My friend in grad school called me fuming.

“Lauren,” she said. “I’m sick of this.” I could hear her pacing up and down the corridors of the library, her boots echoing, the faint buzz of school chatter pulsing in the background.

“Should I write my final paper on the bullshit that I know the professor wants and will get me an A, or should I write it on my idea that I believe in, that is different, but will probably get me a C.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Well.”

And I thought abut grad school which often isn’t a lofty quest for knowledge since most masters programs are cash cows for universities and a box to be checked by professionals clawing their way to the top. They’re also a repository of  confused twenty-something year olds.

“Why are you in grad school, anyway?”

“To make my resume look more legit.”

“Are you trying to be a thought leader?”

“In my profession”

“In academia?”

“No.”

“Then start a blog.”

I told her about my anthropology professor in college who got tenureship and stopped publishing, just blogging

“You’re right,” she said.

“Am I?” I questioned.

“I don’t have time to play their games anymore.”

And I understood her.

Because In many ways I have spent a good part of my post college years unlearning education.

You see, in your entire life up until you graduate from college you are taught that learning happens in a classroom. Your education is guided by a teacher, hopefully wise, who tells you what to read, what to write, what to produce, and how you will be judged.

In many ways, succeeding in school is paramount to succeeding in checking boxes, understanding what someone wants and then producing that exact thing.

Which is fine. You can still be smart there, within the boundaries. This system of clear expectations is relevant to entry-level jobs.

But it is entirely irrelevant to jobs that are now becoming increasingly valuable in our economy: thought based jobs, where you’re paid to be a big giant brain floating around your office, spewing brilliance and making a vision that has never been seen before come to life.

Perhaps that’s not the point of academia anyway – to be forward thinking. Academia is about observing, synthesizing, evaluating carefully what has happened  from a safe distance away. I can recall hours of my life in college spent cloistered away in a library writing papers about things that I would never experience.

I assume this is different from the sciences, but I don’t know. Does most innovation in the sciences happen in universities or in giant labs owned by corporations? Probably both – the corporations fund the universities. Tell me in the comments below, I would love to hear

Anyway, my point is this: it’s important to be different and brilliant, but it’s important to know where that needs to be and where it will count. And I’m starting to think that academia may not be the place.

Look around you. Everything you see will be dead in 100 years. Do you have time for this?

(My answer: Most definitely yes.)

This is what I compare my perfctionist tendencies to: a pond on a  beautiful day. The clouds shine, the water shimmers, and  as I wade around and around in this beautiful, stagnant hole I go aboslutely nowhere.

This is what I compare my perfunctory tendicies to: a wild, racing river. The water rushes down crags, water falls, and valleys. It pours and roars, moving fast, onward through the next  wild piece of land, going everywhere.

Perfectionism is about staying back,  revisiting and revising.

Perfuntory is pushing forward, doing what needs to get done simply, mechanically so you can go and go and go.

Perfection is at the top of the charts, being perfunctory is somewhere in the middle.

This is my question: How do you balance perfection with getting things done? Is it beter to be perfect or perfunctory? What do you think?

1.) No one knows what they’re doing. Seriously. 90% of people are stumbling along in their jobs trying to make sense of whatever they have been hired to do. Things are changing too fast to have 20 years of experience in anything. When you go to the interview, say you can do it, and research you ass off afterwards.

2.) Be your own university. No one is going to teach you anything. The corporate he-haw of starting from the bottom with an assigned mentor and racking up experience to make it to the top is antiquated. Teach yourself stuff. Buy how-to books and scour the internet for tutorials.

3.) Follow your heart. Do that thing– the thing you should be doing right now. What is that? Shhh. Listen. It’s screaming at your right now.

4.) Life is long. Try something on. Doesn’t fit? Try something again. I told you that here.

5.) People want to help you. Go up to that person you never imagined would give you the time of day and say, “I want to learn from you. I want to ask you questions. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

6.) Say Yes to that job that you’re unsure of, that seems random and weird, that could be great or could be horrible. Because yes opens doors, because yes is hopeful, because yes teaches you so many things that languishing around in “no” could never do.

