Taking Yourself Public

I definitely go through my phases. But for those of you who know me personally, you can probably attest to the fact that I’m a pretty ‘public’ person.  On a normal day, I wouldn’t be surprised if my achingly long snapchats are constantly lingering at the top of your latest updates, my most recent Facebook photos are flooding your newsfeed, or my latest musings about education policy or innovation and creativity are streaming down your Twitter feed.  And for those of you who don’t know me personally, you can probably get a sense of my outward nature from my willingness to share some pretty personal aspects of my life in some of my previous blog posts. 

You know, the funny thing is, I used to be the complete opposite of the way that I am now.  I absolutely HATED social media, avoided Facebook like the plague, and was reluctant to share any of the intimate details of my personal life with anyone who I hadn’t known since I was a teenager.  I was an incredibly private person, and given that I didn’t live my life in attempt to obtain any source of external validation, I didn’t think there was any value that I could really obtain from putting myself out there and simultaneously exposing myself to the various vulnerabilities that come with ‘taking yourself public.’

When I first started using sites like Facebook and Twitter, I was amused by the fact that in many ways, people’s personal lives became democratic, with the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ dictating whose opinions mattered more and who looked shinier in their perfectly edited photos.  After toying with the multiple different social media channels on the market for a few months, I began to wonder what the significance really was in all of this. Did getting 30 likes on a photo instead of 10 really make me an incrementally better person?  Was it supposed to make me somehow feel better about myself or feel more significant if 10 people retweeted my article instead of 5? Because over time, I realized that it didn’t – but maybe that wasn’t what the purpose of these sites were in the first place.

Given how much time our generation spends on the multiple different social media platforms, I think it is extremely important to consistently stop and reevaluate what our individual motivations are in using these platforms in the first place.  While I think that there are various ways that social media can increase our level of personal utility, I don’t think that achieving ‘public validation’ is one of them.  In many ways, social media has tricked our minds into thinking we need instant validation; but the problem with our motivations being aligned with a public response is that our motivations are arguably never going to be fulfilled.  When you consistently start getting 10 likes on your photos, soon you are going to start wanting 20, and 30, and 40, and so on – and while you check your most recent updates every two minutes, waiting for a mass of people (many of whom you are only loosely connected to) to somehow confirm that your life is worthy of public approval, it is never going to be enough.  If you participate in the social media revolution for the primary purpose of seeking external validation, there is a good chance that you are never going to reach the point where you feel entirely fulfilled.

With that said, I do think that there are various benefits that can be obtained from actively utilizing social media – not only as an observer, but also as an active contributor.  Yet, in order to achieve the increase in personal utility that we are looking for through putting ourselves in the public eye, it is important to ensure that our internal motivations for doing so are aligned with the platforms that we are using.  Therefore we can control the way in which we share different aspects of our lives with those in our inner and outer circles, and position ourselves accordingly.  While I enjoy the various social media platforms that I participate in for various reasons, I realized that the channels that have allowed me to seek and obtain intrinsic verse extrinsic validation are those that are adding the most positive value to my life.

I think that many people would argue that, on a personal level, social media is primarily about connection – maintaining and expanding personal and professional networks, seeking feedback on ideas from a wider community of observers, and as a means to stay connected with those whom we might otherwise lose touch with.  However, I think that there is another primary way in which social media can contribute to our personal wellbeing, and that is by providing us with different platforms to explore our deepest thoughts and to serve as a source of stimuli to trigger creativity and innovation.  If we are driven by an intrinsic verse an extrinsic motivation, we are in significantly greater control of the outcome – so no matter how many likes we get on a photo or how many shares we get on a post, we will have achieved what we set out to do through exploring our thoughts and challenging each of us to be our best self.

