jaredscherling

 

For this blog post, I wanted to write about an important TED talk I had recently watched. It’s called How to find work you love by Scott Dinsmore. This TED talk grabbed my attention because I always hear people who complain about their current job and wish that they had a better one. Scott Dinsmore is the creator of liveyourlegend, a cite in which his TED talk is based off of.

 

Dinsmore first started his speech by talking about how he first came up with the liveyourlegend idea. He says that he hated waking up and going to a job he didn’t want to work at. The businesses competitors had already automated his job role, so he knew that it was time to change things up a bit. Dinsmore’s lack of love for his job was just one of the 80% of people who don’t enjoy their everyday work. I’m sure that a lot of people, myself included, have worked a job in which they don’t love or want to be at on a daily basis. The sad thing is that there are a lot of people who continue to work this jobs for the rest of their life.

 

There were two big ideas that I took away from his speech. That’s passion and self-understanding. Dinsmore states that people who are passionate about their job understand themselves and become self-experts. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re never going to find it. You can’t type the word business in a job search bar because thousands of jobs will appear. Even though you may get one of those jobs, it’s very likely that you are not going to enjoy working at that company for the long haul. We must understand our self and our interests before spending the rest of our lives at one job. No one knows what you do best, then yourself. You are the driver of your train and you can take it wherever you want. Although we must follow orders from those that are superior to us, we shouldn’t keep a job we don’t like because someone told you to do so. They can control the things we do inside the job, but they can’t control the job and company you wake up and work for every day.

 

Dinsmore also states to do the impossible and push our limits in life. We need to take little steps and surround yourself with passionate people. Passion is what drives us to succeed to enjoy every second of life. Studies have shown that if you surround yourself with passionate people, you will then become more passionate about the things that you do. When you walk into a business you can instantly tell if someone working there is passionate about their job. When you see how happy someone is, that passion and upbeat environment rubs off on you and makes your day a whole lot better. We can be passionate about the job we work at, but the best job environment is one where everyone feels that way, every day. Because of this, more people have quit their jobs then have been laid off. Although quitting your job comes at a price, it’s most definitely worth it when you find a job that you look forward to being at every minute of the day.

 

Things in the world would start to change if everyone loved the work they do. The only problem in the workforce would be that people are too passionate about what they do. That’s a good problem to have. Everyone would treat people so much better. Passion brings out the best in people, and when your surrounded by it, you’ll feel and be the best person that you can be.

 

Unfortunately, Scott Dinsmore passed away after his TED talk while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. Although this tragedy occurred, I believe that he was pushing his limits and doing what many thought was impossible. He lived by his passion to explore and do things that many thought was unconventional and stupid. Even though his life ended before many thought it would, it’s a little comforting knowing that he lived and died doing the things he loved.

 

            I remember my first day at Nebraska Wesleyan as if it had just happened yesterday. I was nervous and excited at the same time. I was getting to meet my roommate in the morning, when everyone was supposed to come. However, he didn’t show up. In fact, he skipped most of orientation, and I wondered if I was going to have a roommate. Coming here, I didn’t know anyone and I almost expected that my roommate would be one of my best friends on campus. Once he finally moved in, our relationship started. But in a way, it started when he didn’t show up for the first couple of days on campus.

            Coming into Nebraska Wesleyan, I knew no one. The only people I knew from high school weren’t living on campus. Therefore, I was paired with a roommate by the Admissions Office. The office paired us together by our common interests based on a simple questionnaire. Based on the questionnaire, I was excited to meet someone who had the same interests as me. Since we supposedly had common interests, I expected him to be one of my best friends on campus. My expectations however, were wrong.

            If I had to describe myself in one word, it would probably be shy. Around new people and places, I tend to trap myself inside a little box.  But when I met my roommate, I vowed to myself that I would be the outgoing person that I truly am. I wanted to be as friendly as possible while getting to know him better. I mean, we were going to be living together for a year! My roommate’s behavior was almost the exact opposite of mine. There wasn’t a shy bone in his body. He wasn’t scared or worried about new people and the environment. His brother and sister went here, so it was like Wesleyan was a second home to him. It seemed like he already knew so many people. He didn’t even show up to half of orientation, yet he lived twenty minutes away.

