March Challenge - Day 7: Quit a six-figure job? I do what I want!

Recently, I was forwarded a hilarious video called "Honey Badger don't give a shit" - one of the funniest lines is that "it does what it wants."

I recently read an article in Toronto Life about how five Bay St. types quit their six-figure jobs and started to do what they want. One was a lawyer turned chocolatier, another was a developer turned yoga instructor and studio owner, another was a software salesman turned movie producer and finally an investment banker and her lawyer friend turned organic butchers. The common thread - they walked away from successful, high-paying careers in the corporate world and pursued opening their own business, doing something that they loved.

Several of my peers from my HBA class made the switch last year too - from working in a corporate environment to starting up their own business. The change in their attitude is obvious - they are happy, they are challenged, they are eager to wake up every morning and work on their business. It is very refreshing to see.

Then there are the rest of us, weary of making that big leap. It is reminiscent of the time we all graduated and we pursued careers for the money rather than what we wanted to do. Most of us aren't willing to make the leap into self-employment, having to fight for every piece of revenue coming in and penny-pinching on every expense that goes out. Most of us are not comfortable not knowing if you'll get paid this day or the next. Most of us are comfortable with routine and complaining about how our jobs suck.

I've always wondered where I'll be five or ten years from now. Looking back to five years ago when I started out in advertising, I had pretty ambitious goals to which today, I've satisfied most of them. But I think - while I knew I'd still be in advertising today five years ago, I'm not so sure if that'll be the same five years from now.

Don't get me wrong, I love my job. I work at a great agency where I learn and am challenged daily to deal with new and interesting situations in the world of digital advertising. I work with great people who provide great laughter and comraderie. And I work in an industry that is all about creative expression and digging into human truths and insights, something much more fun to talk about at dinner parties than projected forecasts of oil futures (sorry finance folks, you know I still love you).

However, I see the entrepreneureal spirit of my classmates and the people featured in these articles and say, I can be like them too. I just need some more courage (like the Lion in the Wizard of Oz). And an idea of what business I would go into if I did leave the world of advertising...give me some time to think about that...

March Challenge - Day 6: 100 years of International Women's Day

1919 - Full access to the vote was given to all women in Canada. (We were the 6th nation in the world to grant this right.)

1921 - Agnes MacPhail is the first female MP elected to the House of Commons.

1989 - 68 years later, Audrey McLaughlin becomes the first leader of a major political party in Canada.

1993 - 4 years after that, Kim Campbell becomes the first female Prime Minister of Canada.

2011 - Canada ties Mauritania for 49th place in the ranking of % of women represented in politics at the Federal level. If you're curious, Rwanda is #1.

So why all of these dates? Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day - recognition of the great strides women have come since 1911, where in only two countries, women had the right to vote. It is also a day to recognize how much further we need to go to level out the inequities that women still face every single day.

One might ask why I only picked important milestones for women in politics. Well, politics is a great snapshot of the country's mental state. In times of economic uncertainty, people vote conservative. In times of economic prosperity, they tend to vote for parties that promote more social spending. The fact that women make up just 22% of our House of Commons, our national legislative body, shows that we have quite a ways to make up.

As someone who grew up around women of strong character and intellect, it often surprised me when I heard statistics like how Canadian women continue to earn on average 20% less than their direct male counterparts. Or how women now outnumber men in universities, yet their representation in local, provincial and federal governments rarely match anywhere close to that number.

I recently watched a great TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. She was speaking at the TEDxWomen's conference, and spoke eloquently about how too few women are making it to the tops of any profession - from politics (13% is the world average for governments), to business (tops out at 15%), to entertainment, to technology - women are still hitting that supposedly broken glass ceiling from the 80s. She points to the fact that women have much harder choices to make when determining whether to advance her professional career or cultivate her personal life. She states their are three simple messages to help women look towards the top of their professions - always have a seat at the table, make your partner a real partner and don't leave (mentally) before you leave (your career). It's a fantastic talk and one worthy of 20 minutes of your time.

It is important to recognize how important balance is in any aspect - in nature, in society, in our lives. Having an imbalance or extremes lead to conflict, wars and genocide. This is why it's so important to continue to work towards a balance in every professional arena, to get women the equal representation, pay and respect that men receive.

