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Investing your Time

Your time is limited. And it’s time you start seeing your time more like an investment.

When you decide to sleep in or relax for the full day.  When you decide to stick it out at a job because it’s easy or because it pays well. And when you decide not to give it your all in any activity you’re doing.

That’s time you may never get back. It’s time you could have invested working on your art, perfecting your craft or working toward one of your wildly important goals.

It’s time monitored our investment a little more often.

That project that we are working on. Is it worth it?  Is it meaningful? Or is it a distraction? Or the things we decide to do on weekends? Or that person we are spending our time with – the same questions apply.

Working on the wrong thing for a few days or even weeks isn’t the worst thing in the world. But when it turns into months and years and we spend it at the wrong job or with the wrong person,  that’s time that could be better invested.

Just a thought.

So where are you investing your time this weekend?

2013 Princeton Prize Race Relations Event and my Keynote Remarks

There is perhaps no greater challenge facing our country than the pursuit of equality.  From gender, to socio-economic background, to color to race, the challenges we face not only exist today but have existed for hundreds of years.  Princeton and its alumni recognize that the issue of race relations continues to be urgent and recently started the Princeton Prize Race Relations to tackle the challenge of race. The event in Chicago was organized by friend and colleague Marquis Parker.

The mission of the Princeton Prize is “To promote harmony, understanding, and respect among people of different races by identifying and recognizing high school age students whose efforts have had a significant, positive effect on race relations in their schools or communities.” 

The Princeton Prize in Race Relations consists of regionally awarded $1,000 cash awards as well as an annual symposium on race.

The event took place yesterday and I was fortunate to be invited.  Not only did I meet the high school award winners, support the Princeton community in Chicago and talk about Education Matters but I also gave the keynote address, which was on Race Relations as I see it today.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”  The first words of the preamble and an early quote in my remarks. I spoke about many topics, from the town halls of Philadelphia PA where the constitution was written, to the DREAM’ers not given the chance to go to college even though they were born in the United States, to our responsibility to stand up and disagree not just on the streets but also in the classrooms and courtrooms, to the professional challenges of race today. I also told my own story – how I am the son of two adopted parents.  Neither my mother or my father knows the exact color of their parents skin or what countries their ancestors came from – and ended  with a piece of advice to the winners: understand how much #EducationMatters  in this process.

But more important than those remarks were the wonderful efforts of the 4 award winners in attendance.  HERE is the video of this year’s winner, which was posted before the event. But all 4 students at the event were incredibly remarkable. They have businesses that reach all over the world and were very impressive in front of the room to only be 16 and 17 years old.

Tags: College, education, EducationMatters

Instant Miscommunication

In the age of instant gratification and communication, it is almost a quintessential experience to have felt that sinking, “Oh no” feeling of having just pressed “Send” on a message you should not have. Or even worse, getting a message where you have no idea how to interpret it. Unfortunately, this miscommunication happens far more often than it should.

The thing about miscommunication isn’t that we wanted to do it.  Nobody does. Likewise, it’s also not realistic to have the goal to never miscommunicate. I propose that the thing that really matters is to figure out how to cut down on the amount of time between when we miscommunicate and when we realize and fix it.

That’s why emails work better than texts and phone calls work better than messages. The more connected you are to a person, the more you can interpret their message and can fix what’s being said. And the more engaged you are in the conversation the faster you can understand what’s really being said.

The irony is that we all know this but continue to ignore it. We continue to send texts, to write quickly and to ignore how others might interpret it.  Significant others we are involved with. Parents that we take for granted. Bosses that we work with.  And entire organizations with hundreds of misunderstood messages every single day. In all these scenarios, we ignore the obvious fact the more we can understand and engage with people with talk to and the more we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, the better off we will be.

In today’s world of Instant Miscommunication, real human interactions are less frequent but more important than ever before.