UNEMPLOYMENT AS PART OF LIFE

Posted: 9th February 2011 by Lucy in WHO AM I
Tags: , ,
3

It is accepted by the new model of the world of work that the bulk of our current population is going to be constantly on the move between  jobs, or even careers. That means, in turn, we have to sacrifice our values for the stability and certainty of one’s career path for the sake of knowledge oriented technologies and global re-orientation of the modern business collaborations. What do we gain instead?
Looking at the bright side:

  • life-long learning attitude, more democratic approach to education, including on-the-job training, virtual schools, community educational and training services, sponsored by governments and corporations;
  • international business, cultural and global traveling opportunities; possibilities to participate in global scale projects; on the other hand, growing tendency for flexible workdays, including working and studying from home;
  • division of labour between countries – someone makes the best planes, someone  provides the best pilots…
  • nations on the move means an increased need for various type of transportation and  an  increased need for directions where to move, settlement, informational,  childminding services, you name it-  suddenly, an opportunity for the new set of jobs in Transportation,  Hospitality, Informational and Social services

And many more, however, lets look on the other side of this coin:

  • every time, when we fall out of this system,  we have to make sure that we are competitive enough as our skills can get outdated within very short span of time – in 1-2 years and even shorter…Our grandparents will never be able to understand how could they make more money with less education, and their grandchildren with university degrees can not get a job better than an entry level position for the Home depot customer service, because during their 5 years of education the industry has disappeared from the Earth face. It would be funny, if would not be sad…
  • fierce competition creates the stress and dis-balance between life and work; the more stressful is environment, the less healthy are relationships between people; and the less healthy are people themselves. How our forties and fifties are going to look like in this economy?
  • if people are constantly on the move, their life style has to be changed and all the real estate has to lose its value; we are going to, similar to tourists or gypsies,  follow  the available job market and keep all our staff as mobile as possible;  our “mobility” is going to dictate change for the houses’ structure, and  for all other items of our every day living – it will need to fit in one suitcase. “Small space” concept seemed to be already attractive to the generation Y and to modern overpopulated cities and countries.
  • nations on the move means that people going to deal with real  issues such as decrease in commitment of any aspects, increase in exploitation for the same reason (think of the modern contracted jobs – who is responsible for your health or your relationships with your family or community).
  • The most dangerous tendency is about decreasing of our natural tendency of sharing  – we are going to develop survival techniques so that employers would keep us longer on the job – we will keep our secret formula with us or try to sell it big to cover time between jobs.

We can go on and go on, but the question is – do we really need to sacrifice our values, is it worth it?

WORTHY OF LOVE AND JOY

Posted: 24th January 2011 by Lucy in WHO AM I
Tags: , , ,
0

It does not take long to realize that  your career is all about your life experiences and your connections with other people. We are all social creatures and wired to be connected to each other.  The way we organize our social life is not about making money,believe it or not!  It is more about self-actualization, acceptance and understanding of our survival as an entity.

What moves us, what makes us happy, what brings us satisfaction while we perform our duties no matter on what scale  – maybe we are going to understand more after  watching the TED talk of  Dr. Brené Brown.

She is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough — that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy?

CELEBRATE FAILURE

Posted: 17th January 2011 by Lucy in WHO AM I
Tags: , , ,
0

Long ago, we overgrew the stage, when we could be happy only by living through another day, and that meant after we got a mammoth on our family table and provided food for the whole community. However, our hunting instincts still live with us and make us thrive for the extreme and adrenalin producing activities.

We instinctively trying to choose environment, which make us feel alive and giving us not only a sense of belonging, but a sense of victory over our own fears of insecurity or failure. It does not guarantee us from failure, but we are not afraid to fail, or, by another words, unafraid to take risks in such environments.

Risk-taking is perceived rewarding and usually comes along with other characteristics such as leadership, gut feeling, openness, trust, creativity and teamwork. Thus, people, which encourage risk-taking, maybe stumble frequently, but at the same time learn valuable lesson, improve themselves and gain confidence in their own abilities.

As soon as we de-stigmatize failure, normalize it as the only way to self-development and perfection, we would make a progress. We will focus on efforts more, than on outcomes; do not punish ourselves for mistakes, which are a natural part of our life and a necessary step in the process of maturing as an individual.