I've only touched upon development of women in the professional world, but haven't barely scratched the surface of all of the other issues that need to be resolved before women can enjoy equal status with men. Abuse, poverty, health issues and discrimination all disproportionately affect women moreso than men. Abuse being one of the worst injustices - 1 in 4 women in the world will be victims of physical abuse. A book I recently read called "Half the Sky" talks about poverty and how it leads women around the world to prostitution, a gateway to the abuse I spoke of a sentence ago. Maternal health, while enjoyed by the majority of the develop world, claims the lives of millions of women and their unborn children due to improper medical treatment during pregnancy, botched abortions and unsterile living conditions. Discrimination, which leaves little physical signs, scars even deeper emotionally, leading to self-esteem and other mental health issues.

We must remember that men have to also champion women's rights. We have a role to play in making sure our mothers, sisters, daughters and friends are recognized for their contributions to our society and celebrated as our equals. And as members of the developed world, we cannot stop championing this cause as developing nations look at us to lead as examples. If we don't show them that women deserve equal respect and treatment, they will not follow.

Sadly, coverage of this historic day for women's rights probably made page two of the paper or the 10min mark of the evening news. What's even sadder is that Charlie Sheen made more headlines recently due to his antics than any coverage leading up to this day. Another sign that women's rights is slipping on our list of priorities.

March Challenge - Day 5: Finally caught up with a morbid topic: Obits

Phew, I'm back on track with my posts. Damn, reading and writing is hard (twirls blond lock of hair).

I never quite understood why papers had the obituary sections - I often wondered, who the fuck would read this morbid shit. Seriously, you'd take your time to go through the section and voyeristically look through who died recently and see who's mourning their loss. An old fashioned Death Facebook.

MacLean's magazine gives their back cover story to a reader each week who sends in an obit for a friend or family member that has recently passed. These obits are more extensive, more thoughtful and have changed my mind about obits in general.

Not only are they well-written, the words bring the individual to life, even though they are dead. More elaborate than the 100 words or less 1/64 of a page obit in the god knows what fucking section of the newspaper, these full-page stories bring a 30 year old mother of two who recently died in a freak traffic accident in BC or a 18 year old teenage boy who died on a ski slope, or an 80 year old who lived a long and rewarding life.

Death is nothing foreign to me - I've seen four close family members pass, I've seen young people die for no reason - car crashes, suicides, cancer. But I've been mostly stoic when dealing with death - very rarely showing any grief or expressions. Which is probably why I never understood obituaries - they are expressions of grief from the living trying to memorialize their departed friend or family member.

Then I realized, I've been an obit writer myself! Last year, on the 10th year anniversary of my mom's passing, I wrote a tribute to her on a Facebook note. It was long, featured photos of her throughout her life, and my musings on how she would be like if she were around now. In a sense, it really helped me cope with my loss (even though its been 10 years, it's still incredibly painful to think about). Had I done it earlier, like these people have, perhaps it would have helped with my grief process more.

While I normally never pray, I certainly hope that I will not have to write an obit for any of my friends or family anytime in the near future. However, if that day comes, I look forward to using that as an outlet of my grief, which it seems so many do, to whatever audience that wants to read.

March Challenge - Day 4: Emotion Contagion

So the book I've been reading called Connected, has been incredibly interesting. Chapter 2 is all about emotions being contagious and how the people you surround yourself with, and the people they surround themselves with will ultimately impact your emotions.

Most of you might be going "duh, tell us something I don't know," but seriously, how often do you stop yourself in a day to calibrate your emotions back to that safe place, you know, that place where you're not overwhelmingly happy that people think you're Charlie Sheen, or that place you're overwhelmingly sad like a Sarah MacLaughlin album (I swear, that woman can make "Don't worry, be happy" sound like a funeral march).

I've recently hit a slump, and it wasn't until someone else told me about being negative that I was able to take a more conscious note of it. I'm an emotional person, although I try to deny that I have any human emotion, I'm very expressive when communicating with others. When I'm happy, I let out several guffaws while slapping the shit out of my knees. When I'm angry, a torrent of swear words gets unleashed into the world and my hands flail like a mad person. And when I'm overwhelmed, I get quiet and scattered. All of this is picked up by other people and like a domino effect others begin to feel the exact same emotions I project. If I panic, others do; if I stay calm, so do others.