7.) Your degree means nothing. It’s a checkbox to get you in the game, and after that? Prove yourself.

8.) Don’t Go to Grad School. It’s expensive and behind the times because it takes academia years to cycle technology into curriculum. It will teach you things that you could have learned on the job while making money, and most people want to go to grad school whenever they’re lost and unsure of what to do next. Just do something next. Anything. A waitress, a paralegal, a maintenance man, whatever you need to survive and continue. Keep on doing something next until you find what you love.

9.) You should learn to surf. I’ll teach you if you live in New Orleans.

10.) The anxiety will pass. I promise.

11.) Bonus! Share your own bit of mortal wisdom in the comments below, and I’ll choose one to go here. We need some comments from mermaids AND mortals here.

Have you ever been in the mountains, tens of thousands of feet away from the solid, sea-level earth? You feel like you are hovering not here, nor there, but somewhere else. This is what 2011 felt like for me.

This year was really, really tough for me.

Did you know that? Did you sense my worry, my sleepless nights, the anxiety that welled up inside me like a ghost? I hope you didn’t. I hope you peered at my Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and thought, what a strong bold Mermaid that one is, unstoppable, effervescent, beaming like a winter sun. That’s how you need to look in tough times to everyone else.

But you’re not everyone else. You’re someone who reads this blog because I promised to be honest with you, so I won’t try to be the winter sun here, the cold hard beams that touch you and make you feel colder. That isn’t me, here.

This year I’ve had to make major decisions in every single thing that I do and be and live by, and those decisions feel heavier then they did when I was 23 or 24. I’m 26 now. I gaze in the mirror and I’m still young, but less young. I have time, but less time. I feel like I’m putting on a suite and it’s slowly zipping me up into adulthood.

I’ve realized that the hardest thing about growing up is not the DOING of tough adult-like things like work and houses and investments, but those in-between phases when you’re doing nothing. When you’re choosing what to do next. Your own liminality is the hardest pat of adulthood. That’s a word I learned in anthropology class, liminal, to be something that is not here or there but in-between, the threshold of a door, the tip top of a peak where men and mountain gods meet.

But you know what made me feel better? This first line of a story that Rose Finn wrote when she was 8. Rose was my editor for an article I wrote, and she’s also a writer, but that’s all I know about her. I couldn’t find her on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, those places where I hope I look tough and strong. But I found her here saying things we all know but always forget:

“Hi, my name is Amy. My parents died in a car crash. But I’m okay now, because it’s fall, and the leaves are crisp.”

Do you see this plant? How neon-green it's leaves are, how red it's trunk shines? It only grows in swamps, but during Katrina it drifted in the flood waters and rooted randomly in my front yard. We kept it. We transplanted it in my backyard. It spread, and now, my yard is full of glowing, green plants, shining brilliantly in that other-worldly way..

When everyone at the luncheon started crying, I was trying to login to Twitter.

My phone had been giving me a headache the whole lunch– it seemed that the company Twitter password had changed, and I didn’t know it. I couldn’t load Hoot Suite. I couldn’t login with the Android Twitter app. I was trying to live tweet from the French Quarter Business Association luncheon about the Louisiana Bicentennial, to no avail.

What’s the new Twitter password? I texted my colleague.

She texted it back to me. But it hasn’t been working, she said.

I was trying for the umpteenth time to validate the Twitter account when General Honore approached the podium and started speaking.

Do you know who General Honore is? If you’re from New Orleans you do, but if you’re not he’s the guy who stepped in during the darkest moment of Hurricane Katrina and saved the city from an even darker moment.  Mayor Nagin called him that “John Wayne Dude” who “ came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving,”

Nagin said this the moment before crying on live, national radio.

Honore started talking about Katrina, about stepping into the city and telling the soldiers to stop pointing their guns at us because we were citizens. About a woman saying that her brother died in Vietnam and that she had hated the military until this day, when the military saved her life.