Many of us, since school times, become our own worst critics and after making a mistake have trouble recovering and moving on, forgetting that if we do not try, we will never succeed. Instead of equating an error with disaster, we have to envision it as a portal of discovery, frame Never, never, never give up!failure as a learning opportunity.

Think of the worse case scenario. For example, pick the image of the biggest failure in the history of literature, Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, famous by their constant missteps in pursuing their dreams. Even though, they were considered very unsuccessful from the point of view of others, they had the most adventurous and exciting life , they were following the path they honestly believed in, and created the most famous symbol of never giving up on your dreams!

HOW TO OVERCOME CURRENT CRISIS (Guide for the Canadian governments)

Posted: 15th March 2009 by Lucy in WHAT'S OUT THERE
Tags: , ,
0
My ideas are very simple:
1. Give priority to the most technologically advanced industries, which already proved to be beneficial for the world. Those are green technologies within the old trends, communication technologies, robotic technologies and others of the same significance for the future. You can invest in them bravely enough, if you have still something to invest! Otherwise you will lose money to inflation, while on this investment in some 3-5 years you will get a bulk return .

2. Create new jobs  with equal payment opportunities  for women.  Provide with  the child care system  partially financed by government of all levels. It will not create a chaos,  it will bring much more money to the trade, because we know who is a good spender in family.  In addition, anyway it is going to be inflation, so why not to spend money for something good and distribute them more consciously, with democratic aspect to it! Plus, we will resolve the problem with overpopulation of the planet, the working women are not often willing to come back to the home-stay mother routine.

3. Public Transportation is not supposed to be privileged and has to be under jurisdiction of Federal Government with partial participation of provincial and local authorities. Otherwise, it supposed to be opened to free market and explored by different size transportation companies, which will create competition and will improve the quality of service and correspondingly, daily life of people. In addition, it will decrease necessity to use individual transport and will serve to environmental improvements. It is time to change for public transportation system – they feel untouchable for too long and our pockets can not bare its increased greediness – de-monopolization is the word of the day – tomorrow could be too late! Do it now!

4. Pharmaceutical industry is in even worth condition, than Public transportation and in my opinion, even Real Estate. It is a huge bubble, and it is going to explode sooner or later.  They are going to be next after GM, if not going to simplify the entrance to the market for the small size companies. It is going to be outbreak for those countries, who are more open-minded than FDA and its counterpart in Canada. Competitiveness is the key, when the ideas are spread enough to be stolen. China and India, and so many more have not so established intellectual rights laws in their trade laws (see example with Toyota Lexus, http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2009/03/china-byd-auto-launches-s6-lexus-rx.html). Modern communication technologies are incredible in spreading an information.  Do not count on the fact, that people in the North American continent could pay 100 times more than others for their health, it is not working anymore, as UN statistics shows!
As an alternative, the  industry could be partially, nationalized and or price regulated by the governmental laws, similar to FDA(put an additional tax pressure on their over the top interests, we know those are not connected to the entrepreneurial quality, it is more about being privileged and corrupted, and return those taxes to minimize the price of medications for the taxpayers, especially, in Canada, where the Health Care System is founded on people taxes)

5. It is time for the governments and billionaires of all the world to join their efforts to create the infrastructure, where all countries best input could be helpful. Start any unthinkable project to involve as much people as possible, to create stability and trust of the people in your good will (please, do not start the war – it is not going to work this time – just use your common sense… I would think, based on Obama’s steps, that nanotechnology and stem cells research could have  international prospects to it, as the whole humanity will benefit form its development. As I mentioned above, green technology could give not only money, but power back! And not only electrical!  Or, how about invite best engineers from all countries, who are interested in the arctic development and make its exploration, including oil production, beyond politics, considering only the global problems or economical problems as resolution for money spending -anyway we need money for their resolution. We can control the production, based on the international approach from all points of view – environmental including. The money could be placed into any neutral country bank and this fund could be the first international account for Earth Problems resolution. Rewards are you do not have to spend tax money of your people, you can use it not for the political outrage fight over “the unkilled bear”, but for the creative and realistic approach to the modern situation on the planet.