While I think that there are a variety of reasons that different people allow social media to play such a large role in their lives, the most important thing is not that we align our logic and rationale with that of those around us, but rather that we take the time to analyze why we are individually ‘taking ourselves public’ in the first place, and reevaluating where and how it makes the most sense to do so.  In order to demonstrate what this type of self-evaluation might look like, I have briefly demonstrated what my personal intentions are in utilizing the different social media platforms that I actively participate in:

Snapchat – Of all of the social media channels that I use, Snapchat is by far my favorite.  While I was originally leery of the idea of sharing instantaneous and often ‘unedited’ moments with people, I came to love the idea of documenting the different parts of my day. My primary motivation for using Snapchat as frequently as I do is to serve as a digital version of a photo album, and to act as a platform for me to evaluate the different aspects of my life.  I think that far too often, we set lofty goals for ourselves in a variety of different walks of life – yet given that we cannot see ourselves growing and changing from the perspective of an outsider, we often overlook the progress that we are making and don’t place enough emphasis on all of the ways that we come to better ourselves each day.  For me, Snapchat has come to serve as a really important means of helping me to capture the various moments that I might otherwise overlook.  Given that my primary motivation for using Snapchat is not to share my life with others, but rather to reflect upon my own days, I go back through my Snapchat story every night before I go to sleep.  While this might sound like an odd practice, I have found that capturing the instantaneous moments throughout my day really allows me to reflect upon what the various people in my life really mean to me, and to see how my daily experiences shape who I am as a person.  While there are often photographers in the room to capture the ‘big moments’ that alter the paths of our lives, it is up to us to make sure that the everyday pleasures don't slip away from us – because in my opinion, it is the simple things that really make people who they are.

Twitter – I definitely go through my phases with Twitter, as my level of activity on the platform tends to fluctuate based upon where I am in my professional life.  In many ways, I initially became exposed to Twitter through working with the platform from a professional perspective, utilizing it as a tool for personal branding and consumer outreach for different companies that I had worked for.  In my day-to-day personal life, my primary motivation for using Twitter is to challenge myself to think outside the box, to stay up to date with the recent news, and to explore my new ideas or opinions on a particular topic.  I think that one of the great things about Twitter is that it allows us to share different aspects of ourselves with others; this often serves as a catalyst in spearheading new friendships and even potential business relationships.  Twitter further is representative of the fact that we are multifaceted individuals: a pilot can express his opinions on education policy, a fashion designer can share her newest dessert recipe, or a business leader can share his opinions on the story on the front page of The New York Times.

Facebook – Out of all of the social media outlets that I use, Facebook is the one that I feel allows for the broadest array of self-exploration.  Through allowing for the sharing of information in different mediums, I feel that it allows me to reflect on the various aspects of my life on one unique platform.  From sharing my latest blog posts, to uploading photos from my family vacation, to sharing an article that really inspires me, I feel that Facebook almost serves as a personal mood board.  While I don’t actively use Facebook every day, I love having everything in one place, as it serves as the perfect platform for self-reflection.  Often when I am having a bad day or trying to obtain a deeper understanding of various aspects of myself, I spend twenty minutes or so flipping through some of my old Facebook photos.  From silly photos from high school gymnastics meets to photos from Christmas Eve at grandma’s house, the depth of information that we can store about ourselves on Facebook really allows us to reflect on how we have grown as individuals over time.

Blogging Platforms – Until recently, the entire blogosphere was really quite a mystery to me.  I’ve always had a very active imagination, with constant thoughts flowing through my mind, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the courage to really dive in and see what might come out of trying to put some of my thoughts into writing.  When I first started blogging, I didn’t have any high expectations, and I didn’t necessarily go into the experiment with any serious motivations or intent.  Yet, over the past few months, blogging has served as arguably the most beneficial means of exploring my thoughts.  In many ways, my blog serves as a journal for me.  When I spend the time to put some of my thoughts on paper, it allows me to take my ideas to the next level, and to explore the various elements of a topic that might otherwise remain untouched and unexplored.  While I am always happy to learn when one of my posts has a significant effect on someone’s day, the primary reason that I blog is for the purpose of exploring my feelings towards people, places, and experiences in my life, thinking about the ways in which I can continue to grow as a person, and to initiate the exchange of ideas to further my understanding of particular topics.

