I was going through my phone today, finding contacts for a project I am working on. It required me to scroll through every person in there. As I did so, I was sad to see several people that are no longer living in my contacts. I couldn't bring myself to delete them. One of these people was once Hubski's oldest user, Ralph Stollard. Ralph was in his 90s when he joined Hubski.
Ralph always took great joy in hearing about the projects I was working on, whether it be music, Hubski or family stuff. He referred to this time in my life as the "productive years." He then told me that as he saw it, there were three stages to his life ; The formative years, the productive years, and finally the reflective years.
What part of your life are you in? Do you think Ralph was right?
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In my book, every year should be reflective. We need to reflect on our forming and on our producing and on ourselves. The unexamined life is not worth living AND the unlived life is not worth examining. I asked my class last week to prepare a short speech that discussed an identity-defining moment in their lives. This class are very much into both formative and productive years. They come from all kinds of careers and programs and are becoming entrepreneurs. After explaining the assignment, I asked if there were questions. One older, thoughtful guy said - "It's not exactly a question -- but it seems you are asking us to not only prepare a speech, but also to reflect on our lives. We never do that." Uh huh. The speeches were AMAZING. Several of them left us in tears. One girl managed to give her speech talking through tears. Reflect well and reflect better dammit. It's NOT navel-gazing to be reflective. It's a process of asking yourself a few questions, for example: Is the road I'm on related to my desired destination? Is the relationship I'm in helping me be more happy or more sad? Do I have "agency" in my own life?
I've been on this website for a total of ~27 minutes now and every post and the comments to follow are making me realise just how often I leave my brain in auto-pilot. It's very unsettling.
Thank-you! Well, I'm in the medical field so if I ever post something it will likely be medicine-related. I actually found Hubski in amongst a list of "50 websites to waste your time on" (clearly having a slow Sunday) and I believe it is going to be just that, minus the "waste".
Welcome! What do you do in medicine? We have some PhD's, MD's and nurses kicking around the site. My wife is an MD so I'm constantly around those in the medical profession. I look forward to seeing your posts. Followed! If you have any questions about the site, feel free to ask me.
Absolutely off topic but I am a stalker apparently and just looked at your profile and saw a link to the Primer page. Good stuff that I had not seen before. Has hubski ever has DMCA takedown request or any other "official" contact about personal or IP information? I am a licensed professional and am very reluctant to post anything related to my work due to paranoia about professional liability.
We have not had any such requests. We will always be transparent if any such things occur.
Exactly. Interesting that you'd put it that way. Your comment about what to do when one is dumped is about first - reflecting - and then using the information you get from the reflection for action rather than wallowing in reflection. It's worth posting again right here: We've discussed reflection before and its relative value.
I'm still really uncomfortable with your definitions of "reflection" and "mediation." To me, you're drawing boxes around experiences and defining ways in which they can and cannot be enjoyed and creating arbitrary guidelines for which they may or may not be allowed to provoke thought. I also really dislike the fact that not only are "experience" and "reflection" called out as discrete things, there's a percentage assigned to them and a value judgement assigned to that percentage.
kb - When I have world enough and time I will either rewrite or delete the original post. I've created a BINARY in that post and I want to reject the binary (right OftenBen). May reflection lead to action and transformation. And vice versa. Maybe the two can unite: REFLACTION -- as in "This is a time of serious reflaction!" kb, I'm experience a brave new world of self-reinvention. I sent the very busy thenewgreen a version of my state of the lil address that I prepared for hubski. May or may not post. I appreciate you. Hmmm maybe tonight is a possible IRC. Of course you are in a baby-feeding bed-putting time zone.
Perhaps it's a difference of what "reflection" means to us - there's an implied "what can be learned from this?" in reflection to me. Reflection is the act of investigating something internally in order to achieve a better understanding. Understanding is the single most important thing for changing one's regard for the world without investing capital or effort. So when I see "reflection" I see a guided internal effort towards improving something - something internal, something external, an understanding, an appreciation, an approach, an effort. I'm officially done with the show for another year which means my evenings are my own again, which means I'm spending as much time as I can with the fambly. I may be able to make an appearance, but it will necessarily be brief. Good luck on yoru self-reinventing adventures. I appreciate you, too.
I agree -- words, words. You mean reflaction - as in the two are bound somehow (as they should be). I had never associated action so closely with reflection -- but I think I will now -- and since I force my students to #reflectbetterdammit I will tell them your definition above exactly as stated. Copying it now.
You would have really liked Ralph, lil. I worded this post wrong. I shouldn't have asked, "is Ralph right?" Because, Ralph never told me that this was how life IS. Rather, he was reflecting, in a very "macro" way on his life. What I should have asked is, what would you name the stage of life you are in, right now? -That would have provided some interesting answers I think. I wish I would have had you as a teacher when I was in college. It's NOT navel-gazing to be reflective.
