My comprehensive review of the new South Park episode “Sarcastaball”
It sucked.
Yesterday, after accepting a Linkedin connection request from a friend, I found myself perusing the list of “People I may know” that Linkedin automatically populates based on my current connections. As I scrolled down the list and as the people became less familiar to me, I saw a name I hadn’t thought about in years—and I was shocked.
This person was an acquaintance from my high school years whose name I will keep anonymous, but for this post I will refer to as Chelsea. Chelsea went to a different high school than I did, but we knew each other through mutual friends. In her teens Chelsea was an amazing painter. And I mean not just amazing for a high-schooler, but amazing for anybody. I remember being blown away by her talent every time I saw her work. She was brilliant.
So why did my jaw drop when I saw Chelsea’s name on Linkedin? Because underneath her name was the name of her current employer… an investment bank.
How, I wondered, did Chelsea of all people become an investment banker? Or maybe more importantly, why? I felt a tinge of disappointment imagining all of the artistic talent going unused as Chelsea sits at her desk crunching numbers for 100 hours a week. It bummed me out.
Now I don’t mean to disparage Chelsea or her career choice here. She may very well love her job. It’s no doubt a tough job to get, and if she can do that AND paint like Monet she is clearly off the charts multitalented.
I also don’t mean to disparage the idea of working on Wall St. Many of my good friends work on Wall St. and I work in a finance-related consulting job. And even though I have a few qualms about the current wealth disparity gap in the U.S. and some of the poorer decisions that have been made on Wall St. in the last several years, I am certainly not an “Occupier.”
I don’t know how Chelsea’s path led her to a job in finance. But seeing her picture next to the name of that big bank (you’d know it if I said the name) got me thinking about how elite colleges these days have a way of funneling kids into the worlds of finance and consulting. I can’t tell you how many of my college friends came in to school wanting to work in politics or international non-profits or tech startups or medicine or the music industry etc, and left four years later having signed an offer letter with Deutsche Bank or Deloitte.
Why does this happen? On one level it’s obvious. Consulting and (especially) finance jobs are well paid and prestigious. After being an academic star in high school and attending a prestigious university, it’s logical that the next step for a person would be Morgan Stanley or Accenture. I get that.
But on a deeper level it also seems pretty illogical… or at the very least odd. I would guess that about seventy five percent of my college friends (yes, including me) currently work in finance or consulting. Seventy Five Percent! Doesn’t that seem like a lot? I find it hard to believe that many of my friends are truly passionate about investment banking. In fact, I know they are not. And I know none of them wanted to be strategy consultants when they were twelve… or even seventeen. But still, we went to good colleges and then took these jobs because… well I guess it felt like the right thing to do. Maybe it’s not our passion, but it leaves a lot of doors open and is a virtual guarantee of financial security.
But will these jobs make us happy? Will they bring more meaning or value to our lives than any other type of job could? Should we have pursued different career paths?
I wish I could answer those questions. I would love to write a brilliant paragraph or two about how the system is broken and how all the incentives are misaligned. I’d love to say exactly what careers we, as a country should be funneling our best and brightest into. I’d love to present the solution to all of our problems and lay out a blueprint to ensure that my kids and their friends end up pursuing careers they are truly passionate about.
But I can’t make that argument and I can’t write that blueprint. First of all, even trying to do so would feel pretty hypocritical since I too work in the world of management consulting. Second, I can’t claim that taking my job has forced me to give up happiness in exchange for prestige and financial security. I’m a pretty happy guy. And third, even if my hunch is right and the system is “broken,” I certainly don’t know how to fix it, or even what a “fixed” system would look like. I can’t say what percentage of Harvard’s graduating seniors “should” be teachers or doctors or engineers or bankers or writers… or painters. What hypothetical pie chart of career choices would produce the best and happiest society? I just don’t know.
But I do have a gut feeling that whatever system we are currently using is at least slightly out of balance. Should Chelsea have been a painter rather than a banker? Who knows. Maybe she got sick of art and fell in love with pivot tables. Maybe she’ll rise to the top of her analyst class and become the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Or maybe after a couple years she’ll realize she hates it and quit to do something else.
Whatever happens I won’t pass judgment. If Chelsea willingly pursues a career in finance that’s totally OK. Though I still can’t help but wonder what all of the paintings she’ll never make would have looked like.
My Cold-Hearted Facebook Journey: (If I haven’t unfriended you by now, you’re probably safe)
This February I wrote my first blog post, “My mission To Make Facebook Useful Again” in which I outlined my intent to unfriend anybody whose name I didn’t recognize on their birthday. My hypothesis was that if I were no longer Facebook friends with “randos,” Facebook would become a more useful social networking tool for me.
Three months later I’ve realized two things: First, Facebook IS useful. And second, unfriending lots of people is pretty dumb.