While there are plenty of social media platforms on the market, these are the four that I have come to use most prominently – and for the reasons described above, they have all come to help me understand and reflect upon various aspects of my personal life.  In order to maximize the benefits that can be obtained from participating in the rapidly changing social media landscape, I would encourage you to similarly take the time to reflect upon why you are using each social media platform, and ultimately what you hope to get out of it.  These advanced technological platforms serve as wonderful tools that can not only act as a means of increasing our connectivity with those around us, but also as a platform for personal development and self-reflection.  If we keep our core motivations at the forefront of our daily actions, we will always be moving one step closer towards our goals rather than constantly sidestepping to chase the ever intangible sources of external validation that consume far too many of us.

Building a Happiness Agenda

For a long time, I felt like I was running on a treadmill.  It was as if time was passing, but somehow I was mentally rooted in the same place – tied to a state of being that was inevitably being manipulated by the world around me.  Even though I was working towards my goals for as many hours as I could possibly keep my eyes open, I felt as if I wasn’t going anywhere.  On paper it looked as if I was making progress, but isn’t progress supposed to come with a feeling of satisfaction - a feeling of excitement that should come in knowing we are one step closer to finally clenching that green light? But somehow, I didn’t feel that way.  I felt like I was a voodoo doll being puppeteered by the world around me and pushed to unhealthy limits.  I didn’t feel in control of my own day, and each morning I would wake up, feeling like I was already ten paces behind.  I thought that in order to keep up, I had to try to run faster – to chase everything that I always thought I wanted but never quite knew how to obtain.  But it wasn’t until recently, that I realized that the only way to move forward at a healthy pace was to stop running, and to finally take control of my own life one step at a time.

Far too often, we spend our days running, but instead of moving forward we end up running in circles – moving towards our goals, but leaving a part of ourselves behind.  After many weeks of self-reflection, I realized that in order to somehow ‘feel’ differently, to feel what I thought that I should be feeling, I had to step off the path completely and to ask myself one question, time and time again: ‘does this make me happy?’  As basic as this sounds, I realized that one of my biggest problems had been that for the majority of my life, I didn’t quite know how to find the answer to that question – how to freeze a moment and to assess whether or not something really made me happy.  When I looked at my life, I wouldn’t say that I was unhappy; I would say that I was simply content.   But after spending year after year feeling ‘content,’ I realized that eventually I no longer was – I no longer wanted to be stuck in quicksand, mentally constrained by the rules I had set for myself as society continuously dragged me forward.  I wanted to know if something different was out there, if there was a way to feel something stronger, something deeper.  And after freeing myself from all of the expectations that I had ever placed upon myself and going back to the basic question of what made me happy, I started to realize that there undoubtedly was.

For me, reaching a new level of personal happiness came with a lot of trial and error.  After mitigating the various aspects of my life that I was certain were making me unhappy, I was left with a sheet of grey.  And in order to paint my world in color, I started making every effort to consistently live in an active state of mind.  I assessed everything – and from the time that I woke up in the morning to the time that I fell asleep at night, I tried to isolate every single aspect of my day and place it under the microscope to see if it was really making me happy.  While some aspects of my life were initially harder to evaluate than others, I experienced a series of moments where everything became crystal clear – where I finally let myself go, let myself fall into a space that I had previously blocked off.  And it was in those moments, when I was laughing until I cried, or simply sitting there in a state of utter serenity, when I realized that this is what I should be feeling every minute of every day. 