-Damn straight. I've been meditating lately and after a session recently I came to the conclusion that I have to treat my family/marriage the way I do the projects I work on. Why? Because that's how I work best and having a happy family/marriage is a lot of work. So, I started a project I'm calling husband/daddy 2.0. -1.0 was already pretty good, if you ask me :)I asked my class last week to prepare a short speech that discussed an identity-defining moment in their lives.
-This is essentially the topic of the podcast I am supposed to be working on :) I'd have loved to have heard the speeches.
Last week I left a voicemail for a lifelong friend who died a few months ago. It was just good to hear his voice. :( And.... now I can't type for a while. I am going to go out and throw a stick around with my dog.
I'm very much in my formative years, I feel. Currently in the latter half of my college career though, so I suppose that like OftenBen I'd be coming to the end of this stage pretty soon. I broadly agree with Ralph. However, I was thinking along these lines earlier on this month when I went back to college. It seems that a great many seniors have suddenly entered my year in college, and apparently this is a trend in other places as well (I was talking to a German exchange student about it). A lot of seniors are taking advantage of their retirement by going back to university and studying things that they never had time/means to study in the past. I suppose the formative years can sometimes go on for one's entire life.
I'm in some mix of formative and productive, though I don't think the former ever really stops. When you put it like that, "the formative years, the productive years, and finally the reflective years." it reminds me of Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Say what you will of him but in the elder age it is a very poignant and reflective look into the life of a person. I'd like to think that this holds true for people that aren't at the forefront of some of the biggest events in world history, that they end up having this kind of reflection later in life. Did I do the right thing. Was I a good person. Did I behave in a just manner. I think those three questions are among the most important things a person can ask themselves and now I'm way off-topic. Productive years? Yeah, I'm getting closer to that but it's still very much formative. I'm searching for a lot of things right now and slowly finding them, while still being productive. But it's shaping the things I care about and the things I want to do in the future in new and different ways. I think Ralph was right and that the guy had a good taste in coffee. Stumptown is great. I hope he had a fruitful life.
I've heard the same idea phrased differently: "Spend the first third of your life learning all you can, the second third doing all you can, and the last third teaching all you can."as he saw it, there were three stages to his life ; The formative years, the productive years, and finally the reflective years.
Being in college, formative. I still am a "kid". I haven't had to get a serious job, work for the things I have, or really do anything truly productive for society. My views radically changed recently, and I've found the foundations I am comfortable with, and noticed that I've been building up my worldview now more than reconstructing it based on new things I have found.
I think Ralph is right to a limit. To an outside observer, I would appear to be in my productive years. I'm in my mid-30s, have been out of school for some time and am gainfully employed. I wouldn't disagree with that, but in so many ways I still feel very formative. The biggie is how my hobbies have changed. From my mid-20s to my early-30s, my primary hobby was going to live music. I'd go out locally three or four times a week, and I'd fly to cities just to see a show. That started to change a year or two ago. Now I'd say my main hobby is hiking in the Adirondacks, something I've only been doing for nine months now. Instead of scanning tour pages for dates I could make, I look for a time to get away to the mountains. So professionally I've moved from formative to productive, but I'm also reflective about my time city hopping and formative with hiking and backpacking. I think Ralph was right for individual things, but overall I think we can be formative and productive forever.
Odd thing is I don't think those things have to be in that order, and I think we are free to move between them as we see fit. A relative of mine started out working endlessly to have something more, only to end up falling into some situations that were less than ideal. Over the years he spent his time rebuilding his life, and finally entering that productive phase once again. For him it was formative, productive, formative, reflective, and finally productive. That's how I see it at least. I also think that sometimes those years can happen at the same time. I would put myself in the formative years, but I would consider these last three years in college as being productive.
I liked this article. http://markmanson.net/four-stages-of-life very similar to Ralph's 3.
I would say I'm pretty solidly in my formative years, though perhaps towards the end. I am learning to take care of my meat wagon, to maximize it's mileage and the quality of the ride, so to speak. I am trying to become literate in the inputs, outputs and management of the sparking meat-computer interface, so that there is less time/friction between 'Desire to do a thing' and 'Doing of a thing.' More on this later I think.
I was a pretty reflective kid, my favorite book in 8th grade, was Thomas Moore's Utopia. I don't really find college formative. I just took my first statistics test. It was way easy, and I only have 6 homework assignments left. Anxiety has officially left the building. I want to get the homework done, and go to the tutor, right before the my other 3 tests open up. The rest of my classes are electives, I can get ahead on them too. Once I do that, I can switch to procrastinating on productive tasks. Mostly the data entry, I was trying to do in my break. I can move my domain to a place with free hosting, since Go Daddy made me wait three months. Comming soon, technology for real world activism.
I'm glad to be transitioning from the formative years to the productive years. But, then again, we are always in the state of becoming something else, and I'm not sure where I am in the formative | productive spectrum. I'd like to hear his explanation of it, if you've got a link!