And right then and there General Honore started crying.  A 6 foot-something military man was choking back sobs in front a room of 70 business people. Suddenly, the entire room was sniffling, sobbing, dabbing eyes and blinking back tears. There we were, over six years after Katrina in a New Orleans that had come so far, a city that was so hopeful, so vibrant, so on the verge of something great, and right beneath the surface was that ache of all we had lost, the more potent ache what could have been lost: everything.

I put down my phone. This was important, this room of crying business people on a humid Thursday afternoon in the French Quarter, six years after Katrina.

After the speach a client of my company came up to me. “You were glued to your phone the whole time! I almost sent you this text,” he flailed his Blackberry in front of me. “In fact, I’m going to send it to you right now.” He pressed send and my phone lit up with, Stop looking at your phone and look at Honore!

I protested, reminding him that this was why he had hired me, because I was always glued to my phone, but something inside me knew that I was wrong. Yes, being connected all the time was my job, but it was also my job to know that Twitter, Facebook, this blog that I’m writing on right now— it’s all useless without our own communities, online and offline.

I remember my own Katrina story: the flood waters that miraculously swept right beneath the floor of my parents house, how the floorboards buckled as the moisture pressed beneath, waiting to get in, but somehow remained one inch shy of flooding the entire house.

I remember my harp at night. How the strings would snap from the ninety-degree heat and my parents thinking they were gunshots.

This was Katrina: harp strings snapping and gunshots everywhere.

I can share this experience with you and give you a glimpse into who I am, who we all are here in New Orleans, what this city meant to us during Katrina and how much more it means to us now, all because of the internet.

But we all need to disconnect sometimes, maybe right now. Do it. You. Put the phone down, shut down the computer, power off the ipad and relish in the great, moving moments exist all around us, all of the time.

Tell me, how do you unplug? When do you unplug? 

One of the biggest things I love about New Orleans is that it’s driven by relationships.

One of the biggest things I hate about New York City is that it’s driven by money.

When I lived in NYC, everyone was obsessed with money: having it, not having it, wanting it, spending too much of it.

And in New Orleans? We’re obsessed with one another—talking to each other, having coffee with one each other, saying hi to each other, recognizing each other in our really random Mardi gras costumes. The priority here is people first, music second, and somewhere down that long list of food and festivals, money, because we need money to have languorous lunches to obsess about one another at.

Maybe that’s why there’s no toiling in the Big Easy: we know the most important thing in life is the people you care about.

Maybe that’s why visitors come and never leave: because community springs up everywhere.

When I was five I told my parents that I wanted to play the harp.

They looked at each other and then at me and said, “Play the piano first.”

So I did. My piano teacher was named Ms. Kitty and she was a strict, Christian lady who made me count out loud every time I played. To this day, I still count to myself when I practice. To this day, Ms. Kitty still sends me letters asking me if I’m playing the piano.

When I was nine, I told my parents, “I play the piano. Now I want to play the harp.”

A harp teacher was offering discounted group lessons after school in the music room. So they signed me up.

And that first day, as I walked into that room ready to proudly start playing the harp, there were kids who had already been playing the harp for one year. While I fumbled around trying to figure out which string was what note, they breezed through melodies, plucked out tunes, performed fancy glissandos.

I felt that I had missed the boat. Why hadn’t my parents let me play the harp when I was seven? I would have been playing for almost three years by now and I would have been so good, I would probably be able to play in youth orchestra.

It was going to take me forever to catch up.

This is how I felt at age 10.

And this is also how so many of us feel at age 20, 30, 40, even 60. We didn’t start an instrument, our careers, a language at some magical age, 10? 17? 20? and our brain went into lockdown and whatever talents we managed to eck out by sheer luck and childhood fancy, are the ones that we are destined with forever. If we haven’t learned music, mastered a language, become a writer, we never will.

Thus the people who sigh, “I wish had learned the piano when I was young. It would be such a great talent to have.”

And the others that pine, “If only they had offered Spanish in school when I was ten. I would be bilingual.”