After I was more easily able to pinpoint what aspects of my life were really making me the happiest, I put together a ‘happiness agenda.’  This list is composed of a set of ‘rules’ or ‘guidelines’ that I set for myself, which I could hang up on my wall and reference multiple times per week.  The rules on my list are a combination of practical and marginally ridiculous things that I aim to incorporate into my routine on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, that contribute to either my short or long-term happiness.  I developed this list over many months of self-reflection, and I continue to add things to my list as I learn more about what happiness really feels like, and what makes me freeze in a moment, subtly smile to myself, and feel confident that I want to experience that same feeling again.  While making an agenda of this nature may feel somewhat silly, I would encourage everyone to go through this level of self-assessment and put together your own happiness agenda.  Because now instead of feeling like I am running on a treadmill, physically moving along but mentally stuck in one place, I live each day dynamically, and instead of chasing time I feel in complete command of my day.  I have shared my happiness agenda below.

My Happiness Agenda

·       Start each morning by blasting music and dancing on my bed

·       Run 3 to 5 miles per day

·       Consistently write in a journal

·       Don’t make plans on Mondays

·       Plan spontaneous getaways

·       Get my nails done once per week

·       Don’t eat fried food

·       Take care of my health by consistently going to the doctor and dentist

·       Prioritize sleep; treat it like a meeting

·       Do small things to show people how important they are to me

·       Only stay out late twice per week

·       See more theatre performances

·       Only drink alcohol on special occasions

·       Listen to music on my way to work

·       Only spend time with people who inspire me

·       Don’t do anything that I actually don’t want to do

·       Take social risks

·       Make an effort to stay connected with my mentors

·       Give thoughtful birthday and holiday gifts and gifts just because

·       Wear bright red lipstick as often as possible

·       Learn something new every day

·       Talk about startup ideas at the dinner table

·       Make an effort to look my best

·       Turn off my phone for a few days every month

·       Spend time with my siblings

·       Eat a lot of ice cream

·       Sleep in once per week and then make chocolate chip pancakes

·       Ask people what they are passionate about rather than what they do

·       Continuously re-evaluate my list of goals

·       Write in pink or purple pen at work

·       Block out a few hours per week to watch the shows that I like

·       Go shopping every other weekend

·       Make grand gestures for my close friends and family

·       Write my daily to-do lists on neon sticky notes

·       Meet at least one new person every week

·       Stop talking to people who bring negative energy into my life

·       Read a book every week

·       Drink a lot of water

·       Spray relaxing mist on my pillow before I go to sleep

·       Go to as many concerts as possible

·       Take a few short walks outside every day

·       Consistently throw out things that no longer fit or I no longer need

·       Mentor younger students as often as possible

·       Go to an over-the-top affair at least once per month

·       Take a new path to work every day

·       Consistently call or spend time with my close friends

·       Snapchat lots of goofy moments

·       Print new photos to hang on my wall every few weeks

·       Keep my room and desk clean and workable

·       Write short notes to the people I care about

·       Find a new secret spot every week

·       Watch at least three gossip girl episodes per week

·       Spontaneously buy plane tickets and plan trips around them

·       Stop a few times per day to freeze the moment and breathe

·       Talk to strangers

·       Burn candles while I’m working at home

·       Go on occasional adventures by myself

·       Cancel days on my calendar and do whatever I feel like in the moment

·       Live dynamically

Flirting with Change

I know a lot of people who are afraid of change – who cling to the many facets of the world that they know, only to avoid having to enter into unchartered territory.  While the majority of people find comfort in living the life that they have built for themselves, I find stability in instability, through living in a state of constant change.  From new cities, to new men, to new friends, to new jobs – being thrown into a fresh situation makes my senses come alive and keeps my creativity at its peak level of functionality.  I thrive on change.  In fact, I may even be addicted to it.

A few months ago, I walked along the Champs-Elysees in Paris for the first time – and while I’ve spent the majority of my life immersed in vibrant cities like New York, I never felt more alive.  My trip to France was the first time that I had traveled to another country completely alone.  And while at first I was daunted by my fear of the unknown, it turned out to be one of the best trips of my life.  After a few weeks of wandering around the city, taking a weak stab at speaking French, mingling with the local shop owners, and tasting the best of Parisian macaroons, I was in love.  Even though I had no friends to keep me company and only about ten words of French at my disposal, I couldn’t remember any other time in my life when I was quite as happy.  And as I sat in my favorite restaurant overlooking the Champs-Elysees on my last night in Paris, tears started sliding down my face.  No man had ever made me feel as vibrant and alive as this city had – and we had only known each other for a matter of weeks.  I was completely and utterly enchanted by life in Paris – the people, the smells, the culture, the style.  And I knew one thing for certain – I didn’t want to leave.  As I dragged myself to the airport to go back to my life of normalcy here in New York, no loss had ever felt so great.  But I knew that when I left, it wasn’t goodbye, but rather au revoire.