In a study the authors conducted, they found out on average, if you had one close friend who was happy, you were 9% more likely to be happy. But if you have a close friend who is sad, you're 7% more likely to be sad. So the goal seems simple, surround yourself with happy friends, right?

Sure, that sounds simple enough, but terribly difficult when you consider how peoples' lives change on a constant basis. Your happy friend could turn sad one day, and vice versa. What's important is that you continue to check your own state and consciously figure your way back to a medium spot.

Another part of their study talks about how ultimately, people do level themselves out subconsciously - there are very few that spiral completely out of control or that can maintain a nirvana like happy state. However, if you consciously make the corrections everyday, you don't have to wait out the up to 365 days to get back to your normal self.

So the saying is correct after all - check yo'self befo' you 'reck yo'self.

The book talks about love next. Have a feeling I'm not going to like this chapter.

March Challenge - Day 3: Get Hired...or free tuition.

The March 7^th issue of MacLean’s magazine features their 6^th annual Student Guide. A miniature sized version of the University guide they publish every year, the Student Guide is mainly for over-involved parents of high school students or keener high school students gearing up for the next stage of their academic careers.

In this issue, they featured a great articled in the Get Hired section called “Get me a job – or give me my money back.” Here’s a quick synopsis of the article: in the last decade, universities and colleges have decided to shift the focus on the quality of education you get at their institution to making sure their graduates get hired after they leave the institution. After the job market was crippled in 2008 after the great recession hit, institutions are still reeling from getting their students placed in “good” jobs that their university programs trained them for. The University of Regina has gone so far as to offer students that don’t get hired within the first six months after graduating in their chosen field, they get a free year of tuition to go back to school.

Before I get into my opinion on whether or not this is a good or terrible idea for our post-secondary institutions to launch programs such as UofR’s Free Tuition program, I thought I would share with you my own experience as a student.

I was one of those keeners in high school that was already planning for university when I was in grade 10. Yes, I attended the university fair from grades 10 – OAC (mostly for the swag) but also to figure out a whole array of academic choices put in front of me. When I finally made my decision after sifting through countless university brochures, I shipped off my applications and felt a huge weight fall off my shoulders.

That weight was to come back not three years later when I entered my program at Ivey. This time, the weight was something called “Getting a job” – that was everyone’s focus…get a great summer internship in finance or consulting. If you can’t cut it there, go for accounting, they’ll hire anyone. Failing that, go for the marketing jobs. And if you really suck, perhaps a summer being an “entrepreneur” (cough…unemployed) will help you reflect.

To make a long story short, my internship hunt went poorly. I did everything our Career Management department told us not to do – I applied for everything, sent out templated cover letters and resumes and memorized the standard interview questions to ask a perspective employer during an interview. Fuck, I was dumb. So I disguised my failure well by running for student government and ended up working for the school that summer (thankfully, the election worked out, otherwise, I would have had to “entrepreneur” it for that summer).

It didn’t get any better during my last year at Ivey either. Recruiting started even earlier, and by October 15^th (of all days, my birthday), all the good paying 75K+ jobs were gone – offers went out and those people were able to strut their stuff like their shit didn’t stink and go for an academic wank for the rest of the year. Then the 2^nd round came where accounting firms and marketing companies came in to swoop up the remainder. By the time that round finished, I’d say 75% of our graduating class had an offer in their hands.

Then there was me. The only offer I had was an internship opportunity with Export Development Canada in Ottawa after I won a scholarship by writing an essay about how trade was important for Canada’s future (seriously, I won a scholarship for writing an essay with that broad of a topic) and why this scholarship will help me pursue my aspirations of international business. Besides that, I had nothing. I repeated all the mistakes from the year before and then just kind of gave up. I was deflated, angry and embarrassed. Having had several student council predecessors land great gigs when they held the role, I was certainly the black sheep, and that May, I packed my bags for Ottawa for the internship.

