AU Blogspot

          Thanks to Axel Tregoning for permission to use this Photo. 

Josh Hinds is the author of Why Perfect Timing is a Myth: Tips for Staying Inspired and Motivated Day in and Day out! and also a great friend of the Ashworth Blogspot community.  One thing that’s great about working with Josh is that he truly believes in helping others reach their potential.  He’s been consistently willing to sharing his insights with our student community since the AU Blogspot was first launched.  I mention this because sometimes people have cynical perspectives on so-called motivational gurus.  Well, I can assure you that Josh would never classify himself in those terms and his track record of inspiring people speaks for itself.  The following podcast is rather brief, but contains a very powerful message about “leaving your mark” in life.  If you find yourself inspired by Josh, don’t hesitate to stop by his terrific blog, Get Motivation, and show your appreciation.  We’d also love to hear from you in the comments section of this post.  Click here to listen.  Have a great day! 

Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University   

 
           Thanks to Mario Hernandez for permission to use this Photo.

Have you ever wondered where your resume went after you submitted it (either online or in person)? The most obvious answer is that it is given to someone who is in charge of hiring, and then from there it was perhaps passed on to a higher authority, but it likely ended with the first person, right? Wrong.

The number of people that are likely to see your resume may surprise you, and though it varies from company to company, you can bet that at least 3 people are going to see it. In larger companies and corporations, that number grows to 5.  This may seem like a trivial detail, but it brings to light one very important question: who do you have your resume geared toward?

Things brings about a series of skills that are commonly referred to as “technical communication” skills, as you are going to have to find a way to clearly and concisely say what you need to without offending anyone or having someone misinterpret something that you’ve said.

Neutral Language

Neutral language is important in delivering a message without appearing biased or sexist. One of the major sources of contention in the last few years has been the emergence of a much larger and more powerful female workplace than before, yet the masculine-oriented terms have not yet been replaced. You have absolutely no way of knowing how important issues like this will be to the people that will be reviewing your resume, so it is best to avoid the problem entirely by using neutral language. Neutral language is good because it can be expressive and meaningful without creating implied meaning. It may take a bit of work for you to start writing in neutral language, but once you do it’s easy to switch between “normal” and neutral language.

The obvious applications are terms like “Policeman” (Police Officer), “Fireman” (Fire Fighter), and “Mailman” (Postal Worker). Terms like these are easy to replace, and though it is unlikely that you would need to use them on your resume, taking the time to consciously avoid using sexist language may land you a job. (more…)

 
              Thanks to Lukas Bergstrom for permission to use this Photo.

This is the season when people finishing college or grad school begin to wonder about how the heck they’re going to get gainfully employed. It seems like such a hurdle - and, from the point of view of a new graduate, almost anybody who has a job doing something related to what they want to do appears to be so safe and secure.

I remember when I was just finishing theater and film schools, envying the technicians on the sets of television shows. They had a place to come in every morning, knew their jobs, got to play with knobs and keyboards, and were part of the production of a creative product. Until I manged to get my own writing career going, I took a number of jobs like this - even running the sound board for a musical in LA with Sam Harris (the 1980’s Star Search winner), for $35/hour. It was heaven - working three or four hours a night, getting great pay, and being part of a theater production, even if it wasn’t in the most creative capacity. (more…)

In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It’s a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life.  It’s a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever.  It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is.  It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation.

And this play begins at work.

Establishing a playful career or company isn’t as easy as it looks.  It doesn’t require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company’s culture based on some abstract ideal.  But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival - not just in business school, but for the past five centuries!  Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

A Harvard Business School professor told me that more than half of his students leave their corporate jobs within two years, disgusted not just by the company for which they worked, but “the whole world of business.” Invariably, they choose jobs or start their own companies in order to participate in projects they feel offer meaning and fun.  In a recent study of American workers by the Radcliffe Public Policy Center, 64 percent said they would prefer more time to more money, and 71 percent of young men said they would give up pay for more time with their families.

 
          Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak having fun in the early years…

In their crude efforts to make work more fun, however, most companies are missing the point.  Employers are busy installing foosball tables, hiring chefs, and building gyms for their increasingly disgruntled employees, but these are just ways of trying to make a bad situation more tolerable. (or to coax employees into spending long hours away from home) A foosball table is not the sign of a fun place to work; it’s a glaring symbol that work is not fun and employees need a break.  Why would they rather be playing foosball than doing whatever it is they’ve been hired to do?

Many have argued that it’s immature and idealistic to believe that everyone, or even a majority of people, should be allowed to enjoy their jobs.  In the words of one dark New York TimesOpEd piece, “We’re still just means of production….Work is often more bearable when we don’t, in addition to money, expect it always to deliver happiness.” The same might be said for life itself, particularly when our duty to perform an economic function extends from what we can produce to what we can consume.  Both work and life should be much more than “bearable.”

Luckily, renaissances celebrate immaturity and idealism.  The growing field of “neotany” looks at the extended childhoods of species as a sign of their development.  The longer an infant is helpless, the more advanced the species to which it belongs.  Fish are fully developed from birth, dogs depend on their mothers for a few months, and human beings are helpless for several years.  Likewise, the extended time for youth and exploration our society now offers (a full 90 percent of American residents now graduate high school, and more than a third make it through college) means more time for practice, development, and play.  Growing up should not mean an end to this freedom to expand and innovate.  It can be its rebirth in an entirely new context: that of playful work.

Douglas Rushkoff: www.rushkoff.com
Ashworth University Special Guest Blogger

Listen to this fascinating podcast interview with Douglas Rushkoff about his new book, Get Back In The Box. 

*We would like extend a special thanks to Douglas Rushkoff for openly sharing his perspectives with our students.  Throughout his brilliant career, Douglas Rushkoff’s actions have demonstrated time and time again that he truly stands behind the open-source/open-internet principles that have always inspired his work.  We are honored to have the opportunity to introduce the ideas of Douglas Rushkoff to the Ashworth student community.*