As I sat in my Park Avenue office after returning from my trip, my focus was nowhere to be seen and my eyes were constantly gazing out the window as I drifted into a daydream that frequently involved me, with a lemon macaroon in hand, clothed in Parisian attire, perusing through the shops on Boulevard Haussmann.  When it comes to men, some things are out of my control – but I knew that unlike any man, Paris would never turn its back on me.  And that’s why I had every intention of going back, and this time for good.  Why couldn’t I drop everything and move to Paris? Nothing had ever made me feel so beautiful or creative or alive in my entire life – and I wanted to feel that way every single day.

As the days marched on and I slowly fell back into my usual routine of gallivanting from charity event to society gala in New York City, the taste of lemon macaroons that lingered on my lips started to fade away.  And that’s when I started to wonder if Paris and I were just a spring fling, or if we were really ready to take this affair to the next level.  And as I reconnected with the people in my life here in the city, my senses weren’t quite as alive as they were in Paris, but I was able to look at my world here and the people in it with a new set of eyes.  Wandering the streets of Paris for the first time made me remember what it felt like as New York and I were first becoming acquainted.  And while the flashing lights and roaring sirens inevitably threw me around a bit when we first started to tango, time brought us closer together.  And now I can confidently say that nowhere in the world feels more like home.

When you really love a man or a woman, you are wholeheartedly enamored by them.  They are the last thing that you think about when you go to sleep at night, and the person you want to share all your secrets with.  And it doesn’t take just any model in a bikini or man in a pinstriped suit to shake your focus.  So when New York had managed to recapture my affection and light up my eyes in only a matter of days after we became reacquainted, I knew all too well that my love for this city was far deeper than the winks from French men and the exquisite ballet that attempted to steal me away in Paris.  I couldn’t leave this city. Because beyond my favorite underground salsa clubs and secret societies, I realized that it’s really the people in our lives who make a place feel like home.

Change is good.  Whether it be meeting new people, visiting a place we’ve always dreamed of going, or taking up that hobby that we were too embarrassed to try, having new stimuli in our lives allows our senses to reignite and creates a spark inside of us.  But over time, more often than not, that spark will start to fade.  And just because something is new or different, it doesn’t mean that it is right.  So in the midst of traveling the world, embracing new experiences, and letting new people into my life, I have come to see that sometimes the most courageous decision is not to leave, but to stay – to immerse yourself in a career, to commit to a person, to fall in love with a city.  And one day, you might just be standing on your favorite street, with a macaroon in one hand and the love of your life in the other, in a city that couldn’t feel more like home.

Finding Your Why

Money, power, status, and intimacy - these are four of the carrots that life dangles in front of us as we run ourselves ragged trying to make them our own.  Through identifying what it is that we think we want and working towards our core motivations, we spend our days charging towards the finish line instead of skipping in circles.  The first step in achieving personal success is taking the time that we each deserve to discover what it is that we really want. What drives you to wake up in the morning and push yourself to the breaking point by the end of every day?  When you look at your life twenty, thirty, or forty years from now, what tangible milestones can you achieve that will make you feel as if you have overcome the potential failures and setbacks that separate the winners from the losers?  Once you know what you want, you can stop floundering in the sea of what-ifs and start devising a conscious roadmap to get to where you want to be.

