Idle hands and the summer I did nothing

​I hate being idle.

So when faced with the choice, nearly 10 months ago, of when to have my first full day at work, my immediate impulse was to choose the earliest date. What I did instead was ask everyone older than me for their advice, and as a result I ended up with a three month long summer vacation.

Being able to take such a vacation and even having a job straight out of college are privileges that some of my closest friends don't have and they're certainly privileges that my parents never had. But what I've recently discovered is that if I ever find myself in the fortunate position to take significant time off my main hustle, I'm going to view it a bit differently than how I used to.

I've always viewed free time as an opportunity to start something new (this doesn't always mean I finish it) or work on something I've been neglecting. At college, this usually resulted in something like a summer internship at a daytime soap opera (true story) or brainstorming with my roommate on a new student group that we wanted to start on campus. From the moment I first heard the words "Common Application", multitasking became my permanent state of being. Experiencing new things feels great. It feels even better when you meet benchmarks, and back in the days when I had no idea what exactly I was doing with my life after school, it gave me the comforting feeling that I was progressing towards some kind of life outside of the books.​

I decided to use the same philosophy when designing my grand plans for the summer before my first day at work. Immediate on my post-graduate bucket list were the GMATs, maybe the GREs, a new website I wanted to start, several books I wanted to read, a couple programming languages I wanted to learn, and my imminent rise to music DJ glory and fame. For many reasons, absolutely none of these things happened. I had completely miscalculated the transition out of college and the steps I needed to take to move into a new life.

Instead, I found myself taking a vacation with my family, taking another vacation with my friends, witnessing my nephew’s first birthday, and going six weeks without a desktop computer (do this whenever you get a chance). Throw in several vacant weeks in New York City and I’m surprised I haven’t been punched in the face for all the times I’ve said “I’m bored” or “I’m so ready to start working”.

I know what you're thinking at this point, dear reader. "What I learned ​on my beautiful, luxurious, three month long vacation is the beauty of doing nothing. Embrace the emptiness and find happiness in simplicity."

But that's not the whole of it. ​

​What I've learned this past summer is that it's really really hot in New York City and even then people won't wear deodorant. I see them all the time on the subway. I've also learned that I'm never actually, truly, doing nothing. I get the feeling that I am doing nothing because of the value I place on high achievement activities and the value I don't place on other activities like spending time with the people closest to me, or spending time not producing, or spending time not creating work for myself.

In one of the most popular TED talks, author and Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert discusses synthesized happiness, the notion that our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. He goes on to say that “natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.”

Gilbert goes on to prove that synthesized happiness is not secondary to natural happiness. But more importantly, sometimes, or at least in my case, the events that necessitate synthesized happiness become the kind of achievements that supply natural happiness. 

Once upon a time, I would’ve said that I did nothing this past summer. Measuring out dimensions for furniture in my bedroom will not be added to my resume. Sitting at the dinner table with my parents, the most plain and ordinary of all events, is the most accomplished thing I've done all summer. 

Sometimes, I think bucket lists should be made retroactively instead of prospectively.

How to Graduate From College

I recently graduated from college with an extremely marketable BA degree in Race and Ethnicity. ​Like the end of any chapter, finishing school beckons celebration, platitudes, and reflection. The following piece is my attempt to add to the noise. (This blog post was originally posted on the Blog Daily Herald under the title "How To Graduate From College". You can read the original here.) 

​It's only been a few months since this piece was first written, but after re-reading it, I'm already wondering how much I'll waver away from these thoughts as more and more things garner my attention (my job, HBO, etc). My hope is not too far.

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If my mom were writing this, it would be much shorter: sleep eight hours a night, study hard, be pre-med, go to church every Sunday. She’s reading this right now so I’m going to say that I did all of that (she’s in for a rude awakening when she finds out she’ll be attending the ethnic studies commencement and not neuroscience). And more or less, it worked; here I am in the waning days of my life at Brown.

But as I prepare for Commencement, I’m realizing that all the advice I’ve ever received about “how to graduate” has been about how to get to the point where you’re shaking hands, moving the tassel, and holding the degree. Here are seven things I’ve been thinking about on how to transition into everything it means to not be a student.*

*Disclaimer: I’m not sure these steps are 100% correct. I’m not even sure they’re 10% correct. I’ve never graduated from college (yet).

