Tech Literacy

I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, which often feels like a contradictory mess of a city to me. Fort Collins people (and Colorado people in general) are pretty well-educated; in fact, we're ranked the second-most-educated state in the U.S. after Massachusetts. Yet, as that link attests, lots of those college-educated folks are working as waiters or cashiers and bringing home salaries below the national average for college graduates.

There are likely lots of different reasons for this (that everyone in the U.S. is told to go to college as a kid whether they should or not, that the east and west coasts are generally home to higher-paying jobs than the midwest, the list goes on). But I think a major culprit is something I've see firsthand, day after day, while working with people at Simply Mac and T-Mobile here in Colorado: technological illiteracy. Here are some example phrases I hear on a daily basis:

•"I don't 'get' technology."

•"I don't understand this stuff at all."

•"I hate technology."

Sound familiar?

Here's the thing: while it may be acceptable for your retired grandparents to not worry about learning how an iPhone works (and even that's questionable), if you're in the workforce and want to get beyond the level of cashier or waiter, it is not acceptable for *you* to not understand how technology works. And make no mistake, while older folks give me those lines more often than younger folks, I hear it all the time from people of all ages (including the teenagers who live on their smartphones and the twenty-something "professionals" who can't figure out how to attach a document to an email).

If your immediate reaction is "It doesn't matter that much because I'm not a tech person," your opinion is wrong, and here's why. Imagine, if you will, that you were born in the mid-1800's and wanted to make something of yourself, so you decide you want to become a lawyer. Now imagine that you don't know how to write with a pen and paper.

Sure, a lawyer's job isn't specifically to write things- it's to speak for someone else in a court of law, meaning they should be talented at public speaking and know a lot about law. But trying to become a lawyer in 1850 and not understanding how to write with pen and paper would have been ludicrous. You would need that skill so often during your career that it would be like trying to win a race when you're the only one wearing ankle weights. It was not excusable for a lawyer to say "It doesn't matter that much to know how to write because I'm not a pen-and-paper person."

Today, the same is true of using a computer or a tablet or a smartphone. Your job may not specifically be to use "technology" (as we refer to these things), or to understand how it works, but technology is the pen and paper of the modern world. If you feel you would struggle to attach a PDF of your resume to an email, attach a picture to a text message, set up a conference call with coworkers, set up a video chat with a hiring manager, navigate a cloud storage file system for document collaboration (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive), or tell someone whether your phone, tablet, or computer is up to date and backed up, you don't just "not get technology," you're unprepared for the modern business world. These are not pieces of information that only "the IT guy" or programmers need to know; these are the table stakes for a successful, long-term career, because you will need to be able to do those things in order to look (and feel) competent in that career.

I have no idea whether tech illiteracy is especially prevalent in Colorado or not (I suspect "I don't get technology" is a popular line in lots of different places), but if we're the second most highly-educated state in the country and 99% of the customers I work with have no idea how to back up their phone, there's a problem. Sure, the sample data I have is the people who come into a store for help with their phone (whereas people who don't need the help just... stay home and save themselves an hour of waiting in line and resetting passwords), but it seems like a constant struggle for so many people I know.

If you see my point, consider yourself technologically illiterate, and you want to change that, a couple quick tips for smartphone and tablet users are to check out iMore for Apple product tips and tricks or Android Central for Google's Android platform. Most products these days also have a user manual available on the hardware manufacturer's website, and for all other questions about technology, your best bet is likely this link. (I know that seems snide but I'm dead serious- I use that link to answer about 90% of people's questions at T-Mobile whether I already know the answer or not).

All right, folks. It's time to quit complaining about technology (the equivalent of whining about learning how to write with pen and paper) and start learning how to function in modern society. I wish you luck.

Post number 12.

Front End Development

My software engineering track at Bloc consists of four parts (units, so to speak). The first was focused on backend web development with Ruby on Rails. Backend development, for the layman reading, is writing code that by and large is not seen by the user; it's how Facebook stores your username and password to pull up your account, or how your iPhone links your contacts to your Apple ID. Backend development is primarily focused on interacting with databases and making the website work. Ruby is a programming language and Rails is a framework that helps you build websites using the Ruby language so developers don't have to write the same basic code over and over again to get started.

