JerseySmarts.com

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #2, Edition #1

Joe — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 11:17:21 +0000

After a nearly 8 month absence, I’ve decided to bring back the Start the Weekend Right Link Series. There’s just too much awesome content that I run across on a daily basis for me not to share these links. On the topic of there being so much great content out there, if you find yourself visiting several websites each day and you’re looking for a better way to stay up to date on all of your favorite websites’ new articles, then I recommend signing up for a free Feedly account. I don’t get any kickback or reimbursement for promoting their product; I just think Feedly is the best RSS reader on the market and that everyone should use it! If you’re using another RSS aggregator, then consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/ or if you’re already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here.

Anyway, the link series is back. Enjoy the links below and get your weekend started right!

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #2, Edition #1
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before College, Be Great Daily
One of my younger fraternity alumni started a blog focused on personal development, motivation, and inspiration. He wrote an entry that caught my eye because of its timeliness. With colleges across the nation kicking back into session either this past week or this coming week, I thought that now was the perfect time to share this entry. What are the 5 things that you wish you knew before college?

What If?, Danger & Play
Mike at Danger & Play has some of the best content on the web for men of all ages. This particular entry poses the question – what if? In this short, but thought-provoking read, Mike asks a lot of great “what if” questions. My favorite one was, “What if you live your life with a sense of urgency and purpose?” More people need to live life with a better sense of urgency. The time is now, people!

Great Leadership Isn’t About You, Harvard Business Review
This one is a little bit longer, but it really hits home on one of the core characteristics of great leadership. The article suggests that great leadership is about inspiring your followers to “share your enthusiasm for pursuing a shared ideal, objective, cause, or mission.” Amen! As the title of the article states – great leadership is not about YOU!

The English Major Has Lost Its Way, John William Pope Center
Keeping with the earlier theme of “back to school,” this is an entry about how the English major has lost its way in higher education. My undergraduate degree is in English, but I always knew that English couldn’t be the end of the road. In my graduate studies I opted to get a degree in Public Policy along with two different certifications – one in Public Relations and another in Curriculum Studies. You have to be diversified if you’re an English major. The third to last paragraph of the linked commentary gives a concrete suggestion to improve the English major curriculum, and I agree with the writer.

What’s Wrong With Comcast?, The Atlantic
We all remember listening a few months ago as a customer tried to cancel his service with Comcast and the telephone rep for the cable giant refused to let him do so until the bitter end. It was the very definition of a public relations nightmare for Comcast. In the wake of the call being released, some folks began interviewing current and former Comcast employees to try to figure out what the problem is over there. This article sums up their largest problem – a company that is built on a fragmented structure. Not a good situation to be in. Not good at all.

Building a Better Teacher: An Interview with Elizabeth Green, EdWeek
Normally, I’d stay far away from posting links that direct people to articles on education-based websites. The unfortunate truth is that the public education industry is inundated with extremists and ideologues who are intellectually dishonest and blatantly lie to disgrace the people they assume to be their opposition. And most public school teachers are brainwashed by the propaganda organizations that they call “unions” (particularly here in New Jersey) so it makes having an intelligent conversations virtually impossible. This interview, however, is with an author who wrote a book about which teaching methods work in a charter school in Newark. Incidentally, this charter schools is also one of my clients, so I’m extra interested in their success. In fact, I’m so interested that I’m actually going to buy a physical copy of this book (who buys physical books any more?!) to see what the author has to say.

