Category: Thinking

Build up debt for a degree that doesn’t even guarantee you a job? Is University worth it? Are you better off going straight into work or an apprenticeship?

In my opinion, it’s hard to know if the degree alone is worth the money. However, University as a whole is worth every penny! Here are my three main reasons, aside from earning a degree, for why I believe University is the place to be.

1 – The People

When you start at University, you jump into a community of thousands of other people in a similar position as you. It’s no surprise people meet friends for life or even their future husband/wife.

For me, I’ve loved being able to meet like-minded people, who are working on similar things, with similar goals. This is one of the main reasons a number of business students still go to University, rather than start their own venture – they want the network.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people who you meet and think ‘how did they get into University?’ and you won’t get on with everyone. However, it only takes a few new, good people to make it worthwhile.

2 – The Freedom

University is the place to try things! The risks of giving something a go and hating it or failing are low.

Want to try and start a business, give it a try. Want to learn a sport, turn up to practice. If you fail there are no (or very low) consequences, you don’t have a job you’re putting on the line, you don’t have a family you need to provide for, you don’t have a mortgage to pay.

You start as a student and if it all goes wrong, you carry on as a student. The freedom to try is unique and won’t last once ‘in the real world’.

3 – The Time

Despite what many students will tell you, the work load isn’t that big. Around exams or weeks full of deadlines it can become pretty intense, however most of the time you only go to a couple of lectures a day at most and maybe prepare some answers every now and then.

This leaves lots of free time for other things; sports, societies, socialising etc. It’s incredible how many different things you can have on the go at once. If you’re in a 9-5 job it will be really hard to hold up the same level of commitments!

 
Whilst I do enjoy my degree and I do learn lots from it, it isn’t the only reason for being at University, I’m here to take advantage of everything it has to offer!

Social Media ninja Gary Vaynerchuck says no…

Well of course he would. Social Media is the blood of his business and his personal brand. But I think he honestly believes it, and I agree with him.

Let’s first define Anti-Social – google brings up two definitions…

1. contrary to the laws and customs of society, in a way that causes annoyance and disapproval in others.
2. not sociable or wanting the company of others

It’s not hard to know that many people from older generations certainly follow the first definition when complaining about Social Media.

“Look at them on their phones. Whatever happened to talking to one another?”

Well, I hope the photo for this blog points out the slight hypocrisy of this….

That’s not to say I completely disagree with this opinion. If people are choosing to play games on their phone, rather than talk to other people, then they’re being anti-social by the second definition.

However, when it comes to Social Media, you aren’t acting alone. The whole purpose of Social Media is to interact with others. See what others are up to, let people know what you’ve done and talk with other people. Surely that’s the definition of being sociable?

In my opinion, the whole debate surrounding Social Media revolves around the first definition of anti-social… “customs of society”. Younger people who have grown up with Social Media don’t see it as much of an issue. The older generation who are becoming accustomed to it are more likely to despise its constant use. It can also be noted that those who use Social Media more, will be more likely to side with it due to them discovering more capabilities and opportunities of Social Media. I’ve met and become friends with a number of people through Social Media. These are people I now know in person, but the initial contact came from Social Media. To me, that’s being sociable. However, if your friends or followers are only a small group of people you see in person anyway, then you won’t necessarily see any added benefits.

So what’s the answer to this question? Should we use Social Media less? I think not. However, when we use it might need to change. If someone is sitting next to you wanting a conversation, don’t get your phone out. However, if you’re on a bus or train, you’re not expected to talk to a stranger, feel free to be on your phone talking to someone else.

Hard work is the key to success right? If you want to succeed, you need to maximise your time and work as hard as you can. Work, eat, sleep, repeat.

Not only is that ridiculously hard, it’s probably really unhealthy. The first reason people have as to why this approach to each day is unhealthy, is the reality that people in this situation probably start to sleep less. Yes, this isn’t always the best idea, but not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep, some can function off 5. When it comes to sleep, it’s not always about how much you sleep, it’s about what you do in the day. If you are active and have a reason to be awake with energy, you’ll probably find it. So why is working hard and being ‘active’ all day a bad thing? Personally I believe it is just as important to ‘re-charge’ during the day by finding your release.

