Lee's Blog

Intercambio camping trip weekend

It's coming!  This Saturday we'll take a group of 70-100 Intercambio folks up to the mountains for our annual camping trip.  Those of you in town should join.  Let me know if you're interested.  

Also, you can be among the first to purchase the new guide that I developed recently and got printed this week.  They make great little gifts for any people you know who are between the ages of around 16-27.  Check out www.lifeskillsguide.com for a sample and to place an order.  The more you buy the more economical they are.  

Thanks y'all! 

New Life Skills Guide

I finally finished writing the guidebook Practical Information for the Real World.  When I graduated from the University of Michigan Business School in 1999, I had no idea how unprepared I was for life after school.  I received a wonderful education, I have amazing parents, and since graduating I achieved my dream of starting a successful nonprofit organization. 

However, I have felt uninformed about many of life's essentials until recently when I truly learned the objective information included this guide about finances, health, the workplace, housing, and insurance.  I didn't learn about credit cards until I was 26, and about credit ratings when I was 31.  I felt nervous when signing leases, I didn't know what to do about buying a house, one year I accidentally paid my staff semi-monthly wages when they should have been paid bi-weekly wages, I didn't know how to file an insurance claim until it was too late, and I didn't know how to identify symptoms of depression or substance abuse in order to better support and understand my friends who were dealing with those. 

Many college graduates can relate to my general feelings of uncertainty and doubt with real world life skills.  There are simply a lot of practical basics to learn about life, and schools and parents usually don’t cover them all adequately. It usually takes a long time before we start navigating life with confidence. 

Before working on the guide I researched existing publications and I found a lot of decent books about surviving as an adult, but I didn't find one with comprehensive and objective information that has been consolidated into one easy-to-read, brief and extremely affordable guide. So I created one using the framework from another guide I wrote in 2008 What Every Immigrant Needs to Know.   As this guide begins to circulate throughout the country, society will eventually consist of two categories:

1. Young adults who quickly learn this information and avoid unnecessary problems having to do with finances, health, jobs, housing and more. 
2. Those who over the years will figure out some, but not all of this critical information, before it’s too late. 

I want to share the guide with high school counselors, leadership groups, and parent organizations.  High Schools can use the guide to raise money for their schools by buying copies of the guide for $2 apiece (the reduced cost for buying quantities of 1,000+) and then sell them individually for $5 apiece (the cost for purchasing quantities of 100 or less).  Selling 1,000 copies could net $3,000 for schools while providing students with critical information to help them make informed decisions as an adult.  The guide also equips parents with ideas for important conversations to initiate with their children.  Without a tool like this it can be difficult for parents to initiate factual and productive discussions about all of the practical issues and life skills young adults don’t often learn about in school.    

Universities are the other primary target market because they should provide this resource to incoming students so that the students can focus on academics and minimize their stresses and uncertainty about living on their own for the first time.  I wish I had received this resource before entering college.  

I am very excited to start getting this resource into society and helping to provide millions of people with essential information.  As evidenced by our current economy, when people don't effectively manage their finances, understand housing systems or take care of their health it affects us all. 

You will be able to buy the guide within a week via the website www.lifeskillsguide.com.  Please spread the word about this new source of information.  Thanks!!

 

Quotes from the Tipping Point

I've been reading regularly for the first time in my life, partly because I recently discovered that I can truly focus on a book while on the exercise bike at the gym.  I mostly read nonfiction books that I can derive some concrete learning from, and one of these books that really applied well to my life and to Intercambio was Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.  I like to think of myself as a connector, and I'd like to become an even stronger connector in our society.  Below are some quotes I'd like to share with you. 

“…the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

“Most of us don’t have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends....We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble.  We don’t seek out friends, in other words.  We associate with the people who occupy the same, small, physical spaces that we do.”

“We have our circle of friends, to whom we are devoted.  Acquaintances we keep at arm’s length.  The reason we don’t send birthday cards to people we don’t really care about is that we don’t want to feel obliged to have dinner with them or see a movie with them or visit them when they’re sick.  The purpose of making an acquaintance , for most of us, is to evaluate whether we want to turn that person into a friend; we don’t feel we have the time or the energy to maintain meaningful contact with everyone.”

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”

“…the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior.”   - This was referring to the Good Samaritan study where 90% of seminarians hurried by a person in pain and distress because they were told they were already late and they had to rush. 

I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it, especially if you're a part of or wanting to be a part of a positive social epidemic.  One more quote, this one from Margaret Mead; “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individual\s to change the world.  Indeed they are the only ones who ever have.”  Amen sister!!!