How Anthony the Developer Lost Over 200 Lbs… In One Year, Nerd Fitness
Sometimes, I’ll spend an hour or so reading through different motivational websites focused on realistic approaches to the world. Many years ago, though, I stopped reading blogs focused on the primary writer’s weight loss journey. Those blogs are a dime a dozen out there, but their abundance doesn’t bother me. I’m bothered by the “if I can do it, YOU can do it!” bullshit that accompanies most of these weight loss journeys. No, idiot. Your readers’ lives are different than your lives. They can’t do exactly what you did because they’re NOT you. A few years ago there was a semi-famous blog written by a guy who lost 125 pounds by counting calories and starting to work out. Big surprise he lost weight, right? And then after he stopped counting calories and working out? He gained 70 pounds back. Now he justifies gaining the weight back as being healthy. Amazing. The article linked here is NOT that website nor is it that guy’s story! This article is from a fun fitness website called Nerd Fitness and it talks about a guy who lost 200 pounds. I’m not suggesting you get inspired from what this guy did because he’s not you. However, looking at the pictures is pretty dramatic and eye-opening.

The Necktie, Doghouse Diaries
One thing I hate about working in an office is that I often have to wear a necktie. I liked the comic that I’m linking here so much that I pinned it to my office wall. Stupid neckties…

‘Six Californias’ Plan May Make 2016 Ballot, USA Today
This article may not be as recent as some of the others linked above, but it is certainly relevant. Particularly in our country, where we’re finally beginning to have a national dialogue about whether a two-party system works best for American and what elements are in place that keep the two-headed monster firmly in control of American politics. The map in this article shows how the state of California could (and should) be broken into six different states.

9 Striking Library Posters from the Great Depression, BOOK RIOT
If you made it down this far, then you already know that I was an English major back in college. You may have surmised from that information that I enjoy reading – which would be correct. One of the book-focused websites that I follow is BOOK RIOT, though not all of their content is focused on book reviews. Take, for example, the entry linked here. This is a post listing nine different library posters from the time of the Great Depression. I don’t know why, but I appreciated these posters – they were fun to look at for a few minutes. I hope you enjoy them!

Again, if you don’t already have one, then I recommend opening a free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

The Next Big Thing, Part 1 – What Should I Tackle After Student Loans?

Joe — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:30:57 +0000

This entry is the beginning of a three part series discussing what the next big thing will be for me after my student loans are fully repaid. Today, I’ll discuss two areas that are worthy of my hyperfocus while on Wednesday I’ll let you know which direction I’ve opted to move in for this big decision. Then on Friday, I’ll wrap-up this three part series with some thoughts about how I might begin the next hyperfocus. I hope you enjoy reading this miniseries!

The full repayment of my student loan debt should be coming up in the next few weeks. And if it’s not in the next few weeks, then it will certainly occur at some point this summer – and hopefully sooner rather than later. Those of you who have been along for the ride via this blog, my twitter feed, and through our personal discussions know that I’ve spent the last few years hyperfocused on repaying my student loan debt. There is a lot of discipline and new skills that come along with successfully hyperfocusing on one aspect of your life. With my student loans, for example, I’ve crafted some exceptionally useful spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel to track my income and expenses. These aren’t your run of the mill spreadsheets that one can find for download off of any financial website. Instead, these are highly customized spreadsheets that I built from the ground up and that I’ve been using day in and day out for years to track my income and expenses, short and long-term financial goals, and debt repayment.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I would have been able to quickly and successfully decimate my student loan debt without the organizational help and long-term planning provided by using these spreadsheets on a daily basis.

The big decision – which direction do I go in next?

When you set your mind to completing a long-term goal, your mind will use your innate abilities to adapt your environment to help you achieve that goal. For me that innate readjustment was spending more time doing long-term financial planning through the use of highly customized spreadsheets and highly customized budgeting. And I couldn’t be happier with the end result (no student loan debt!) of this hyperfocusing.

Now, when it comes to hyperfocusing I have a decision that I need to make. When I sit and think about what my next big hyperfocus might be there are two items that come zooming to the front of my mind. The first is improving my health and the second is completing a doctorate. I don’t list these as first and second because that is how I rank them; either of these two items could be the next big thing that I hyperfocus on. Below are some of my ideas on each of these items and since I listed health first and a doctorate second above, I’ll give my thoughts on the doctorate first and my health second.