Before I get to my main point, I will mention the benefits of exercise. It’s proven that if you want to increase your energy, exercise helps! It gets blood flowing and your muscles moving. I won’t go into the science behind it (I’d be guessing anyway), however if you want to increase your energy levels, give exercise a go.

I believe, however, that as well as a physical aspect to get you moving and give you more energy, it is really important to get a mental re-charge. This is where your release comes in. Is there a hobby you have or sport you play where you find you can ‘lose yourself’? You lose any concerns, you either relax or fill with positive energy. I find these activities allow me to rest the part of my brain that I use to work. I might be thinking really hard on the activity, but it is a different form of mental energy.

For me, badminton is a big release. Playing for even an hour helps re-energise my mind, even if physically it has drained me. Another release for me currently is learning to play the guitar. I won’t lie, I’m rubbish, but I think that’s part of why I love it. I really enjoy spending five or ten minutes attempting to play a song. It’s a different challenge to that of my work. I have a friend that has taken up Salsa dancing and improv comedy as a form of release. Entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuck, travelled to watch every NY Jets game this season, despite constantly telling people they need to maximise their time. Why did he do it, in his words, it was the one ‘stupid’ thing he has in his life where he doesn’t need to worry. This is his release.

If you don’t have a release, try a few things out. It might really help!

Passion is a word that has come up in a number of conversations I’ve had recently. Referred to by some of my friends as the ‘p-word’. It has surprised me how many people detest the word, how many people think it’s over used and how many people think it can actually be a barrier to success.

It’s often said that you should do something you love. If you don’t love what you do, keep looking. As summarised by Steve Jobs –

“You’ve got to find what you love. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

The conversations I’ve had, have centred on what exactly should you have passion for? And, at what point do you just need to go for something, even if it isn’t your biggest passion?

If you’d asked me a week ago what I thought on this. I probably would have produced some words similar to those from Jobs. If you ask me now, I’ll say the same, but I’ll add a bit more. Here’s what I’ll add:

“But remember, you have to keep looking! Not sitting around waiting”

You may know what you’re passionate about. You may not have a clue. You might think you know, but when you start exploring, you discover new passions.

You have to learn through doing and trying to discover what you enjoy. We aren’t born knowing what makes us happy. We learn that through experiences.

A lot of people will try and narrow or focus their search for work at a very young age to try and fit their passions. Yet, those passions could be different in 10, 20 or 30 years. You’re passions could lie in a field you don’t know exists. Meaning, trying different areas and getting a wide variety of experiences is important. It gives you the first-hand experience to make informed decisions.  

If you sit around and wait for your dream job to come around, you will always be waiting. You have to go and look – by doing and trying!

“Once you believe you know what you’re passionate about, think about the actual context where it applies”

This is a particularly important one.

Why create a startup in the education industry if you aren’t passionate about education? Why want to invent a service that makes washing up obsolete if you aren’t passionate about having clean plates?

Because the passion can lie in the process!

Your passion may be to create a game changing product. Or you might love living a hustler’s life. The journey may be your enjoyment, no matter the direction that journey follows. If your passion is for the path, then you need to take any road you can onto that path.

What does this mean? If you’re passionate about creating art. Maybe there’s little difference to you between oil painting and graphic design. If you’re passionate about animals, maybe you’d enjoy being a vet just as much as being a zoo keeper.

I have always been a strong believer that you should always do things you enjoy. I also really like the word passion. It’s a word I use and is something I look for in others. Passion can be one of the most powerful drivers and a huge key to success. However, I can completely see how it can be a hindrance. Don’t let the thought “I’m not passionate about X and so I shouldn’t partake in Y because it incorporates X” stop you. Y could be the path that most suits you!

If you want to read more around the debate of passion, check out this (better) blog – Do you have to love what you do?

I admire anyone who has the will to improve themselves in some way. Whether it’s by losing weight, reading more or even smiling more often. Any improvement, big or small, is a step in the right direction. It is at this time of year that my social media feeds are full of posts stating such aims, I like to see the positivity, however it seems rather pointless if these aims aren’t being met in a month’s time. What’s going wrong?

Goal setting is a skill. You can set bad goals that you will fail to achieve. It isn’t always a matter of will power, sometimes people’s goals just don’t ‘tick the boxes’ we need to see them through.