While I did well at my internship, it was clear, it wasn’t for me. I came back to Toronto in September and became a gentleman of leisure. Clearly, at this time, my educational institution wanted nothing to do with me. I was pulling down their graduate stats. Then I did something even more outrageous – I got ANOTHER internship, this time in Advertising. Advertising wasn’t even a path up for consideration in my business program. We had one elective on it and well, let’s just say out of my 2006 graduating class, there’s one other person in advertising with me now. Big shoutouts to Rebecca Ho. Why was it not up for consideration? The pay sucks when you start, certainly nowhere close to what the school pumped up your salary expectations when I was there. While some of my friends in banking their first year cleared well over six figures after bonus, I made about $4000 during my four-month internship and when I was promoted to an Account Executive, I swore to myself everyday that I would get to the next level ASAP in order to make an actual return on my educational investment.

This story does have a happy ending. Heading into my five year anniversary after graduation, I’ve gotten myself to a place in my career where I’m doing well, I’m happy and I like what I do. Not to say there were bumps along the way, but I’d say less bumps than some of the big hurdles some of my other classmates had to jump over when they found out their career choice wasn’t right for them. Overall, I think if my university education was to be judged upon how well it prepared me to get a job immediately after I graduated, it did poorly. But in the long run, I'm doing okay.

Now that I’ve bored you to tears with my own personal trials and tribulations with the job hunt, back to the point of the article. Should universities and colleges measure their success on how well their students do in their job hunt? In my opinion, while getting a job is important, this shift towards focusing on getting and guaranteeing grads jobs is dangerous. The strain it’s putting on graduates these days to focus on job hunting while they are still there to learn is unbelievably cruel and actually does a disservice to the student’s academic development.

There are three reasons why this outlook is dangerous:

1) The pressure of finding a job leads graduates to pick a career they had no interest to begin with.

I go back to my experiences and see how some of my fellow classmates struggled a year or two after they were in the workplace. Many were unhappy and disenchanted because they thought this career would be different than in reality. In some cases, people had to stop their career, and pick a completely different discipline and start at the bottom again. They gave up on pursuing what they really wanted to do by bending to the pressures of getting that top paying job. It’s a terrible lesson to learn.

2) Job-focused academic institutions prioritizes job finding over academics.

I remember that in the year that followed our class, they were given an extra week of break in order to recruit for jobs, much to the chagrin of my classmates. We complained how these “kids” had it so much easier than we did (very “when I went to school, I walked barefoot over a mile on broken glass” kind of mentality). What we failed to even talk about was the fact that these “kids” paid the same amount we did, for one less week of education. Academics really took a back seat in my last year of university. Once people secured that job offer, less cases were read, more people showed up hungover or didn’t bother showing up at all, and the hands up to answer questions sat firmly planed on their laptop keyboards, playing games or picking out what to buy for the new condo downtown.

3) What every happened to enjoying life after graduating?

Remember those stories of people going to “find themselves” after university? They are as rare as people in Ivey and working in advertising. While people travelled during the summer between graduation and September when they started their jobs, perhaps one person went and took a full year off to really travel or do volunteer work and take a break for themselves. What I would pay to go back in time to tell my stupid self to go and blow my little to no savings on a round the world adventure and experience life as people had done decades ago after they finished a degree. Nope, I too conformed to the pressures and decided to work. Now, I struggle to get in vacations (my last having been well over a year ago).

All the while, university programs (in particular commerce or business programs) have succumbed to salary/hiring-rate hysteria, reflective of how publicly traded companies will do whatever it takes to deliver a good quarterly investors report. I often get reports from my school on how well our graduates are doing with a 90%+ hiring success rate…blah, blah, blah. Job placement should not be the top Key Performance Indicator of any educational institution.

These universities are short-changing their students of the experiences they actually deserve - learning and developing critical thinking skills that are actually required in the workplace. Their focus now on getting them resume and interview ready in order to make themselves look successful too. Some might compare it to the crazy parent that forces their child to go through 16 levels of piano, and meanwhile, the kid has little to no desire to play that piano.

The UofR program of “we’ll get you a job or your money back” reeks of so much desperation that it was actually sad to read when I came across the article. A money back guarantee doesn’t instill any confidence in me that this is the type of education I want from an institution.