           The first day I met him, I was really happy to be assured that I was going to have a roommate. We had dinner with some other guys and tried to get to know each other a little better. However, this became a rare occurrence. Every other day after that, he was gone. He knew so many people before he came, so he just hung out with them all day. When other roommates were going to lunch and dinner together, I was by myself. I still had the expectation where he was going to be one of my best friends in college. That he was going to be someone who would go through the nervous freshman phase that I was going through. Instead, I was pushed into college life without someone I could talk to or even depend on helping me if I had a problem. Being my nervous and shy self, I never asked where he goes or who he hangs out with. We would say “what’s up,” whenever we saw each other in the room. That was it. The interests we were paired together with were unknown. To this day, I still don’t really know what we had in common.

            My roommate rarely communicated with me. He used our room for one purpose, sleep. As I stated earlier, he was always gone. I never knew where he went, and I honestly never expected him to tell me. He came in, went to sleep, woke up, and then left again. Some days there wasn’t a single word exchanged between the both of us. I didn’t know if he was trying to avoid me, or if he just had better things to do. I never knew what to say during the time where I actually saw him. I still knew very little about him. I didn’t know what he liked, if he played sports, or what he was even studying. It’s difficult to start a conversation with little information and little time. During the first week of school, I wanted to ask if I could go hang out with and his friends that he already knew. But my shy self couldn’t do it. It’s like I expected him to ask me, instead of myself doing the same. In a lot of my relationships prior to this one, I always had to ask if people wanted to hang out. After a while it gets tiring when you have to be the one creating the conversation all the time. In college I wanted something different. I expected something different. Unfortunately, it just didn’t come. It was hard for my roommate and I to have a good relationship when our communication was nonexistent.

            As with every person you live with, there are little quirks that annoy you. Once the things that annoyed me kept happening, I should have spoken up by setting certain boundaries. We never had a conversation about food, guests, or any of that basic stuff. As I stated earlier, our conversations were a rare occurrence. Both of us never fought about anything. I personally kept my issues with him to myself. That’s something I really regret doing looking back. Keeping everything to myself makes the relationship worse. If I don’t tell him to do something differently, nothing is going to change. I think that I didn’t want to hurt our relationship. I didn’t want him to dislike me because I spoke up about some things I disliked. We were living together for a year and I didn’t want to live with someone who hated me.

            Similarity also plays a big role in roommate relationships. We like people who are similar to us, which is why I had high expectations for the both of us. Since neither of us knew how we were similar to each other, it was like the avoiding stage in a relationship started right away. He always spent time with his old friends, people who had the same interests and ideals as him. Since we didn’t have access to any new information about each other, our starting perceptions of each other stayed the same. Our perceptions of each other before we even met most likely shaped some aspect of our relationship. In order to change my starting perceptions of people, I need to have an open mind at all times. It’s just like the saying, “Don’t judge a book by the cover.” In no way did I want to perceive him as someone that wasn’t him. Although it’s hard not to have an opinion on something, I need to be more open to change. I feel like I characterized him by things that I saw during the first week of school. People change, thus my perceptions of people need to change as well.

            All in all, my roommate left after one semester to move in with one of his close friends across the hall. I think that we both saw that our relationship wasn’t working out. This was strictly due to our lack of communication. When we stopped living together, our relationship surprisingly improved. We talked to each other a lot more, even though we weren’t living in the same room. To this day, I don’t really know how our relationship improved. I just don’t understand it. But in life we don’t have to understand everything that happens.  

When I think of cars, one word comes to mind. That word is reliability. Everyday millions of people, including myself, put trust into a vehicle in hopes that it gets us from one place to another. Car companies spend billions of dollars perfecting the machinery that makes every single car. Because of this, a lot of people were shocked when they had first heard of the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal. The machines didn’t do anything wrong. So, who is at fault and how much will it cost Volkswagen?