1) Be incredibly ambitious. Be incredibly active. And be humble.
Back when he still had hair, Steve Jobs once said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

So what makes an Average Joe into a Steve Jobs? I think it’s ambition and activity. They’re two separate things but they work together. And fortunately for us, unlike smarts, we can control our ambition and activity. Ambition is reaching for something you don’t have and may never have. Activity is the mechanism by which you get to find out how close or far you actually are.

Humility, as I understand it, is a sense of all that you do not know. This is actually a gift in disguise. Knowing that you don’t know gives you ambition. It keeps you active.

2) Actively cultivate friendships.
Unless you’re incredibly lucky, you’re not going to live with all the people you’ve grown to love at Brown after you graduate. And if you’re like me, you’re going to hoard your vacation days like GCB guest passes, which means the chances of your vacation overlapping with your friends’ are not favorable. But just because you’re in different locations staring at a computer screen doesn’t mean you can’t maintain your friendships.

Our relationships with friends are like the relationships we have with work. You have to dedicate enough time and energy to achieve a result you’re happy with. Friendship is like that A you worked really hard to get in orgo. The only difference is that with friendship, once you have it, you have to keep working at it.

3) Welcome criticism.
Maybe you already have a story about this (I have thirty-three). Your work is going to get judged whether you want it to or not. But what would it accomplish if everything you put out into the world was agreed upon by everyone?

I’m sure someone out there is going to have a problem with something I’ve written. People may even sound off in the comments. But I hope they do, because the means by which they’re able to criticize are the same means by which I’m able to communicate.

There are two types of criticism: constructive and vindictive. We’d love for all the criticism we receive to be constructive. But somewhere along the line, people are going to talk some serious shit. Brush the dirt off your shoulder and keep doing your thing, but don’t forget to check and make sure there’s not something to be learned first.

4) Don’t hold back.
More importantly, don’t let fear of criticism prevent you from doing something. At Brown, I was fortunate enough to be a co-founder of Brown for Financial Aid, which has started some important conversations about Brown this semester. Before starting the project I didn’t even know the language of financial aid. But the truth is that if I had waited until I was 100% sure of everything, then I may never have decided to work on the project in the first place.

The other beautiful truth is that you’ve probably already jumped into something that you weren’t completely ready for. And you’re more than likely going to face a scenario where you’ll have to do it again (May 27th anyone?). When that moment comes, just don’t forget that you’ve already been there; you are where you are right now because you went there.

5) Set your own metrics.
From here on out, nothing you produce will be given a letter grade (although, let’s be real, half the classes I took weren’t given a letter grade — holla at ya boy, pass/fail). You’re your own evaluator and, chances are, you’re going to be more critical than any professor you’ve ever had. Sure, there will be external validations (i.e. awards), but those are the metrics of others. I’m not saying awards are bad, I’m just saying that all awards and external validations are based on someone else’s metrics and sometimes those might not align with the metrics of success that you live by. And if you’re lucky enough to know what your own metrics of success are (some of us are still figuring them out), then are all of those awards and validations really that important?

6) Say no to things you don’t want to do.
Remember that class you dropped sophomore fall even though you had already completed two-thirds of the semester? If you were able to say no to something you didn’t want to do as a student, then don’t forget that it’s still an option after college.

You can drop a class. But it doesn’t mean you’ll stop learning. You can also, especially when you’re young, quit your job. But it doesn’t mean you’ll stop working.

7) Assert that the four best years of your life weren’t in college.
You’ve heard this line from at least one post-graduate who ever flirted with a red Solo cup: “College was the best four years of my life.” This scenario is bad for two reasons. The first is that they believe they’ve lived a less fulfilling life than the years they spent in college, and maybe that’s true. The second reason is that they don’t believe they have the agency to create four incredible ass-kicking years starting right now. Worst of all, more often than not, when people say that college was the best four years of their life, they often have at least four more years left to live.

In science, measurements are often accompanied by estimates of their uncertainty. Uncertainty depends in part on the number of samples taken: an increase in sample size decreases uncertainty. This is what aging does for us. Looking back at my past four years, each one brought me slightly more awareness, slightly more enlightenment, and slightly more openness. College doesn’t have to be the best four years of your life if you don’t want it to be. In fact, shouldn’t we all be striving to make college theworst four years of our lives? I’m hoping that’s the case for all of us. And not because we’ll be more financially independent, or because we’ll marry the loves of our lives, or because we’ll do all the things we set out to do the day after we graduate from college, but because there can’t possibly be anywhere better to be than where we are right now.

So, Brown, Imma let you finish, but the next four years are going to be the best of all time. Until, of course, the next four.