Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Homebody Steps Onto the Flat World

Growing up in rural LaVerkin, Utah, I enjoyed a less social, but more liberal education than many of my peers. I was home-schooled, not by necessity as much as by choice. I felt my education was superior until I attended some middle and high school classes and discovered that the kids were surpassing me in mathematics. Illusion shattered: I was no longer the smartest kid in town. But neither was I the dumbest. Nevertheless as adulthood approached, I became increasingly concerned about my future and my ability to succeed in the grownup world of work and business and all those other mysterious adult things, especially with my lack of social skills. All I had ever wanted as a kid was a way to realize my creative imaginings and go on various adventures, or to make all the inventions I'd conceived. Much to my frustration, I kept hearing about other people beating me to all the inventions I thought of, because they were more skilled or educated or they knew more about how the world works, or they had more money and resources, or they knew the right people.

Enter post-mission freshman college year. More anxious than ever about being able to make it in the world, I took my first steps as a full time student anywhere besides my own home. It was hard and stressful but I did much better than average, and even had a few pseudo-girlfriends for the first time in my life. The structure of the public education system however caused me to increasingly view my home-school background as inadequate and behind the times in meeting current demands. After all, how could one or two parents mentor me in everything I needed to know, and provide all the resources to pursue my personal educational ambitions? Truly they couldn't provide me all the skills I wanted, but they gave me something more important—a desire and belief that there was no reason I couldn't be successful at anything I truly wanted, and the curiosity to explore it all. They kept a keen eye out for what turned me on and found opportunities for me to experience it more times than I can count. They couldn't usually afford it, but the attitude continues to make an impression on me. I've recently come full circle from my fears about my upbringing and realized our present conveyor-belt system of education is broken and inadequate to fill the rapidly changing needs of the world, despite how much I've learned in it, and how it's brought me to this very point of enlightenment in my life.

Unfortunately, before this epiphany, I was paralyzed by doubt and a traffic jam of life decisions that proved to be NP-complete. For about 6 years of schooling now, I've had to make unpassioned decisions about my career and education path, in absence of any clear, singularly defining role for me to take on. But recent experiences, including reading The World Is Flat, have shifted my paradigm. If Thomas Friedman is right, I wasn't being cheated at all by my homeschooled liberal arts education. My wise parents were training me to think in the ways required by the new, flat world. My dad saw it all coming, and I remember watching at least half the videos that were included in our CS-404 class curriculum while growing up. I remember almost everything presented in our class, as it actually happened. I lived through it. However, I didn't understand its effect on the world or myself until taking this course.

I am relieved to know that my "laziness" as a teenager was actually largely spent keenly exploring my interests and passions, adopting new technologies as soon as I could excitedly get them into my hands, and developing the hunger for knowledge that will keep me on the crest of the world's leading edge. Not because I have to try and keep up, but because all the things I love are what make me special enough to compete, because my interest in them joyfully impels me to explore, improve, and add a personal touch to the things I do, making them valuably unique in an increasingly commoditized world. This paradigm shift was inspired by Chapter 7, "The Right Stuff," and now I can finally stop fretting about my life decisions. Perhaps my reluctance to assign myself a single hat to wear throughout my life was a healthy attitude after all. My natural inclination has always been toward a variety of things too vastly different to fit into a packaged, cut-and-dried college major. Good news: The world doesn't want cut-and-dried anymore. I'm a success story in the making and I didn't even know it. I should've saved all those tears.

Further vindication came with Chapter 16, "The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention." My biggest passion besides creative arts and technologies is any fight against tyranny and injustice. Boyish fantasies inspired by the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars and various heroes of fiction, religious works and world history grew into conviction for contemporary issues and events. Things like the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and China's continued use of political prisons to torture and repress its citizens who dare to think differently... those things lit the fire inside me, and I constantly wish to know how I can be more directly involved in these hot-button humanitarian issues. My interests have expanded to fighting slavery and human trafficking in the United States, combating terrorism abroad and at home, undermining the porn industry, and preventing serious local crimes. I feel bad that my involvement in school has kept me too busy to do much in these areas, and I wondered how going to University is supposed to help me make any difference. As I've become more educated I realize that all the crazy revolutions and insurgences I'd dreamed up in my teenage mind to help people get freedom would have a terribly high cost in human lives and a horrific failure rate, especially considering what it would take to prevent societal collapse thereafter.

Since reading Chapter 16, I found further confirmation that free-market diplomacy would more fully persuade totalitarian and isolationist governments to give up their unrighteous control and persecution of their people, much more than any adventurous militant action could do. The more vested interest they can—and must—place in the world market, the more they must comply with the vigilant eagle's eye of people and businesses who love their fellow human beings. I learned that simply by being successful in doing the things I love, and even tapping local markets to provide for myself and my loved ones, I am doing the whole world a favor by increasing all nations' need to treat their people kindly, lest they lose face and their economy takes a turn for the worse. This, I believe, will prove more beneficial than all the blacklisting and boycotting and destructive action anyone could take against them. The more we invite them to share our goose that lays the golden egg and grow the pie larger, the more they'll have to abide by our ethics, or risk losing customers. And if we invest enough in places like China and Africa and get inside their infrastructure, we can influence them to support human rights because we will take our business elsewhere if they don't, because we don't want that stain on our hands, either. They know it, too, and they know they're missing out if they don't collaborate. Ergo, they must cooperate.

So by doing business rather than boycotting it in these (some would say undeserving) governments' nations, the human condition improves in general for all, so long as our ethics are more important than our pocketbooks. The reversal of those values is, after all, much of what causes human rights abuses in the first place, be it in Provo, Utah or Guangdong Province. I never had enough passion to be a businessman or entrepreneur before I came to think that collaborating internationally could save a breadwinner from going to the Laogai prison system for having unorthodox beliefs such as Christianity or for being a Falun Gong practitioner, perhaps never to return home. Such free business correspondence may very well be the vehicle that opens these nations' doors to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its missionary efforts.

So let's trade with them. Let's do business with them. If their money is dirty, lets help them make it clean. The best way to remove corruption is to starve it of incentive. And we can all do that best by doing what we love and loving what we do, always exploring and learning more about it. If a child is only interested in snakes (as in the book How Children Fail), and that interest is nurtured, it will grow into knowledge of herpetology, zoology, biology, international field studies, ecology, even statistics and math, and before long you have a youngster with the mindset of a PhD. Don't disapprove of your passions. The world needs them. It's not too late to chase your dreams, no matter how esoteric or eccentric they may be. Don't be afraid if a course isn't charted out for you or there are no college degrees for your interest. If it edifies, somebody out there needs you to excel in what you love.

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