to see your comments about this.. .

    BUT, there is an important BUT for the frequent daydreamers, your dreams have to have a little closure of their own, if you want these dreams to really happen, you have to snap out of them by thinking “now what do I have to do if I want to achieve that…” or “well let´s start doing X so one day I can be like in dream Y”… When you come back to reality, or stop dreaming, don´t let this wonderful time that you´ve just spend by go without rescuing encouraging motivations for you to continue life focusing on the direction of your dreams, always give them this little closures, they make you feel better, trust me and it´s a wonderful way to get you excited of the good things that are still to come in the future…

    Daydreaming lets you know that life should not be boring and that we shouldn’t accept regular routine, that there is so much out there that needs to be discovered.

    If you daydream, find the motivation for following these dreams and planning the actions that are needed to achieve them.

    Finally, a quote to remember:

    “All people dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake up in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they dream their dreams with open eyes and make them come true.”

    D. H. Lawrence

     

  • Being a loner actually gives more opportunities to focus on career goals?

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    I don’t know what you may think about this but I’m beginning to see that maybe this could be true…

    I’m a multi task person, I work in a company as technical writer, have a small business of my own and sometimes I happen to have small consultancies or “small jobs” on the way. Everything that seems interesting and that could give me an extra income is always welcomed. I have some bigger ideals and goals for the future… for instance I would like my business and my free lancing jobs to be big enough to make me an independent entrepreneur…. For the moment the economic situation is not that ideal…and that means that I have to maintain for a little longer my full time job … it’s not a bad job but I really don’t see myself spending years and years there….

    I’m more of a free spirit person and like many of you probably I would like to travel a lot around the world in the future but for that to come I have some financial issues to resolve before (like the money for traveling right?).

    So after all these ramblings I don’t want to bore you anymore and I want to summarize my thoughts in the following points, as encouragement for the people that are loners out there and don’t see that they may actually have an opportunity that others don’t have:

    • First, you can actually have more time to organize yourself; you keep worrying about your social life or “lack of”? So maybe you should gather your strengths to realize that you can actually take this “extra time” to see what are you going to do to improve your career opportunities, you always wanted to take that course about graphical design, creative writing, photography, marketing or something to improve your skills? What are you waiting?
    • You have a business idea but you have to do some market research or other type of research first to see if your idea actually has the chance to work? Use your extra time for this! Never complain about your lack of social life, see the positive side of this and see this as “good extra time for yourself”
    • You’ve been trying to change your career or want to start something new or just change of job? In this case I must tell you, some decisions are easier when you’re a loner, you don’t have actually to consult anybody else… or on the contrary, you can be sure that you won’t have that somebody else questioning about all your decisions, take the opportunity, if you are a loner, take the risks you always wanted to take, trust me this may be the best time for you to do that…
    • Finally, it may sound a little bit cold to say this, but being in a relationship, well depending of course the type of relationship (unless you have a perfect one), may actually make you lose the focus.  Difficult relationships where the circumstances make you worry or be afflicted all the time, may actually impact your career life. The relationship becomes your main worry in your life, and guess what; your career (well for most cases, not for everybody) becomes secondary and therefore doesn’t receive the attention that it should.
    • If you are a loner, take the advantage to focus all your energy on the things you always want to achieve, no difficult relationships torturing your head, just the pure and free spirit of pursuing your goals! So cheer up!

    What do you think? I hope this is helpful for all loners, I would like to hear your comments (not only from loners! )

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