In 2014, a small West Virginia lab started to test if Volkswagen vehicles had low emissions the company had promised and advertised. When the laboratory ran tests, they never saw the low emissions Volkswagen was promising. Instead, they found an emissions device that tells a computer when you’re on the official test cycle and when you’re not. If you’re driving on the test cycle, the device activates and lowers the cars emissions rates. But once you drive the car anywhere else, the device turns off and the car exerts 40 times the legal emissions rate.

Once the news broke, many Volkswagen employees seemed shocked. Who would do such a thing? At first glance, the company thought that only a couple of engineers were involved. However, there were 11 million Volkswagen cars, all over the world, with this emissions device. A lot of people had to of known about this device if it was personally put into that many vehicles. Investigations were launched all over the world including an internal investigation by Volkswagen. Although a lot of investigations are still under way, Volkswagen’s CEO has stepped down from his position. The head of engine development in the U.S. division also faces charges regarding car emissions and public health. 9 other Volkswagen executives have also been suspended because of their supposed knowledge of the scandal.

One question I mentioned earlier was how much this scandal would cost Volkswagen. The device was implemented into 11 millions vehicles, meaning that Volkswagen was going to have to pay around $250 million dollars to fix and compensate those that have been cheated in the U.S. alone. Global sales for Volkswagen dropped 3.5% after the first month of the scandal. In the 3rd quarter, Volkswagen took a loss of 1.9 billion. Since Volkswagen knew compensating customers and legal fees would be costly, they planned massive savings of around 20 billion dollars. However, the legal fees were a lot more costly than expected. Because Volkswagen sold cars all over the world, the company incurred legal issues in a lot of different countries. Their massive savings technique was a nice start to fixing the issue, but everything ended up costing the company around $90 billion dollars.

Whoever created the emissions device was very clever, but they failed to realize all of the consequences that can occur if they get caught. Because of other car companies mistakes, Volkswagen is currently the top car manufacturer in the world once again. Last time their company was #1 in the world they made a huge mistake. Hopefully this time around Volkswagen has learned from their mistakes and are ready to start all over again.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/28/news/companies/volkswagen-scandal-two-minutes/

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/24/443053672/how-a-little-lab-in-west-virginia-caught-volkswagens-big-cheat

I wanted to focus this blog post on one of my favorite TED talks. It’s called The Mystery Box by J.J. Abrams. I first watched this TED talk in my geography class and since then, it has been one of my favorite TED talks. In case you don’t know who J.J. Abrams is, he is a director, producer, and screenwriter. He’s mainly known for his involvement in Lost, Mission Impossible, and Star Wars.

J.J. starts his speech off by talking about his grandfather. He said that his grandfather always bought him gadgets at a very young age. Because of this, J.J.’s dream was to always make things. He’s always wanted to take apart objects just to see how they were made or put together. J.J.’s grandfather also introduced him to a magic store where he had bought a magic box. Most of his speech focused on this magic box and what it meant to him. He’s never opened the box because it represents his grandfather, infinite possibility, hope, and potential.

He also explains that mystery boxes are everywhere in life. He created the hit T.V. show, Lost, based off of these mystery boxes. If you’ve ever watched the show, you know that the events weren’t shown in the same order as they had occurred. There were so many flashbacks to the point where it was hard to keep track of what was actually going on. A show like this had never been done before. When you skip certain events, the viewer tends to wonder and think about what could come next. Television lives off of this excitement. That’s why the best cliff-hangers come at the end of a season. They want viewers to think and talk about the show. It’s free publicity at its finest.

Towards the end of his speech, he talks about how a blank page is a mystery box. This blank page needs to be filled with something fantastic. If there’s a blank page in front of us, we can do anything with it. We can draw a picture, make a hat, fly an airplane. Anything is possible. A blank page is a mystery box because it can be so many different things to so many different people. I wouldn’t be able to guess what someone would do if I gave them a blank page. That’s why it’s a mystery. Mystery fuels us. It makes us wake up and explore what the world has to offer everyday. No day is ever the same. No matter how much we prepare for what will happen in life, its always going to be a mystery.