And me who shouts, “Shut up and starting practicing!” Because piano playing and language speaking might be easier at younger ages, but they can come greatly at any age if you decide to sit down, practice, and persist.

If you start playing the harp diligently each day when you’re forty, by the time you’re sixty you will have twenty years of harp playing under your belt.  You’ll probably be able to play in the symphony, all before you’ve reached the ripe old retirement age of 65.

Speaking of jobs, if you completely switched careers at age 40, you have 25 years to pursue and perfect your new job until retirement. And if you start working at 25 (the average time we all start), and consider that it takes 15 years to become a jedi master at whatever you do, you’ll have enough room to perfect three different careers in your lifetime.

I challenge you to stop the job you hate, and find the one you love right now.

I challenge you to listen to that song that you love and learn how to play it.

Because we’re never too old to start doing the things that we love

It started during the raffle. I was leaning against a big column and sipping my glass of water (I already knew that this was NOT going to be a wine kind of night), when my body broke out in convulsions.

I grabbed my shoulders.

“Are you cold, or is it just me?” I asked the guy who was talking about his job in sales.

“Uhh, no, I’m actually hot!” He said waving his hand over his ruddy face like a fan.

I took a deep breath and calmed the shivering for one second. Then my teeth started chattering.

He looked at me.

“I gotta go,” I said, and I ran out of the building into the 100 degree August New Orleans heat, inhaling a big breath of marsh fire (that’s another story) and I felt better. Kind of.

I knew I was getting sick in a very predictable way, when your body functions on a fragile film of adrenaline, waiting for that one single moment when all of those essential duties have been completed and it can officially go into catastrophe mode.

So off I schlepped to bed and then to the doctor early in the morning who said: you have an ear infection.

And I immediately thought: blue tooth.

I thought blue tooth because I know when I stand around talking on my blue tooth, gesturing to no one, my ear lighting up like a Christmas tree, I look like a corporate shmuck. An infection from that would totally serve me right.

Either way, I had to work through it.

You see, when you’re sick, you don’t want to do anything. You don’t want to work, or do yoga, or pet your cat, or even eat cupcakes. But you still have to do some of those things.

Which of course is eating cupcakes, but after that it’s work. Because work is what sustains us and gives us the ability to go to the doctor (with insurance).

So on Thursday, when I woke up and my fever had subsided, I sat down at my desk and I worked.

Calmly, systematically, and straightforwardly. I couldn’t work with that some blue-tooth overdrive that I usually do— loud, passionate voice (yes I talk a little loudly sometimes), flailing hands (I gesture wildly). But I could work with lightness, focused simply on one the one single task in front of me, and then the next.

And it struck me that this was the first time in a long, long time that I was truly in the moment at work.

It made me wonder if all of this grumbling that we do about our jobs—how we’d rather be doing something else, how we feel oppressed by whatever tedious work we say we have to do– is simply us not being present in the moment. When I’m working, I would rather be doing yoga. When I’m doing yoga, I would rather be writing. When I’m writing, I would rather be playing the harp.

But when we focus on the thing we need to get done, there is calmness, lightness. As I did everything I needed to get done on that sick working day, each thing I completed brought me closer to the end of the day (and sleep!), but each thing I did brought my forward in life in some little way, too. I could feel that so acutely as I worked on that sick day.

And this was one of those tiny revelations that I would never have had if I had been sitting there with my blue tooth shoved in my ear, typing tweets at 100 WPM, frantically trying to fit an entire year of work, life, and passions into one single day.

I think I might just bring that calmness back with me when I get better.

And I think I might just ditch the blue tooth.

This is my VW bus parked on a moonscape like beach on the gulf coast. Something about the sparseness of this picture reminds me that when we strip our lives of all the junk we don't need, we're only left with our dreams. In my case, a bus, two surfboards, and the endless ocean.

I felt like I was destined to sit at the head of the table with the question that had been assigned to me, “If you didn’t have to work another day in your life, what would you do?”

It was perhaps the most important question that you or I might ever have to answer. The hardest question we might all have to answer because secretly it’s asking, what are your dreams that you’re too terrified to pursue?

