Personal Experience Isn't Enough

I like being fed up with political articles and the news, because it covers up the fear that I'm horribly under-informed. It's easy to score coolness points by acting like current events are noise distracting me from some important life wisdom. It's easy to say "it's futile to try to keep up with current events".

That's better than admitting I'm being lazy by staying ignorant of what's going on. Or even worse, that maybe even if I did have the stamina to stay up on a lot of things, admitting maybe I don't have the intellect to make sense of what's happening in the huge space outside my routine. That space, by the way, is most of the world.

It's easy to distrust something that's hard to understand, or to discount things that have little to do with your daily life. I feel like I have so much to concentrate on every day, that I can get fooled into thinking that the long list of concerns has some kind of global relevance. It doesn't really. Think about the fact that there are societies separated from you by an ocean, speaking a language you don't speak.

I've been in plenty of arguments where the other person speaks mostly or only from experience. It's true that there are certain things we can learn only by doing, but it's a giant mistake to think we can only learn by doing. Other people have done, and have learned by doing. Some of those people wrote books, some of their doing has been included in statistics. No matter how strongly I feel a connection to something, I have to remind myself that there may be literal billions of people that do not relate to that.

And the longer I live, and the more attachments I develop, the harder it can be to care about events across the street. Which is why I always try harder to read more, try more things, listen more, observe more, look for patterns. And do my best (which is usually not very good) to remember I represent a very small amount of humanity.

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Any personal opinion represents a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of human experience. More people are on Earth every day, which means your views represent a smaller and smaller percentage of people every day, and every year. That means every year an individual opinion represents less and less of humanity. Which means as a person ages, any argument from personal experience is going to be less representative of humanity overall. So the older we get, the less relevant our personal opinions get.

Another issue is when arguments from personal experience ignore the experiences of people that are better in some way. Finding your own way in a craft, or to physical fitness, or to your life philosophy, is all well and good. But if you think personal experience is the ultimate authority, then what about someone whose personal experience led them to be better than you at your craft? Healthier? What if they have a cooler life philosophy than you?

Science, books, facts, statistics, it's easy to dismiss these as not being useful if you feel some intuitive truth that conflicts with what you're hearing. Other people also discovered amazing things on their own, off the beaten path, and maybe better than what you discovered. Will you dismiss those discoveries because they didn't come from your own brain?

There's not much difference between that reality and science, books, statistics. It's one of the major advantages of being a human being instead of a fish or a giraffe. You don't have to (and shouldn't) rely only on what happened to you, because smart people have already figured out lots of things and all you have to do is read them.

10 Ways To Play Guitar Sooner

What's this awkward title? I'm not talking about playing faster, or better, I'm talking about going from someone who doesn't play guitar to someone who does. That's it. If you want to get crazy with buying gear and learning musical theory later, that's great. Most new players just want to start making musical noise as soon as possible, so let's do that.

1. Listen to a ton of guitar based music all the time.
If you don't listen to a lot of guitar based music, you will never get good at guitar. It's simple. People listen to what they like, if you listen to guitar that means you like it, if you listen to it a lot that means you love it, and if you love it that is the best motivation to get good enough at it. Also you need a lot of songs in your brain for later when you decide which songs to play. You don't need to be well-rounded.

2. Decide who to copy.
Google the player(s) you like the most from step 1, learn their names, listen to everything they recorded on Spotify, watch YouTube clips of them playing live. Make a conscious effort to copy them and be derivative. Originality is great, but it takes time and years of experimentation and we're trying to get you playing right now. Important: if your favorite player uses a pick, you have to use one too or else you can't copy them. If your favorite player doesn't use a pick, you have to learn to play without a pick. I don't recommend choosing virtuosos such as Joe Satriani or Eddie van Halen.

3. Buy cheap gear.
A common phrase in music instruction: "buy the best gear you can afford". This doesn't work for beginners because they don't know enough to judge the quality of gear. I suggest buying a cheap piece of crap, because you might hate playing and give up, so it's better to not waste money. I recommend pawn shops and eBay. Get something with obvious cosmetic damage, these sell for cheap even if the functional parts of the instrument are high quality. I have personally done this and recommend it to everyone. You don't even need an amp, but the distorted sound of your guitar through an amp might be a good motivator.

4. Get Smartchord.
It's a great app that becomes more valuable the better you get. For now you only need the tuner feature, which tells you how out of tune your guitar strings are when you play them into your phone's mic, and it tells you which direction to twist your guitar's knobs to make the strings be in tune. It's my favorite tuning app, and has a million bonus features that will come in very handy later on. Tune your guitar, or else it will sound bad no matter how well you play.

5. Pick a few simple songs and get tabs, not sheet music.
"Tabs" are ultra simple sheet music for learning songs, and you don't need to know music theory to read them. Say you want to learn "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Google "Smells Like Teen Spirit Tab" and pick whatever tab is the most popular. If you want to figure the song out by ear, I salute that, but it is a much slower process unless you have great critical listening ability (most people don't). You will never have to learn how to read sheet music in order to play rock n' roll.

