Advice From One Millennial to Another

@wabbitoid The attitude goes even deeper than the ones who use a guru moniker. I think you hit the nail on the head with "channeling conventional wisdom" , by curating the thoughts of others is how young people find themselves.

I don't want to tell people that they have problems, but I've been getting notices about an ongoing philosophy debate between 3 college kids that grew from a picture of a cat riding a skateboard on Google+ all day.

Why do people have such an ingrown need to feel smarter than everyone else that they're getting all Kerouac on Google+ at all, let alone below a picture of a cat on a skateboard? They're the reason Kevin Trudeau will still be able to sell books in 30 years, and the reason you can't clean Occupy Wall street off the sidewalk.

There are so many great advantages to living in this time, but at the same time people will pass over a job application I submit because the precedent set by the 26 year olds who came before me. In reality I'm the anti-27 year old. I don't use a cell phone, I went without cable for 8 years, I never miss a day of work, I don't use excuses and I don't feel like anybody owes me anything, but the reputation of young people precedes us all as a group. If you look at my picture you'd probably assume I'm a lot younger than I actually am, so I'm not just paying for the bad reputation of my own age group, but the one younger than me as well.

@etelligence it is the easyest to hack as in a hacker taking control of your site for malicious puposes, so I have been told and seen :((

@etelligence Very true! Similar to how everyone knows what is the right thing to do, but not everyone does it. :)

@danperezfilms Thanks Dan! My goal is to get 1 person to like me for every 5 who are indifferent or absolutely hate me. I've got this weekend covered!

@Nakeva

Oh I never said age matters, in fact this applies just as much to 30-50 year olds who secretly hate that their boss is 27. I think the common denominator would be attitude. "Oh I'm the only demographic who's qualified because ______". I think it's even wasted subject matter. Merit should apply above all else in business, but unfortunately that isn't always the case, and it's easy to confuse courtesy with merit (especially for our generation where evry kid was given a trophy in little league, every kid got to play on the team and we were taught self esteem above merit).

The lesson I would like everybody 18-32 to take away from this is that a strong foundation in learning and practice is mandatory if you want to effectively blog about something, and you need to mind your information sources. If you want to free lance managing social media accounts for small business, a good place to start would be learning the methods that advertisers use in newspapers. Think about your website, have you ever saw a fold on it? For some reason they call the visible part of the screen "above the fold", and that's not a coincidence.

A more practical example would be the source of my lesson: my day job as a Drafter / Engineering Technician. In college I had a professor who insisted we draw on paper for the first semester, with pencils, rulers, dividers, the same way drafters done the work in 1960. The class thought it was stupid because we could make the same drawings in a fraction of the time on AutoCAD, but we learned geometric construction, lettering, isometric projection, etc. When it came time to use AutoCAD we didn't just learn how to use the commands, we already knew how the computer ran those commands. The math , construction techniques, order of basic operations. We were the computers.

When I entered the workforce I got promoted ahead of several drafters because of it. If I run into something I haven't drawn before, it is easy to figure out because I know how the computer would do it. Meanwhile the drafters who went to a rival school that didn't include board drawing in their cirriculum, they ask me how to draw it. I never realized that it was the board drawing that gave me an edge until I solved the first problem (it was another drafter's problem, it was just an exercise for me), and I didn't realize how much marketing in a traditional sense applied to the Internet until I increased conversions with techniques taken from billboards and magazines.

Thanks for stopping by Nakeeva, that's some pretty good advice you left, for all generations.

@TonyBennett Thanks Tony. I think if someone has enough self-awareness to realize they are getting too confident in their own abilities, they likely wouldn't have found themselves at that extreme in the first place, but maybe everybody has to get to that point at least once. Like a puppy getting swatted back by a cat.

That's one of the main reasons I started reading this blog and contributing for @ginidietrich , because I appreciated her self-awareness, and in my opinion it's one of your best traits as a blogger too @TonyBennett . I don't really trust writers who can't be objective with their own experience, and I hope I have a correct view of mine.

@Hajra Experience always helps. There's a misconception I think everyone has that when you're adequate at something you think you're proficient, and when you're proficient you think you're untouchable. There's only one way to get past that, and that is to be around others who are adequate, proficient and untouchable. I couldn't have written this blog post 6 years ago. There is a lot that can be said for having drive and confidence, but having confidence without substance is called ignorance.

Thanks @KenMueller . When it comes to technology, we're all forever students. This whole writing thing is supposed to be a pyramid. You build a broad base of learning, and then you build upon that with practice. The capstone should be writing about it. If you write about it more than you practice, or before you learn about a subject, there's more than one thing wrong with that pyramid.