The second section is what I'm about to begin, which is frontend development with JavaScript. This, as the name implies, is more focused on what the user sees and interacts with on a website. JavaScript, with frameworks and libraries like AngularJS and jQuery, allows developers to quickly build all of those fancy animations and icons that are now commonplace on the web (remember websites in the 1990's that were pretty much a bunch of text and links to other websites? Frontend development makes it all less ugly). Of course, there's some overlap here, as you know if you've explored the fully-functioning web apps I've already built, but by and large that's what I'll be practicing starting tomorrow. The third and fourth sections are about software engineering and doing an open-source project.

Because I'm about to make this transition, I figured this would be a good time to give a bit of a status update on how my work at Bloc is going. My recent posts, while tangentially related to Bloc, have been impassioned discussions about getting people out of debt/poverty, cool new technology, and becoming a more talented individual, not the actual process of coding and developing websites.

It's easy for me to get focused on what I want to do with code rather than the actual act of coding. After all, code is a bit like the English language or Math equations. They're tools we use to describe things produce things, and communicate, not really an end in and of themselves. The only reason one would ever write code just to write code is to get better at doing it. It's much more meaningful (and therefore fulfilling) to write code for a product or resource that makes people's lives better.

But as I'm still in school, so to speak, when it comes to coding, I still have lots of practicing to do. I can build a website and make it work, but I have a lot yet to learn about designing it and making it compelling to the user. There's always more to learn, of course, but even though I feel I've come a long way already, I also recognize I have a long way yet to go.

Onward and upward. Or, as my first mentor, Mark, would say, it's time to lean in.

Post number 11.

My Finance Journey

I am immensely grateful for the life I've been given. I've never (truly) wanted for food, never been homeless, and never been really sick or in life-threatening danger. As lives go, mine is really pretty good.

That being said, one of the things I've struggled with most in my life is money. I was raised in middle class Fort Collins, Colorado, so by "struggle" I don't mean that I've had a hard time finding my next meal, but I do mean that I've learned the hard way about what works in the world of personal finance and what doesn't.

I grew up under my dad's six-figure income as a pharmaceutical salesman and (like most Americans) was surrounded by advertisements from banks and car companies, so as a kid I was accustomed to an upper-middle class lifestyle. It goes something like this.

• Want to buy something that you can't afford? Buy it anyway and put it on payments for 5-10 years!

• Credit cards and personal loans are "powerful financial tools" you can use to build wealth and become successful.

• There's nothing wrong with eating out every night for dinner.

• It's "normal" to have a house payment, a car payment, a student loan payment, a smartphone payment, and just about everything else on a payment.

In short: spend, spend, spend. It was a rude awakening when I got out of the house, rented an apartment with a roommate, and was living on an income typical of a college student (in my case, $10,000-20,000/year). I quickly realized that I regularly spent $400-500/month on food just for myself, that it was a bad idea to go to college on student loans, and that it was an even worse idea to spend money on anything I saw.

Unfortunately, it still took me a long time to start on a path to fixing my financial problems. I paid for everything with a credit card, not bothering to track whether I was spending money faster than I was taking it in. For several months I could barely keep up with my student loan payments ($600/month). I found a better job and then bought a brand new car on a loan- adding another big monthly payment to my expenses ($450/month).

It was only after this- when I was making the most money I ever had in my life and was still struggling to pay the bills- when I realized I had to stop and fully commit to a new plan. The solution I found was the advice offered up by Dave Ramsey regarding personal finance.

The advice, in four words? Get out of debt. Here's why.

Debt is dangerous. Financially it's the most dangerous "tool" out there for you, and it's why we as a nation have $1.2 trillion in student loan debt and $800 billion in credit card debt. People come up with every excuse in the world to get debt, usually because some salesman somewhere lied to them. "It's a low interest rate" or "It gets me cash back rewards" or "It lets me get a new car/phone/shiny new toy whenever I want" or "I don't have to pay anything now" are some popular ones. It's great for the bank that loaned you the money, of course- but it's almost never good for you. The rare exception to this rule is real estate- but even there you should keep the mortgage on as short a term and as low an interest rate as possible. A fifteen-year fixed mortgage with a 20% down payment will ultimately cost you less than half what a thirty-year fixed mortgage would cost with a 3% down payment and private mortgage insurance.