While identifying the core motivations that drive each one of us is undoubtedly the starting point in living a life of intent, the problem with structuring our lives solely around our core motivations is that we will never have enough. Even if every day we are richer and more powerful than we were yesterday, there will always be more money out there that we can obtain and more aimless wanderers that we can turn into our followers. After we reach a certain benchmark, what used to be a source of healthy motivation morphs into a leech that starts eating away at us, consuming every part of our being.  Instead of charging towards the finish line, we get back on the carousel with all of the other lost wanderers who never knew what they wanted in the first place. 

If we work hard enough and sacrifice enough of our wellbeing to capture the carrots that life dangles in front of us, we may achieve a certain level of success and find ourselves in the midst of a lifestyle that seems too good to be true.  Too many people spend their whole lives devising a design plan that will help them to reach their goals, only to reach the finish line and find themselves more unfilled and unhappy than ever.  Even arguably worse than feeling unaccomplished and unsuccessful altogether is coming to the realization that what you thought you wanted all along never held the potential to make you truly happy in the first place. So while core motivators like money, power, status, and intimacy may prove to be efficient benchmarks of success – they are not a measure of personal utility after a certain point.

There is only one way to find the level of personal fulfillment that is deeper than the intangible green light – and that comes with searching deep within ourselves to find our inner why.  If there were no expectations weighing you down and you could wake up tomorrow and do anything, or be anyone – what would you do? Who would you be?  There is something deeper than the external motivators that tempt us, and that is the inner fire that burns within.  There is something greater that each of us feels destined to accomplish, a mark that we want to leave on the world.  Beyond uncovering our selfish motivations, we need to dig deep within our hearts and minds and find the one thing that makes us feel like we are on top of the world – not temporarily, but indefinitely.  While swimming in a bathtub of hundred dollar bills may make us feel drunk on champagne, the dollars are spent and the feeling fades.  And then what?  We make more money and buy more champagne, pulling us into an endless wheel of temporary satisfaction.  In order to bring meaning and fulfillment to our lives, we need to let our deeper why drive our day-to-day actions.  We need to let our inner passion run wild, and find the one thing that truly makes us feel alive.  While a certain level of money, power, status, and intimacy may give us the foundation to fulfill our greater why, it is not a change in flight class but rather a change in mindset that is going to make all the difference.

A few months back, I lost myself – I was living the life that I thought would take me one step closer to fulfilling my core motivations; but when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t recognize myself anymore.  The more that I leaned over the sea of people and reached out for that green light that seemed within my reach, the more that I came to realize that the tangible accomplishments that I was en route to achieving were not going to make me happy. Instead, they were physically and mentally tearing me apart.  I reached a breaking point, and I knew that I needed to make a change.  As afraid as I was to sit on the expectations that constrained me and put the car in reverse, I knew that going forward in the same direction only meant that one day I would end up running in circles. 

I took a step back, and I spent the time that I needed to reconnect with my greater why. I asked myself the types of questions that I asked you above – out of everything that I have been exposed to in this world so far, what is the one thing that makes me feel the most fulfilled?  When am I genuinely happy living in the moment as opposed to sitting at my desk wishing the day away?  After weeks of reading books, talking to friends in different industries, and staring down at a blank page, I found a place within myself that brought me closer to my greater why.  I realized that while money, status, power, and intimacy are all a part of my roadmap for success, I am truly the happiest when I am mentoring young individuals.  I want to be a positive female role model to help young men and women to find their own sense of motivation, and to help them carve out their own paths to achieve the impossible.  I feel fulfilled when I am creating – when I find a way to build something out of nothing, and I can impact the lives of people around me as a result.

Finding your inner why does not mean that you should throw your core motivations overboard and live your life as a free-for-all.  It simply means that you need to align your core motivations with your deeper why.  For me, that means using the power that I am working to obtain to inspire the lives of those around me, and using the money that I am working to earn to solve problems and create things that can change the world.  Some people will search their entire lives in attempt to find that one thing that will truly make them happy; but a true life mission or deeper sense of purpose comes in different shapes and forms for different people.  The most important thing to acknowledge is that more often than not, your inner why is not going to fall into your lap.  You need to actively commit to living a life of fulfillment and go out and find it yourself.  For months, you may look in the mirror and see a monster, a person that is unrecognizable – but one day when you look in the mirror, you will see your reflection staring back at you.  And when you do, you will know that you are on your way to living not only a life of success, but a life of fulfillment – and once you get a glimpse of how that can change you, you will never look back.