6. Play along to recordings instead of a metronome.
Everyone says to play along to a metronome and that's wrong. Two excellent reasons for this: recordings make you learn and play every part of the song from beginning to end, in order. Second, recordings make you develop realistic rhythm. Recordings are better than a metronome because you develop solid rhythm but with the variations and imperfections that great players have. If you get behind or forget where you are, the recording marches on without you. This helps you build musical reflexes and the habit of recovering quickly from mistakes.

7. (Optional) Learn every note on the two fattest strings.
Use one of the features on Smartchord that shows a diagram of the guitar neck, with little letters all over it to tell you which notes are which. Learn the notes on the fattest string, then if you want you can add the notes of its neighbor string. There is a predictable pattern to the note names, if you spend enough time messing with the diagram and playing each note on the fattest string, you'll figure it out.

8. (Optional) Learn these chords on the fattest string: F# major, F# minor, F#5 and  F#7.
Smartchord has diagrams to show you how to play these. Once you learn these shapes, you can move them all over the guitar. If you did step 7, you know where the notes are on the guitar. If you learn F# major, all you have to do is move it up to the note C, and now you're playing C major. If you learn F# minor, just move it up to the note C, now it's C minor. And so on. When you have a grip on that, learn them on the second-fattest string as well. Now you know 99.7% of all chords you'll ever need.

9. (Very optional) Learn the Ab Major scale, Ab minor scale, and Ab blues scale.
Again, Smartchord has diagrams for this. Just like before, you can use the knowledge from step 7 to move the scale to any note and it will be a different scale. Once you've learned Ab major, move it up to the note D and play the same scale and guess what? Now it's D major.

This isn't necessarily the best way for everyone in the world to learn to play, but it has worked well for me and everyone I've taught. It also minimizes the amount of dead time that you will endure before being able to start playing songs. And the amount of money you have to blow on equipment and books.

I cut out tip #10 so you can start playing even sooner.

The Hiring Process Is A Joke

I was the least qualified person at the interview, but I knew I was getting the job anyway. Because the boss was wearing the same outfit as me.

After 13 years of auditioning for singing gigs and getting turned down for most of them, I've been told many times " don't take it personally, the audition isn't about you", and I didn't realize how true that was until this interview. There's no degree you can get, no job on your resume, no research you can do that can replace the coincidence of showing up to an interview looking just like the boss.

And what's so bad about that, really? Having a degree doesn't mean you'll have any of the skills that all college grads are supposed to have, plenty of people graduate without communication skills, competence at technology, mathematical ability. Depending on the school and the professors, you don't need any special intellectual curiosity or perseverance to graduate.

The resume doesn't say much either, since anyone can put whatever they want on it. You could make ludicrous claims without the company checking up on it. If you put an amazing claim on your resume that is true, that doesn't mean those hiring are going to call anyone that can verify the claims. I've listed references that are casual friends I never worked with, just because they sound good on the phone.

Sure, you could do research on the company to impress the interviewers. I've definitely done that in the past, and then had interviews where I was never asked anything about the company. I've done research and watched people get hired who did zero research. If you research a company top to bottom, impress everyone and get the job... does that have any bearing on whether you'll be good at the job once you're working there?

The jobs pull the same stunts. Here's the classic one: the job lists Excel proficiency as an absolute must, you feel good about your Excel skills so you apply, you get hired, and then none of your coworkers can do anything on Excel. You remember seeing on the website for the job that the supervisor position requires a Masters in Accounting, which you don't have, so you applied for a lower level position. You start working there. The supervisor doesn't have a Masters in Accounting.

But you're not surprised at this nonsense. When you first applied online, the application made you attach a resume. After you attached it, you got an endless application asked you to type out every aspect of what's on the resume. The application specifically forbids you from typing "see attached resume". You also had to write the address of every previous job, and phone numbers of supervisors that don't even work there anymore.

One summer I read a dozen books and a hundred articles on financial matters because I felt like a financial illiterate. That year I had three job interviews (I got all three of the jobs) and asked these great detailed questions about the benefits, most of which the committee couldn't answer. At the third job, after already receiving an offer, I said I would need to see the informational packet they give to new employees so I could study it before accepting the offer. I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. But that's too late, I said, I need to know this information to tell whether I want to work there! I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. I took the job anyway because I needed the money.

The packet didn't have specifics about the dental plan. The HR rep couldn't answer my questions, my coworkers couldn't. I dug deep into the file structure of a shared hard drive only accessible by employees that have a company password, keycard, electronic profile... established hires that are already committed to the job. I found something explaining the dental plan. It covered all preventative care, but took $14.66 out of every paycheck. I only needed basic cleanings once every six months, but $14.66 out of every check means $381.16 per year... so I'd pay the equivalent of $190.58 per cleaning. That means it was cheaper to pay for cleanings out of pocket, an extra cost I didn't have at the last job. Suddenly the extra money earned at this new job has decreased.

And I got that job because the boss showed up wearing the same outfit as me. I matched his speech, leaned on the table the same way, cracked a couple jokes about things I figured he'd be interested in, and my whole past became irrelevant. I knew the three other people applying for the job, and all of them would have done better at it.

They should tell you about that in college. Or maybe high school. It might not go over well to tell college kids that a 5 minute conversation matters more than 4 years of sweat. That $50 spent carefully at Ross goes farther than $60,000 at school.