It’s time for our educators to really reflect upon what post-secondary institutions were meant to do. They should not be factory-churning out grads to replace aging baby boomers and checking their percentage of students hired box at the end of the day. They should be focused on creating an environment where students get stimulated to explore academia, think critically and absorb as many new experiences as possible.

March Challenge - Day 2: Feeling Connected

So I've started on a book called Connected - How your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think and do. I'm about 2 chapters in and really enjoy it. As a Facebook addict, the first couple of chapters talk about the formulation of social networks (now, to note, when I'm talking about social networks, I mean how you relate to other people, not social networking platforms like Facebook). According to the authors, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, there are rules to a network:

1) We shape our network - we choose the structure by deciding how many people we connect with, how interconnected each of our contacts are with one another and how central we are to our networks (do we like to be the centre of attention or live at the peripheries?)

2) Our network shapes up - where you're position in that network (ie: first borns have on average a higher IQ than second borns who have higher IQs than third borns), how interconnected your contacts are with one another, and again, the number of people will mould us into what we are.

3) Our friends affect us - studious people make others more studious, people who drink a lot influence others to drink more.

4) Our friends' friends' friends affect us - there's a rule called the Three Degrees of Influence (similar to the Six Degrees of Separation) where it states that between one to three degrees of connections, attitudes and behaviours (like political views, smoking) are passed along from originator to friend to friend. But beyond three levels, that influence diminishes rapidly. Think of it as a big broken telephone game - while the message stays consistent with the first two or three people, after that, "I eat at the restaurant" quickly turns into "Purple monkey dishwasher." There's also the possibility that your connections have severed along the way - people stop being friends. Or another theory is that our evolutionary path hasn't taken us to the point where we trust anything beyond three levels of connectivity - that it's only been in the last 200 - 300 years where we've in large urban centres, and that humanity is used to living in smaller groups where influence doesn't go beyond three levels.

5) Networks have a life of its own - you cannot isolate it to one person. This point is totally valid when one looks at the unrest in the Middle East. While Tunisia's fight to remove it's dictator started with the actions of a street vendor setting himself on fire, the wave of unrest in the Middle East has started to morph into different opposition networks from Egypt to Libya to Bahrain to Yemen. All different networks, moving, growing and changing everyday without one person to attribute it to.

Points four and five were provoking points to read - and I reflected on how my interactions with Facebook (which surprisingly has not been talked about once in this book) live up to these points. While we cannot ever tell if our influence reaches our friends' friends' friends, we can certainly see if our posts are reposted or shared by our friends to their networks (a term us advertisers love to call social amplification). And point five has been validated time and time again that networks are organic - any brand with a facebook fanpage can tell you now that they are no longer in control of the conversations of consumers about their brand - the network of fans control the conversation, the brand can only participate and contribute (as all other individuals in the network do) but the network steers the conversation (either good or bad).

I'm excited to read on. I'll report back with more soon.

March Challenge - Day 1: Terribly behind...

So I've started March off with a terrible start. Having supposed to start my 28-Day challenge of reading one interesting article and writing an opinion piece per day on March 3, I have failed to keep up due to a busy weekend. A Lady Gaga concert, a day of recovering from that said concert, a friend's bachelor's party yesterday and a day of cleaning and baking cookies for a charity drive, have all prevented me from reading and writing.

So I have a couple of day's worth of posts to catch up on, let's get started. I mentioned earlier in this post that I've had a very busy weekend - it was also super expensive. All in all, between the concert, the party and the grocery shopping, I dropped at least $600 in the last four days. If I had a budget for entertainment, I would be way, way over.

Budgets, savings, spending have been on everyone's minds since the 2008 Great Recession that saw several millions of people around the world declare personal bankruptcy, face foreclosure on their homes and lose all of their personal savings. Some of the behaviours that led up to that mess were things like taking on too much debt and overspending (like I did this weekend).

It's no surprise then that there's now a great deal of concern from the Bank of Canada that Canadians are now starting to edge closer and closer to taking on ridiculous amounts of debt similar to what Americans were before the recession. According to a Globe and Mail article back in May of last year, Canadians had $1.44 of debt for every $1 they earned. Of course, most of that is attributed to mortgage due to low interest rates, but credit card and short-term debt has also climbed, to the warning of many government officials like BoC Governor Mark Carney.