Clarity

When it comes to setting a goal, clarity is key. You have to know what it is you want to achieve. “I want to lose weight”, isn’t clear enough. You’re mind doesn’t know exactly what it is trying to achieve, thus it doesn’t know how determined to be.

If you instead set a goal that said “I want to lose 3lbs this month.” You know what you want to achieve and by when. You are able to monitor your progress – if you’ve lost a pound after week one, you’re on track, if you haven’t lost anything after 2 weeks, you need to get a move on!

This approach also allows you to take advantage of guilt. If at the end of the month you haven’t met your target, you might feel guilty. Don’t feel bad about this. The guilt drive is powerful and can be used to push you even harder in month two.

If your goal is ambiguous, your feelings towards it will be as well. If your aims are clear, so is your focus.

Reason

Why do you want to achieve this goal? Sometimes a goal can be autotelic. However, often we set ourselves goals that are in place for some larger purpose, yet we rarely try to think what that purpose is. Why do you want to read more? Is it to learn more about a certain subject? Maybe you want to win your local pub quiz for once. Think about the wider picture and have a reason for why you are setting the goal. It gives you something separate from the work to aim for.

Think about an athlete running in the morning. Rarely do they get up early and go for a run just because they want to (unless they are a runner). Often it is because it is part of their training for their sport, they are doing it to achieve in their sport, not in the running itself, that part is just a stepping stone.

Commitment

Commitment means staying true to what you said you were going to do, long after the mood you said it in has left.

It is super easy to stand there at 11:55 on December 31^st, probably with a drink in your hand and say that you will go to the gym 3 times a week in 2016. It’s not so easy when you wake up at 8am to try and do it.

Why? Because we don’t think consistently. We have different moods.

This is the main issue with New Year’s resolutions. They are set as part of the hype. ‘The New Year is coming and it’s going to see new determination in me’. The truth is, when the New Year starts, NOTHING CHANGES. You don’t change as a person just because the earth has finished an orbit around the sun and so how can you expect yourself to suddenly have new motivation?

This is why New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t be set in the New Year. Turn around to yourself in the middle of March and set your goals. Do it in November as winter comes. Set your goals when you, yourself have decided you want to change. This way they are being set because there is motivation within you to improve, not because your mind is getting caught up in the New Year resolution’s fallacy.

My first term of second year at university ended rather abruptly due to the flooding in Lancaster! Despite being a week shorter than expected, it was still full of stories to tell and lessons to learn. Somehow I think it managed to be even better than my first term last year (yes, the first term of being a fresher! I thought that term would be impossible to beat!)

Let’s get straight to it – here are the two main things this term has taught me…

The right people can make any situation enjoyable

My days are full of lectures, working in the library, meetings and then probably back to the library. I can’t remember a single time I worked in the library last year, now I’m there until maybe 7/8pm consistently. These longer days are only made possible by spending them with the right people.

The thought of working in the library for 3-4 hours isn’t fun, but agreeing to go with a friend and then go for a drink after makes the evening as a whole good fun! Rushing from meeting to meeting can be exhausting, but if those meetings are with people you enjoy spending time with, it can help energise you. After a long day working, it can be difficult to give maximum effort at sport training, but having a good relationship with you team makes it easy!

Worry less, laugh more

It is so important to be able to laugh at yourself. You can’t control everything, not everything you do has to be taken seriously, sometimes you have to just relax and laugh.

Last month I agreed to be one of the faces of Global Entrepreneurship Week around the university. I was more than happy to help support the events and so I gladly went along to a photoshoot. A week or so later the sample promotion was sent over…

I looked over a rough copy, suggested a couple of changes and agreed for it to be printed.
A week later I saw my face everywhere! There were over 15,000 little versions of me all around the university. That alone would be too much for some people, it wouldn’t help that within the first day it was pointed out to me that in the printed flyers, it looked like I was wearing lipstick…

Alongside all the mini-me’s there was one, not so mini version….

I soon saw myself on a learning zone window – a version that was bigger than me.

A number of people asked what I thought, expressing they’d be embarrassed… I loved it!

I know the picture isn’t great and that I literally am everywhere, but I’d rather laugh about it and when I would receive pictures and messages like this…

… I certainly did laugh!

The main aim of a business is to make money.
The main aim of a business is to make a change.