Sure, there are people who pay their credit cards off in full every month and therefore use it more like a debit card. But most people are not disciplined enough with their money to do that consistently and end up being tempted by the "buy now, pay later" mentality that most Americans are trapped into. The U.S. has $20 trillion of debt- but as easy as it is to blame the government for that, it's worth remembering that a large portion of that is held by individuals who live here who buy things they can't afford.

What's the solution, then? It's simple: quit letting people sell you on the concept of debt. If a $25,000 car loan at a 4% interest rate sounds like a good deal to you, you need to get your head examined, like I clearly did. That 4% (compounded annually, usually, not over the course of the whole loan) is going straight into the pocket of whatever bank is doing the financing, rather than going toward YOU. You worked for that money- why should the bank get it? It should be used to provide for you and your family, not to line the pockets of the bank and the car dealer.

Yeah, some debts are less treacherous than others. Phones, for example, aren't financed with interest at a phone carrier. Even so, would you ultimately be spending less money if you had to buy that $700 smartphone at full price? Would you maybe only buy a shiny new phone once every three or four years instead of every two years (or worse, one or more times a year)?

That's what I thought.

So: debt is dumb. Dave Ramsey's plan recommends getting out of it with a "debt snowball": listing your debts smallest to largest (not based on interest rate- based on how fast you can knock them out), paying the minimum balances on all but the smallest one, and attacking the smallest one until it's paid off. Then, once it is, take the payment you were putting toward the smallest debt and use it to pay down the next-smallest debt on top of the original monthly payment. Keep piling up the payments, and then knock out all those monthly expenses!

I'm doing that myself now. I started with about $103,000 of debt earlier this year- mostly student loans, followed by car payments, and then some credit card balances here and there. I've knocked out about $5,000 of it so far and with the credit card payments done, it's only accelerating. I can't wait for the freedom that being debt-free will bring.

I tell this to you now, dear reader, because I don't want other people to make the mistakes I made. I don't want you to buy the lie that you need a good credit score to get ahead in life; you only need a good credit score to get more debt. You don't need a credit card. You don't need a personal loan. You can acquire scholarships or save up to go to college without debt. You don't need a new car- at most, you MIGHT need a used car. And you certainly don't need a payday loan or a timeshare.

Live debt free and living will be easy.

Post number 10.

Discipline Over Inspiration

I recently saw a Facebook post in which a violin player asked some fellow violin players where they get the inspiration to keep practicing all the time. The response the violinist got was more interesting than the question; she was told to become more disciplined with her violin practicing, not to rely on inspiration, as it was too fickle to be counted on to accomplish anything.

Personally I found this argument fascinating. American culture as a whole, I think, leans more toward figuring out our passions and interests than learning discipline, so it was an unusual bit of advice to find on my News Feed. It got me thinking about what causes a handful of people to excel and most people to struggle with bills all their lives, and why there’s no direct correlation between how hard you work and how much money you make (which is to say, working smarter is more important than working harder).

Make no mistake, I think people should pick a career path that they find engaging and interesting if at all possible, and that it’s better to have a strong work ethic than to be lazy. But I know plenty of passionate people and plenty of hard-working people, and not all of them are leading successful careers and lifestyles. Clearly there’s some other ingredient in there that results in success, and I think the ability to perform disciplined practice (which is not quite the same as a good work ethic) is what most of us lack.

The reason is that no matter what career path you choose, no matter what your dream is, I would be willing to bet you that once you start pursuing it, you’ll find that there’s some aspect of it that you aren’t thrilled about. Lots of authors, for example, love the process of writing books, but when it comes to marketing and selling that book they’re hopeless. My dad is a pharmaceutical salesman, and as much as he may like selling products to doctor’s offices, he’s never found company expense reports especially thrilling. Photographers may enjoy taking and editing pictures and hate the difficult process of coordinating events with lots of people, software developers may love building the views of an app that the user will interact with, but don’t particularly enjoy working with databases (or vice versa), the list goes on.