So, what's happened to make Canadians act this way? One key factor is that interest rates are down so people are borrowing more at the cheaper rates in order to save more money in the long run on paying interest. The other is that Canada, unlike other G8 countries, was not affected as badly during the meltdown - while consumer spending did take a dip, it rose back up quickly compared to our neighbours to the south. People bought more, all on credit cards. And speaking of those cards, people used more credit cards due to loyalty programs - the perceived value of earning points while using your cards makes people spend more on their plastic, not actually keeping a track of that spending until the bill comes at the end of the month to serve a swift kick to the gut.

MacLean's magazine this week featured articles about Canadians and finances. One article called, "Nevermind the facts of life, talk to your children about money," highlights what the province of Ontario plans on doing to educate youth and building their financial intelligence. Grades 4 - 12 students will now have financial literacy classes starting next year, Manitoba and Alberta are planning similar changes to their curricula.

About time, I say. I think back to my classes in grade school, junior high and high school and the only time I remember ever being taught anything close to financial literacy was in Home Ec when we spent one class on how to do a personal budget. Then we moved onto sewing for about 10 classes, 'cause, you know, that was more important.

It is never too early to get people to think and learn about taking care of their own personal finances, but it can't be just up to schools to teach this - parents shoulder the main responsibility. I am pretty grateful that my mom (who I credit for engraining in my brain my sense of financial responsibility) started me out at a young age - age 6 was when I first opened my savings account at National Bank. Age 7 was when I bought my first Canada savings bond. Age 10 was when I first opened up an ING Savings account (to which I still have). When she passed in early 2000, I had learned enough at that point to help manage a personal budget which tracked my wages from my part-time jobs and my expenses, which included a car, and then saving for my future education.

While being mostly financially responsible, I've had a few moments of irresponsibility that, thankfully, were minor and taught me valuable lessons like overdrafting on my accounts, paying credit cards late, and nearly missing a mortgage payment. Small issues - but enough to give you small heart palpations and sleepless nights.

So I can't even imagine another stunning fact in the same MacLean's issue, where it stated that $32,499 was the minimum income a family of four needs to get buy. This number is shocking - for me, having an income that's over twice this amount, I often find myself frustrated with the money I have remaining once I pay my mortgage, maintenance fees, monthly expenses and then set aside an amount for my savings and RRSPs - and this is all to support ONE person. I can't imagine that four people can survive on half of that amount.

Then there was the other mind-boggling fact that in a recent Angus Reid poll, 32 percent of Canadians are hoping that a lottery windfall will help fund their retirement. Have we taken crazy pills? What are the chances of winning a lottery - one in a kabillion? How did Canadians all of a sudden become so financially retarded?

For people of my age, it's not to late to start thinking about how one will fund their retirement. When I discuss RRSPs or TFSAs with people who didn't go to a business or commerce school program, I often get responses like, "I don't know what that is," or "it's too early to think about that, I have to pay off my student debt first." While the latter point is valid, the former point is nothing short of ignorance. I even find my friends who did business or commerce school programs don't know exactly what the benefits of contributing to an RRSP or TFSA are. Take a few hours, read about them!

And it's never too early to ask for help - that's what financial planners are there to help you do! Every bank branch has one - go to your bank and set up an appointment (now that the RRSP rush is over, they have all the time in the world). They are there to help get you out of your student debt faster by finding ways of consolidating that debt into more managable ways of repaying it back, so that you can start saving for the future.

It often angered me in 2008/09 to see that many people put the sole blame on big corporations for the financial meltdown. True, they did a lot of damage, but the finger pointing should have also been put on the ignorant public that signed on dotted lines when they knew they couldn't afford to or spent their savings thinking that money would magically reappear someday in their accounts. Financial literacy starts with each and every one of us. Pick up a book, google or wiki that term you're not understanding - with all the information we have at our fingertips these days, you're a fool not to read up before you make a major financial decision.

So, I say all of this whilst I plan for how I will be scrimping and saving for the next couple of months to balance out all the spending I've done since January. And just when I thought not drinking and eating healthy was supposed to save me money...