Let’s see what you think! Once you’ve read this blog, come back and vote for what you think a business should aim for.

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When starting a business, what should you aim for? It seems as though the above two should go hand in hand, and they can do. However, the more I’ve looked around at people starting businesses, their core aims usually differ, siding with one of the two.

Making Money

A business is there to make profit, right?

Find a business model that will make money and implement it so that it slightly differs to what already exists so that it can capture customers and make money. The differentiation can come from operating in a different area, applying an already proven business model to a new product or even just undercutting competitors in price.

To me, this approach covers the stereotypical entrepreneur’s ‘first venture’. Countless stories of entrepreneurs selling drinks, sweets or small items in schools. The only thing new about this, is the location, and it works! The model is proven – if you have the motivation to implement it, you will see the rewards.

The approach certainly still exists in large corporations, I’d argue budget car companies take on this approach. They aren’t investing to invent new cars, they are simply taking what exists and making it available to a new section of customers.

In my opinion (or guess as I really haven’t experienced the development of these enough to know conclusively) the initial set up and implementation of these businesses can be promising. They may grow rather quickly. However, turning it from a solid business that has concurred the niche it set out to exploit, e.g. a new area, into a leader in the industry is extremely difficult. There may be hundreds or thousands of similar businesses. Why will you be the one to take the lead, to be the one to expand out of your niche? It is at this stage, that the ability of the individual entrepreneur takes precedence, as it is up to them to make the decisions that will ultimately determine the success of the company.

Making a Change

A business is there to make a change, of course?

Make a change to your local area, disrupt an industry or change how people interact with other people or things. A business should look to create something new that adds value or improves people’s lives by solving a problem.

This approach now covers the more current ‘Silicon Valley Entrepreneur’ stereotype. “What we’re creating will change how people pay for their shopping forever” or “we want to change how people interact online, we want to make communication personal again”. They can be very big statements, they can sound genius or crazy. They need visionaries to take the lead and a team full of passion to work on it when the results are non-existent.

These businesses can take years to bring in substantial results, most won’t succeed at all. However, in my opinion there is something rather special about these businesses – they’re exciting!
Both approaches have, and will always have, a place in the world of business – in fact they are both needed! But which approach is preferred, which approach do the business people of today aspire to follow? You tell me!

Working hard is a great way to move forward and get ahead. But working hard does not mean working non-stop, using every second to ‘be productive’. If you want to truly be productive you need to work smart.

I recently read an article titled ‘The 7 Rules of Personal Productivity’. It offers some interesting opinions, however it is a select few of those 7 that I focus on – rules 2, 6 and 7. Why these? Because they tell you not to work [all the time].

Rule 2 – Know yourself

Knowing your working limits. Not everyone can work 12 hours a day, others can work more. Understand where your limits are now and work to it and just beyond.

Imagine you wanted to run a marathon, you wouldn’t jump straight in and go. You’d train,  starting small and building up. But also, know when to rest. If you had a particularly hard training session one day, your body might need to rest the next. The same is true for your mind – if one day you have a particularly taxing day mentally, take time to recover and restore your mental capacity. Over time it will build up and you will be able to go for longer and longer, but be patient, nothing happens overnight!

Rule 6 – Work when you have to, not when you don’t

“As long as you work hard when you have to and when it counts, you can take time off and screw around when it doesn’t.”

You don’t have to spend every second of every day working. Add other things to your day for variety and for enjoyment. It is important to make sure you still do the things that make you happy. Support a local football team? Go and support them every week! Like to cook? Make sure you have enough spare time to cook proper meals for yourself.

This doesn’t mean doing the bare minimum amount of work. It means finding the amount you need to do the best you can do! If time spent on a task and peak performance were plotted on a diagram, it would be curved – find the optimum.

Rule 7: Take Care of Yourself

You need food and rest. You need a balance.

To be productive you need to prepare you mind and body to work hard. That means fuelling it properly, recovering properly and switching off when needed. Eat food with family without talking about work, go to the gym and listen to music. Find something that switches your mind off from work, then when it’s time to get going again you will be raring to go!!

If you don’t feel happy and healthy you can’t work to your best. Push yourself and find where your limits are. Be patient and respect what your body and mind tells you. It takes time to be able to run a marathon.