The Power of Divergent Thinking

Your alarm is ringing. The shower is running. Cars are speeding.  People are passing.  Your coffee is spilling. The meeting is starting. Your boss is waiting.  The office is buzzing.  Your husband is calling. Doors are slamming. Dinner is cooking.  Wine is pouring.  Sparks are flying.  Seconds are passing. Minutes turn to hours. And hours to days. And days to weeks. And weeks to months. Time is passing.  My head is spinning.  And the game goes on.

But where were you in all of that? If I had to guess, my bet would be that you were the one spilling the coffee, running late to the office, racing home to cook dinner, drowning your day in wine, and trying to get to bed at a decent hour, all so that you could wake up five hours later to do it all again. Rinse, and repeat.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The majority of people that we encounter on a daily basis have become slaves to the world that society has built for us.  Since elementary school, we have been confined by a set of rules that we are told we must follow in order to get ahead.  If we don’t listen to the teacher in kindergarten, we don’t get to move on to first grade.  And if we don’t follow the rules in first grade, we don’t go on to second.  And so on, and so forth.  But if we conform to the system and study hard enough, we may end up giving the valedictorian speech at our high school graduation, all while being showered in praise by the teachers, parents, and mentors who have guided us along the way.

The problem with grades is that they don’t follow us all the way through life. While a perfect grade point average in high school or college may make us feel like we are the best of the best, we are going to reach a point in our lives where convergent thinking is no longer rewarded.  After university, the rules that have constrained us for the first twenty-two years of our lives no longer set the framework that dictates who succeeds and who fails.  It is at this point in our lives that the game changes.  Yet, too many people continue trying to play the same game that they grew up playing, as it is the only game that they know how to play. 

When we walk out of the gates on our last day of university, it is no longer convergence, but rather divergence that distinguishes the few from the many.  Given that the efficiency of society relies upon conformity, we are often not exposed to the type of divergent thinking that is required to succeed in the later stages of our lives.  If schools were to teach us how to think divergently, we would start asking our teachers ‘why’ - and when brought to scale, this alone holds the potential to uproot the system in its entirety. 

Over time, it becomes second nature for the majority of children and young adults to conform to the rules of the system.  They get so caught up in trying to reach the top, that they lose the ability to seek out the blank space that exists beyond the world that they know.  But for a select few, the idea of conforming eats away at us. From the time that we are little, curiosity drives our everyday actions as we strive to understand all of the layers of the world that we find ourselves in. This desire to use our minds as a tool for deeper exploration follows us all the way through college – and when we receive our diplomas and are finally set free, we are given the opportunity to play our own game, a game in which divergence is rewarded.

Rather than endorsing the conformity of society, the ability to think divergently gives us the opportunity to be the catalyst of change. We can see the world in a way that many others can’t – seeking out problems and building solutions to things that others did not even find to be problematic in the first place.  We may walk and talk like the convergent thinkers that surround us, but we are constantly challenging the assumptions that build the foundation for the world that we find ourselves in.  When set in the right context, the ability to think divergently is the most valuable skill in the world, as it gives us one thing that others don’t have – the ability to implement change.  We are the ones who ensure the growth of the very society that constantly rejected us.

It is never too late to start thinking differently.  Every one of us holds the power to use our imaginations as a tool to innovate – not only to change the world around us, but to change our own lives as well.  Just as with learning any new skill, it is going to take time to train your mind and body to use divergence to your advantage.  Your imagination is your greatest gift, and once you are able to let your inner curiosity run wild, you will have all of the tools necessary to design the world that used to only exist in your dreams.