…to be continued…

The thoughts after visiting Gapminder

Posted: 13th March 2009 by Lucy in WHAT'S OUT THERE
Tags: , , , ,
0
My visit to the Swedish web-site was inspired by  the lecture on TED-conference by Hans Rosling. I do not claim that my findings are original, but what I have discovered surprised me and raised a lot of questions about our stereotyped vision of the modern world development. Evidently, we live in the era of globalization and it is not anymore a scary word. We know, it has much more positive influences and gives us an opportunity to solve many existing problems with holographic approach from different point of view.  Take, for example, global warming or communication technology development, spread of different religions or melting of pop musical cultures – we have so much in common now, than in difference. It is harder and harder now to brain-wash people, especially in the developed countries. Despite this fact, our old stereotypes are still alive and continue to co-exist with the new knowledge quite successfully. I can prove it with some statistics, I placed together on the "Gapminder"  charts. Lets begin our journey…

    1. We all confident that modern economy brings as a necessity participation of women in the labour market. It does not connect at all with the feminist movements as the latter were mostly about rights of women for voting and equal education etc.  It is wired in our poor brains, that  average family can not survive without woman’s labor and thus, as a matter of fact, it is supposed to be noticed in the world statistics of the last 2-3 decades, by some very important economical indicators as GDP total or personal income, for example. Lets see what the world (UN) statistics shows:
if you place two indicators, such as "woman labor force (%)" vs. "total income (GDP)" on this famous gapminder chart, and compare two countries Canada and India, you can see that actually, the tendency is opposite – the less women involved in the labour, the more productive the rest of the population is!? And the numbers are astonishing: in Canada – with 6% increase from 1980 to 2005 of women participation , increase in GDP is doubled, but in India 5 % decrease of women involvement in last two decades correlated with 4-folded increase in GDP!  Today, India with only 28% level of women participation has 7.7% growth income per year, when in Canada it is only 1.9% with 46% women in labour market. Now I have questions – how can it be possible? Coincidental correlation or an old stereotype – the more, the merrier? What could be the real issues there – technological outbreak in India; genders’ social roles are twisted (women, as well as men, are alienated from aspects of their human nature, which in turn, decrease their productivity);  women are significantly underpaid for their work,  difference in population demography (28% of population in India is equal 300 million,while 46% in Canada is 14 million).
   2. Now, new table, lets compare these two indicators: growth in income per person (%) and new cases of breast cancer per 100 000 women. In 2002 the growth income rate was the same for India and Canada, however, women in Canada have 84 vs 19 cases per each 100 000 ( I do not mention US with 101 cases). The situation looks even worse, if you place Health expenditure per capita vs cancer cases: 22 USD in India vs. 2244 USD in Canada per capita, which means two digits more to pay for 4 times better chance to die from cancer (obviously, here comes  8 times less effective health care system) !!! And these data similar for all kinds of cancer. HIV is an exception, but only for India and most of African and South American countries. Canada is ahead of most Western European countries, Japan, Korea, China, Pakistan and Indonesia. Now the turn for another question – where the myth coming from about better health of people in Canada, if the #1 death rate is caused by cancers and Canada and US are leading in it?! We can argue that such types of cancer as colon or rectum cancers, usually, prevailed in older, long living generations. And the chart "longevity vs.colon cancer cases" proves that this is the case almost for all western countries and Japan, however, long range of countries(China, Mediterranean, some middle eastern countries have comparably long life expectancy, but significantly better statistics about cancer cases (5-10 vs 50 per 100 000 men).
   3. Last for today pair of statistics indicators, which I entered just for fun,  is "academic achievements" vs. "patents granted". You expect that the more successful academically people in the country, the more technological outbreaks are there in place. However, there is actually, finally, some positive, bright outcome of being average: US with lower than average achievements in math, got a strong leadership in amount of granted patents, leaving far behind all competition, including Japan, South Korea with twice as better results in math. I was surprised that England was one of the leading countries as well, despite even lower marks that US:)  I advise to read the book of Daniel Pink "The whole New Mind" to explain these so-named "controversies". This is actually, the serious problem of the world educational systems, which produce billions of unhappy and unskilled for Life people, literally to leave them on their own at the very ambitious age.  By unskilled for Life, I mean absence of communicative, interactive, assertive/persuasive skills – sets not only for being successful, but also for overcoming failures, which are, on a contrary, very well delivered by schools of the North American continent, and Great Britain.

P.S. All the charts you can see on http://graphs.gapminder.org/world up until  I will figure out how to download them on my space.
…to be continued…

Older Entries
Newer Entries