I was at a networking night put on by an amazing organization in New Orleans, 504ward. They connect young passionate people in the community with established professionals with the end goal of helping retain talent in New Orleans.

We had all been assigned random seats for dinner so we could network, and little pieces of paper with icebreaker questions had been placed at each table setting. I picked up mine and turned it over in my hands, wondering when I should spring the question. Not now. Everyone needed to do their first intros and how-do-you-dos.

In the middle of the entrée, when conversation had simmered down to a lull, I pounced.

“I have the best question in the world,” I said picking up the small piece of paper with purpose. The table hushed, everyone gazed up. “If you didn’t have to work another day in your life, what would you do?”

Silence. The clinks of forks and then, like the roaring of a tumultuous ocean, an army of Hmmms.  “Never thought about that, hmmm” and “Hmmm, that’s a good question.” Hmmm this and hmmm that.

I picked a woman and said, “We’ll start with you.”

“Me?” She said, doubtfully. “Well, okay. Let me think about it.” She thought and thought and thought and finally said, “I would travel.”

“Travel!” I exclaimed. “I love to travel. Where would you go?”

“Hmmm.” She stalled. “Well, I’ve never thought about that.”

I go onto the next person, but he was even more confounded than the first. “I don’t know. I like my job. Well, uh, I guess I would travel too.”

“Where?” I asked, hopeful that he would at least have an answer to this one.

“Uh, Europe?” As if he was asking my permission to dream about traveling to Europe.

As I went around the table, every single person had the same lackluster response. Vague answers like, I would travel, or I would move to an island somewhere in the Caribbean.

I couldn’t wait for my turn because I had a long laundry list of seething, breathing, living dreams. I wanted to share it with them, hear their thoughts, talk about how this could all become possible.

But no one ever asked me.

Do you see this? It's a native trout that my boyfriend caught in a stream in New Jersey. One of his dreams fulfilled.

After I turned to the last person at the table, asking the question one more time for emphasis, brandishing the little piece of paper in the air like a sword, the conversation quickly turned to something else. How hot August was in New Orleans.

I thought to myself, how are we not able to iterate our dreams on the spot?

And then I thought to myself, why doesn’t anyone care about my dreams?

Already, at twenty-whatever, we are all dangerously close to losing ourselves. We have fallen into that treacherous hole where the work you do for someone else dominates you. Your dreams seep out of you, leached away slowly, almost imperceptibly until you’re a skeleton of who you once were. You’re like rich, beautiful soil sucked of nutrients.

It scares me that no one had an answer to that question, but it terrifies me that no one cared what other people’s dreams were.

Where did we get to a place where a dozen twenty-somethings don’t have dreams that are on the tip of their tongue, rapid-fire ready to take flight?

I love dreamers. The passion in their voice, the way that they walk around with that shine in their eye, willing the world to become their vision.

Dreaming is innate; it’s what our ancestors did when they drifted across the big wide ocean to America, and what the greatest executives and change makers have done every second of their lives.

What is wrong with us?

Near the end of the dinner, a guy that I had talked to at the cocktail hour approached me. “You work in tech, right? I have an idea for a business.”

We sat down at a table and in a passionate hush we talked about his idea, why it would work and why it wouldn’t work. The world faded around us, it was just rapid fire back and forth.

This is what I had expected at a dinner with 70 twenty-somethings. This. Exact. Thing.

And I realized that maybe not everyone has it them to fight to keep their dreams alive. Every single day it is a battle to cling to your dreams because when you get home from work, tired, exhausted, hungry you do not write the novel, or play the banjo, or work on the business idea that’s been haunting you for months.

That’s why I’m writing this at 6:30 AM outside my neighborhood coffee shop that hasn’t opened yet. It’s the first thing I do this morning because it’s the most important thing I will do today.

This is the first time updating my blog in almost two months. I’m vowing to never let it go this long. Because blogging about stuff that I care about is one of my dreams.

So tell me, are you a dream-fighter? What are your dreams?