When I'm not scouring job boards and the "careers" pages of various companies, I try to spend my time on practicing. Most of the time I don't have an end goal in mind when I start or continue a hobby; I don't need to be great at the things I do. I just want to get better (and making progress on any front helps me stay positive in my job search). But real improvement requires practice, and since I have an ever-increasing number of interests and hobbies to choose from, I usually feel like I should be attending to my skills in one of them whenever I have down time.
Sometimes I just need to kick back and do something more passive and unstructured, though. Reading often serves :)
I try to regularly read material that pushes me into a more studious state of mind (like this book - yipes), but getting through the pages of all that tasteless prose can drain my enthusiasm for learning pretty quickly. Anyway, reading in this way is just a different type of practice, so it doesn't really meet my needs for a mental "break." When my mind is feeling fried like it was this evening, I know it's time to get online and get curious. It's like the virtual equivalent of taking a walk downtown. You see things to which all kinds of fun adjectives can be applied.
So, I think I'm going to create a recurring feature of the Activities section of Aspiring Polymath. I'm going call it Curious Things (even though that's a lame title because it's late and I can't think of a better name). Lots of blogs have a similar feature; a short list of links, pertinent to the blog's topic, are posted every other week or so. Since this is a blog about "wide-ranging knowledge," you're going to get links related to a wide range of topics. And you'd better like it!
In the interest of keeping this somewhat coherent, I'll try to stick to one topic per "episode." This week's topic is, of course, jobs!
- What Are You Great At?
- "When the recovery begins...businesses tend to gain ground faster than workers do."
- President Obama's going to talk about jobs - what else? - on the 8th.
- David Brooks discusses what he (and I) think our country will have to do to grow. And finally,
- Wouldn't it would be amazing to do this or this for a living?
Honeymoon testers. What a gas! I wonder, on a related topic, if there are 'retirement testers' -- folks who spend time traveling, dining out, golfing, staying in designated communities, and penny pinching all the while. I'd like that job -- at least until I retire!
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