Butefore I get into all that, here are some stats:
- On February 14th I had 887 Friends
- I now (on May 16th) have 868 Friends
- Since February 14th I’ve added 8 Friends
- Therefore to date I’ve unfriended 27 People
So at this pace, on Feb 14th 2013…
- I will have 811 friends
- …having added 32 friends
- …and having unfriended 108 people
But I’m not going to unfriend that many people. Why? Three reasons:
- You don’t have to unfriend people to get a better newsfeed. It’s just as easy to make somebody an “acquaintance,” which stops their posts from coming in to your newsfeed. Plus given all the hilarious memes floating around these days, a lot of the content posted by my “rando” friends is just as good as what my “real” friends post.
- Facebook is my best option for sharing personal content. For some reason when I started blogging I thought that a lot of my blog hits would come from Twitter, partially because my Twitter feed is public and my FB profile is somewhat private. I was absolutely, 100%, dead wrong. The vast majority of my blog hits come from Facebook link clicks. This makes sense not only because I have 7x more Facebook friends than Twitter followers, but also because the majority of my facebook friends actually know me, unlike many of my twitter Followers. Knowing that my Facebook friends are pretty much the only people who read my blog makes it a lot harder to get rid of them.
- Trying to make Facebook “useful” is a pretty silly goal. Three months ago I was expecting Facebook to do something it’s not really meant to do—i.e. be a contact management and networking tool. I now find that Facebook is in fact VERY useful… for things like killing time at work or sharing blog posts or chatting with friends. I don’t need Facebook to help me maintain relationships. I already have a dozen other better tools for that.
So to sum up, I guess you could say that my mission to make facebook useful was a success… but not in the way I had expected. Unfriending 27 people hasn’t made my Facebook experience significantly better—understanding what the hell Facebook is actually good for has. Will I continue to unfriend people? Yup. But not as aggressively—just the few people who I truly don’t know. Cause at the end of the day burning a bridge (even a superficial bridge that both parties are hardly aware of) is rarely beneficial.
Dear South Park, Please get funny again. Regards, Mike
Last night I tweeted “Dear South Park, please get funny again. Regards, Mike.” Here’s a rambling incoherent explanation of what I meant…
Let me start off by saying that I am a huge fan of South Park. In my opinion it’s one of the greatest TV shows of all time. But recently South Park has really been disappointing me. Only two or three episodes in Season 15 were great, and Season 16’s first four episodes have been terrible.
It’s hard to put into words what makes South Park so great. One minute they are killing it (in a good way) with lowbrow fart jokes and the next they are offering up some of the best cultural satire around. This, along with Matt and Trey’s ability to make fun of everybody, themselves included, makes up the special South Park sauce we all love.
Some seasons are stronger than others, and every one of them has at least a couple dud episodes, so I’m hoping that Season 16 is just getting off to a slow start. But so far they’ve really missed the mark
Take, for example, the fourth episode of this season “Jewpacabra.” I was excited when I saw the preview clip. Given the premise (Cartman attempts to warn the town of the Jewpacabra, a vicious beast that threatens to terrorize South Park’s Easter celebration) “Jewpacabra” had the potential to be a classic. The preview conjured thoughts of awesome episodes like “Die Hippie, Die” or “Fantastic Easter Special,” but instead it ended up being pretty stupid and un-funny.
I was completely blown away (in a bad way) when at the end of the episode Cartman sides with Kyle and converts to Judaism. …Um, what? That would have never happened in season 10. Cartman would have strung us along until we all actually believed he was being sincere and at the last minute catch us (and Kyle) off guard with a taunting “neh neh neh neh neh neh, heh heh heh heh heh heh.” That’s why Cartman is so great. He is so unflappably evil and obnoxious… yet lovable and endearing at the same time. These days he’s… well… not. And without Cartman South Park can’t be consistently funny. I can only hope that in the next episode Cartman will come to his senses and go back to his classic hilarious evil ways.
Season 16′s strongest episode so far was probably “Faith Hilling.” It had the recipe for a classic South Park episode: basically they come up with a joke making fun of some fad or pop culture trend and beat the shit out of it for 23 straight minutes. And that’s what “Faith Hilling” (poking fun at cultural memes like planking, Tebowing, Bradying, etc) was. But it didn’t have that same great South Park flavor. The formula was there, but the satire just wasn’t as spot-on or nuanced or silly-in-just-the-right-way as South Park so often used to be.
I really hate writing this. I think Matt and Trey are geniuses and I’m hoping that this is just a phase and that we’ll be back to the good old South Park soon. But I have a creeping feeling that South Park may have finally jumped the shark. Sigh…
Life Lessons From Four Months In Corporate Sales
I work at a tech/consulting firm where I spend most of my time on the sales team trying to bring in new clients. I’m relatively new to sales and in my first few months on the job I’ve learned a couple lessons that have helped me a lot–not just in sales, but also in other areas of my personal and professional lives. Some might find these points obvious. I, unfortunately, learned them the hard way.
