Now that we have the internet, and blogging, it’s easy to surf around and find a whole lot of people talking about a whole lot of things, from lousy service to lousy products, pet peeves to rants about former lovers. And it seems like some people forget that it’s not a case of “what happens on the ‘net stays on the ‘net”. Uh-uh. Anyone who’s ever used Google’s cached pages knows stuff can hang around a long time. So that rant you posted about the company you work for when you were having a bad day is still out there, and maybe it’s been copied and pasted and printed who knows how many times by how many people and shared with people outside your immediate circle. You are leaving your legacy. It used to be people had cute little locks on their diaries. Now they put it out there for the world to read.

Anytime I’ve ever researched any college or university, public or private, if I dig around enough I will find dirt. Always. Huh. Isn’t there a perfect school out there who pleases all of the people all of the time? Guess not, but there certainly are charlatans in the business, and it’s disheartening to those who really take education seriously.

Any of us who remember our college and university days remember blowing off steam and railing against the authorities who ran the place and didn’t get it. We did not know, or care, what challenges they may have been facing in terms of their budgets, staffing issues, office politics, and who knows what. And should we have? We were there to get an education, without necessarily realizing all the ramifications of that word, “education”. I always liked that Mark Twain quote about never letting my schooling interfere with my education.

But if we were railing against our schools 30 years ago, why haven’t these problems been solved? Why should anyone have to still be complaining about incompetent teachers or inadequate courses, etc.? Well, one of the trickiest aspects of delivering education is that it’s a moving target. In my lifetime, I have already had jobs THAT DIDN’T EXIST when I was in college. So how did my specific schooling ever train me for that?

Anyway, if you’re thinking of publicly lambasting your school or teachers on the ‘net, let me offer two points to consider (albeit, from my middle-aged out-of-touch perspective, but hey, don’t rub it in, alright?). As you’re probably at that point where you’re trying to start a career in your chosen field, and this will invariably require you to work with other people (whether you work for them or they work for you), if you slam your schooling, your prospective employers and employees will learn two things about you:

1. You make poor decisions
You picked the school, right? It cost a lot of money, and you did the research, right? And you still blew it on a big, expensive, important, decision that could affect your entire life?

2. You don’t take responsibility
Who is ultimately responsible for your education? Apparently not you—it’s all up to your lame teachers and the crooked, bonehead administrators who created the living hell that was your school experience.

I am not advocating putting up with crap, or shrugging off inept, or worse—academically unsound—schooling. Of course you should do something about it.

But if you really want to kick start a career, despite a dodgy educational experience, maybe you would stand out from the crowd a little better if you expressed what you learned from your poor experience, how you would apply what you’ve learned in the future, what you would suggest the culprit school do to mend their ways, and finally what advice you could give the next batch of prospective students to help them pick the right school, or at least make the most of the school they’re already at.

I mean, picture the job interview. “It says here you graduated from the” Acme School of Everything”, and you reply “Yeah, but it was a crap school and they ripped me off. I never learned a thing there.” Ooh, impressive. Next!

No, I’m not suggesting you blow smoke. If the school sucked, it sucked, but put the emphasis on what you learned from that experience, if not what you learned from the school. Rant to your friends. Rant to the school. But rant on the ‘net and you just may be closing yourself off from some golden opportunities.

I’ve read (so it must be true!) that as many as 3 in 4 HR execs google prospective hires. I’ve done it myself. What if googling your name brings up some blog where you’ve posted a poorly-spelled, petulant hissy fit, running people down and making derogatory comments about your peers, colleagues, or alma mater? What would a prospective associate think of that? You can bet it won’t do a lot to make you look like someone other people would want to work with.

When you’re watching a soccer game (football to some), the clock ticks up to note how much time has passed. The actual time the game will end is a little fuzzy, ultimately up to the referee to decide. I think a lot of us live our lives that way. We know it’s going to end, but not sure when, exactly, so we kind of run around, trying to work with others towards a common goal.

In the game of ice hockey, the clock ticks down to show you how much time is left. Hence, the familiar announcement “last minute of play…”, which usually spurs the players into one last effort to do whatever it is they can to win the game. So I got to thinking, what if my life was timed that way. If I was given the rules of the game early on, say, “you have 65 years, 3 months, and 5 days to live, and there will be no overtime, no scoring shoot outs. You get to play regulation time only”, what would I have done differently with the time I’ve “played” so far? What would my “game strategy” have been? Would I play defensively, try to stay out of the penalty box? Or maybe offensively, driving to score on every shift? Maybe casually, like hey, it’s just a game?

Of course the game strategy we employ as adults is very much the result of our upbringing. Were we raised in an atmosphere of conservative pragmatism, dreamy optimism, or a confused mix of both? Was it OK to be ourselves growing up? Is it OK to be ourselves now?

Well, thinking backwards from the end is something some of us can do, and those lives give rise to phrases like “living for today”, “live each day as if it were your last”, and so on. If I were living today as if it were my last, what would I do today? Party like it’s 1999? Or get the Dalai Lama on the phone for some last minute advice?

So guys, we’re in the game, the clock is ticking down, and if our game strategy hasn’t made us feel like winners so far, maybe we need to call a time out, have a chat with our peers and the coach (hmmm, maybe finding a coach is a good idea at this point), and figure out how we’re going to play out the remaining time. Because wouldn’t we really prefer to have our victory in the bag before the clock runs out?

Um, like I’ve been saying…
Music’s Future Digital and Online: Experts

Welcome to mid-life, man. Maybe I got here before you, maybe you got here before me, but whatever, here we are. You can tell you’ve hit mid-life because it suddenly dawns on you one day that perhaps you now have less of your life in front of you than you have behind you. When that thought crosses your mind, you’ve arrived.

So when that mid-life thought is mysteriously triggered (is it built into our brains, like a neural timebomb?), you can’t really see things the same anymore. Oh sure, at first there will be lots of lapses as you forget all about it and carry on just like before. But bit by bit, that little thought gets louder and more insistent, and starts drowning out the other inane stuff vying for attention. Yep, you eventually have to face it, say hello, and start figuring out what it all means.

Once you have firmly grappled with the idea that perhaps the clock is winding down, you will find yourself asking what you’re doing with your life. For the majority of us, that means we realize that somewhere along the way (and for those of you who are, or were, married, do not use your first marriage date as a default date to determine when your self-determined pleasure-seeking authority-bucking life officially died) we sort of lost track of who we were and what we thought we were going to be when we grew up. I mean, how many of us dreamed of a career in middle management? Exactly.

We had no idea what it would feel like to feel so young yet look in the mirror and see some guy with grey/thinning/no hair, an expanded waistline and nose hair, with a bathroom shelf that includes potions, pills, elixirs, patches and pastes for everything from whiter cinema-quality teeth to, well, you don’t even want to know. I mean, who the hell is that guy? And what did he do with ME?