How to be Everything by Emilie Wapnick

This book, How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up was a hoot. Emilie Wapnick provides a structure for individuals who are not content to do one thing people she calls multipotentialites.  Variety can come sequentially, within one job, several part time gigs or using a good enough job to provide financially for time to explore side projects without the pressure to generate income.

I appreciated the author's zest for life. It's how I've chosen to live my life by having many projects going on at once each in the area that interests me. It's a prescription to allow a person to experience all of the colors of their life and plant a garden with a big variety of plants.  You don't have to be the best in each area spending (M. Gladwell's 10,000 hours) to still have fun learning new things with the knowledge that it will be awkward at first but get better with more experience.

She has sage advice about making sure that you structure these multiple experiences so that you can have enough income to support the variety through her puttylike website.  She also has some good advice about figuring out when it's time to move on to another job or activity.  If you wake up and dread going to work on a regular basis, it's time to start looking around for another opportunity working with the help of others to find a better fit.

How to be Everything - 8 min. 14 secs.



Why some of us don't have one true calling - 12:27 min.

How Great Science Fiction Works - Great Courses by Gary K. Wolfe

How Great Science Fiction Works by Professor Gary K. Wolfe starts with what he considers the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, written during The Year Without a Summer in 1816. He traces the history of science fiction from the pulp magazines in the first half of the 20th century to the paperbacks which often took the short stores in the pulp magazines and stitched them together for connected stories or novels.

Science fiction attempts to take the best speculation of the current science of today and apply it to future scenarios. Science fiction also uses other worlds to highlight current social questions we have on our own planet.  The has become more prevalent as science fiction has spread from being centered in England and America to a collection of authors from around the world. Science fiction has the ability to play out scenarios in the future that reflect the unintended consequences of decisions in the present.

I appreciated the wide breadth of authors and topics covered in this course.  I may be able to read a quarter of the books mentioned if I live to be 100. I have enjoyed reading Bradbury, Asimov, and the sci-fi parodies of Adams. I now have a group of new authors to read and enjoy.  The lecture series provided good ideas for the truthiness series of near science fiction I have been writing.

 

How Great Science Fiction Works - 2 min.