First, completing a doctorate would allow me to accomplish my long-term academic goal. As a high school student, I thought that I would eventually go on to become a lawyer. During that process, I would have obviously needed to earn a juris doctorate and thus would have obtained a doctoral degree in that manner. As we already know, though, I ultimately didn’t go in the direction of being a lawyer. Instead, I earned a master’s degree and I’m in the process of completing a post-master’s certificate. Frankly, you can’t get many more education credentials than what I have right now… except for a doctorate.

And even with these various certificates and commendations, obtaining a doctorate is still a very real goal of mine and one that I think about somewhat frequently. Not only does a doctorate open up the possibility of becoming a full-time professor, but there is a unique air of certainty that comes from someone speaking as a doctor versus speaking as an “expert” in a field. And since most “experts” have doctorates anyway, enrolling in a program to obtain one wouldn’t be out of bounds for what I do in my work.

Second, I could hyperfocus on improving my health. Whether we like it or not, our health is that one thing that we can’t get away from in our lives. Of course when we do get away from it our lives typically aren’t as robust as they could be or they just downright don’t last as long as they should. For each of us, our health is that thing we see in the mirror each morning and that thing we are somewhat consumed with when engaging in and interacting with the outside world. Let’s be honest, folks. We live in a very superficial society where a person’s appearance matters. You can be a brilliant scientist on the verge of curing cancer, but if you’re fat or generally out of shape, the superficial American public doesn’t give a damn about you. That is, they don’t give a damn about you until you can do them some good by providing a cure for their sicknesses!

I am confident that once I am no longer hyperfocused on repaying my student loans, I’m absolutely going to focus on one of the two items above. It’s either going to be the full completion of a doctoral program or a sincere focus on improving my health. Stick around the blog for this Wednesday’s entry where I’ll let you know which of the two I’ve selected. See you then!

The NJ Province Scholarship Established

Joe — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:29:00 +0000

A few weeks back (early December), I wrote a post talking about a scholarship fund that I helped establish for brothers of Sigma Pi Fraternity at Monmouth University. Well, I’m at it again, but this time on a bit of a bigger scale.

I’m proud and excited to announce the creation of The NJ Province Scholarship Fund with the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation. This fund will award an annual scholarship to a deserving brother of Sigma Pi Fraternity who attends school in New Jersey. The exact criteria for the award is listed below:

The NJ Province Scholarship will be awarded to an active, full-time member of any of the active chapters located in the state of New Jersey. This award will recognize the initiated member who most exemplifies the ideals of Sigma Pi through academic excellence, chapter leadership, philanthropic service, and community involvement.

I’m very excited to be working on this fund for many reasons, not the least of which is my own history with student loan debt. If one of my legacies in life can be that I helped start a fund that helped one more kid afford going to college in America’s most expensive state, then I’ll be happy with that legacy.

At this time, we are in the process of raise funds for the scholarship. We’re grateful and happy to take donations in any amount from alumni, friends, family, and local businesses who believe in making college more affordable for New Jersey students. If you’re interested in making a tax-deductible donation to this fund, please contact me and I’ll be more than happy to assist you.

The Delta-Beta Chapter Scholarship is Established

Joe — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:08:00 +0000

Obviously, no one knows what it’s like to have a ridiculous amount of student loans to pay off more than I do. That’s why I’m pleased to announce a new scholarship that has been established for my fraternity brothers at my undergraduate institution, Monmouth University!

The Delta-Beta Chapter Scholarship will be awarded to an active, full-time member of the Delta-Beta Chapter of Sigma Pi Fraternity at Monmouth University. This award will recognize the initiated member who most exemplifies the ideals of Sigma Pi through academic excellence, chapter leadership, philanthropic service, and community involvement.

We hope to award this scholarship as early as December 2007!

And if any of you are interested in making a donation to the tax-deductible fund, let me know!