But none of that means that you should quit pursuing your dream. You won’t always be in the same mood every day anyway, and some parts of the career you love are sure to be more enjoyable than other parts, so you should not allow the randomness of inspiration to deter you. Besides, I tend to find that when I’m actually working on software, I’m not thinking “this is helping me pursue my dream,” I’m thinking “how can I make this post reference the user model so when they post it and then delete their account, the post is also deleted?” or some such thing. I’m thinking about the work when I’m working, not the dream the work will lead me to, and I suspect most people are the same way.

Rather than look at each individual moment of your life to dictate what you want to spend your time doing, take a step back and look at the big picture. What kind of life do you want to lead? Would you rather have a career that you hate and be around people who make you miserable so you’re praying for weekends and holidays like everyone else, or would you rather have a career you love and be around people who support and encourage you every day, so you lead a life that you don’t need to escape from?

If, like me, you would prefer the latter, the fastest track to get there is to try and spend some time every day working toward your future rather than keeping all of your focus on the present, and that sometimes requires foregoing present-day pleasure to create yourself a happier future. You should absolutely enjoy the present sometimes (or what kind of soulless life will you be living anyway?), but if we don’t create a future for ourselves, we often wind up not having one. My advice, if you’ll take it, is to control your present and your future, not leave them to the whims of chance or inspiration. That’s what will set you apart in whatever field you wish to pursue.

Post number 9.

Who I Am

This post is a continuation of my first blog post, "Who I Was." I’d also recommend reading my sixth post, "The Secret of Success," to get a feel for what I’m talking about here.

Like everyone else, I am what I think about and am therefore a summation of all of my previous actions. My three sources of income right now are my job at T-Mobile, my job at Old Chicago, and the occasional “job” of being tech support for family and friends. I have a frustrating family life and I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do with my future both during and after college. Like many of my peers, it required a large pile of student loans for me to get a college education in the United States.

Not that I expect pity for those loans or my lower-middle-class income; I live a relatively fortunate life. I’ve never really wanted for food or shelter, and even by food and shelter standards I’ve done quite well here in sunny, mountainous, Disney-based-a-section-of-Disney-World-off-of-our-downtown-area Fort Collins, Colorado.

The above is what I perceive as “normal” about myself, as twenty-four-year-old white American males living in the year 2016 go.

None of it, however, is the part of my present that is guiding my future. I try and improve my family life and do a good job at work, but these are not the things that are the center of my focus right now. The things I am focused on are my identity, my career, and, someday soon, building a family of my own.

I have found that in order to decide what to do with my life, it was helpful to have a strong grasp of who I am—my strengths and weaknesses, my innate talents, and the types of people and environments that make me the best “me” possible. I think when we do not understand ourselves well, we feel lost, which is why so many people my age and younger don’t know what to do with their time or their futures.

To this end, I decided to ask people who knew me about who I was, take personality quizzes, take long walks, and generally do a lot of soul-searching. The Myers-Briggs Test came in handy by describing me as an INTJ (introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging- like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, or, less fortunately, Heisenberg in Breaking Bad), and the book How The World Sees You recognized that my core strengths lie in prestige (holding myself and others to high standards) and innovation (producing creative solutions to problems).

These and other bits of information about myself helped me come to the realization that I am creative in a problem-solving sense, but not the most artistic of people—I simply wasn’t meant to write fiction novels or play guitar. I do have the ability to analyze technical or structural problems and come up with an effective, unique solution, however, which, when combined with my fascination with technology, means I’m a perfect fit for the world of software development.

To that end, my Ruby on Rails projects at Bloc.io (like my current project, Blocitoff, a self-destructing to-do list application), my side practice at Codewars, and my goals of building a Meetup group, interviewing leaders in the tech and personal finance fields, and eventually starting a career as a software developer are my focuses now. These are the things that will build a new, more exciting, and (ideally) more lucrative career for my future, so I can feel proud to start a family with my amazing girlfriend someday.

Excelsior, dear reader. Excelsior.

Post number 8.