1. Don’t be intimidated by the guy you’re talking to. He’s just a guy with a job.
It’s easy to get nervous before talking to a new person, whether on a sales call or in a social setting. When I started in sales I worried a lot about what the person on the other end of the conversation would think of me. What if I said something stupid? What if they asked a question I didn’t know the answer to?
Once I got a little more comfortable with the material I was talking about I started to realize that the guy on the other end of the phone, even if he is a senior-level person, is just like me—he’s just a guy with a job. And while I always try to be respectful and polite, there is no reason to put these people up on a pedestal either in sales situations or elsewhere. The people you talk to are just regular people. So relax.
2. Don’t have a sales pitch, just have a conversation.
When you are new to sales it’s tempting to cling to rehearsed pitch or speech, and for a while it might be necessary to use your pitch as a crutch. But the sooner you can stop pitching and start having a real conversation with the person you are “selling” to, the better you’ll do. This means listening a lot, asking smart questions and responding in a genuine human way rather than with canned sales-y answers.
In personal conversations I know I don’t always listen well enough. I’ll sit there hearing what the other person is saying, but in my head will just be waiting for them to finish so I can say the thing I’ve been wanting to say. I’m trying to break this habit by actually listening well, asking smart questions and being truly interested and engaged with what they have to say. But breaking habits is hard…
3. Frame the conversation in terms of what the other guy wants, not what you want.
This is related to point number 2 and is straight out of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” In sales you’ll often be talking to extremely busy people with goals to meet and bosses to please. And if you go into a conversation focusing solely on what you want (i.e. to sell them something) you’ll probably have a tough time holding their attention. Instead try to frame the conversation in terms of what they want. Do they have a problem they are trying to solve or a pain point that you can address? If so, then there is probably a great opportunity.
Before a sales meeting I’ll look up the prospect’s info and based on what I find will ask myself “What does this guy want and how can I help him get it?” And if I can’t figure it out beforehand I’ll just ask him straight up. Admittedly, navigating personal relationships probably requires a bit more finesse than this, but the same principle applies. People will like you if you help them get what they want, and they’ll probably help you in return. However, this doesn’t mean you should be fake or expect them to do something for you in return. It’s easy to spot when a person is not being genuine and it’s an obvious turn-off.
Hope this helps some people out!
Cheers,
Mike
OK so maybe this is just a symptom of the combination of Twitter and RSS feeds I’ve chosen to follow, but does anybody else feel like A LOT of the content on the internet these days (especially in the tech / entrepreneurship / startup / social media spaces) is the same stuff regurgitated and recycled over and over again?
Seriously, I can’t tell you how many articles about Pinterest, iPad 3 speculation and “social media trends” I’ve seen in the past week or two. It’s unbelievable.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept of trending topics, and it makes sense that at any given point in time there will be a few things that are particularly “hot.” But there is a difference between adding a new perspective or advancing the conversation on a hot topic vs. regurgitating the same stuff that has been thrown out there 50 times already.
Truthfully it’s difficult to come up with something completely new and original. There’s so much content out there, it seems like almost everything has already been said by somebody. And this is one of the reasons I don’t write as often as I’d like–a lot of the things I would write about have already basically been said–many times. Even so, I know I have at times contributed to the continual churn of regurgitated online content.
So from now on I’m going to try to commit to doing the following things when posting content online:
- Be original whenever possible.
- If I write about a “hot topic” I’ll try to make it uniquely my perspective so that it’s not simply a regurgitation of what everybody else is saying.
- If I re-post or RT something it will be because I think it is outrageously awesome or funny or something a lot of people may not have seen before.
On a final note, I know there are probably already forty articles out there about how so much of today’s online content is unoriginal and regurgitated. How ironic. FML.
Shit Georgetown Basketball Announcers Say Bingo
Since graduating from Georgetown and moving away from DC I’ve found myself watching many more Hoya hoops games on TV. And over the last season of televised games it has become painfully clear that basketball announcers love to latch onto a handful of “compelling anecdotes” and beat the absolute shit out of them. (Oh really, Henry Sims has improved a lot this year? No effing way!)
So a couple weeks ago I started taking mental notes of the stuff that announcers ALWAYS seem to be saying during this season’s Hoyas games. If I were cooler and could do a better Bill Raftery/Doris Burke impression I probably would have made a “Shit Georgetown Basketball Announcers Say” YouTube video, but I’m not, so I decided to kill an hour at work today and make the Shit Georgetown Basketball Announcers Say Bingo board instead.
If you catch any of Georgetown’s Big East or NCAA Tournament games on TV over the next few weeks print this bad boy out and start playing. Chances are you’ll black the board out before half time. (And if you turn it into a drinking game and do a shot every time one of these phrases or topics is mentioned you’ll probably black out too—so I don’t recommend it).
Go Hoyas,
Mike
