Curriculum

4 min readFeb 28, 2020

Continuing to put it into the universe—I think I would love to teach one day. A lot of this stems from the fact that the majority of my most impactful professors were adjuncts who actually worked, led teams, and drove business in the “real world” day in and day out and then brought their lessons, experiences, challenges, questions and curiosities to the classroom to share, versus existing in a bubble of academia. They taught hard skills, but more importantly in my eyes, they also coached soft skills. Cool story, but why me, what do I have to offer, what kinds of things would I want to teach? I don’t know why, I don’t have much to offer, but here are some of the kinds of things I think I’d like to attempt to explore with the youngins.

I suck and you suck

Gotta explain the weird image first. Fun fact, some people call me Kale 🥬! What a delicious leafy green! Unfortunately the point of the picture is that I suck at many things personally and professionally. You do too, as we all do, so please dismount from your high horse. The question is how do we have the self awareness to honestly admit/embrace what we suck at and explain/emphasize what we’re really freaking good at without flanking ourselves with red flags or coming off as cocky narcissists? It’s a fine art that’s relevant when interviewing for jobs, but also relevant once you actually have a job, so start learning how to do both. Lesson 1: Methods to knowing your worth and taking ownership over what you’re good at, and methods to asking stupid questions and grasping/learning from your suckiness.

What are we even doing here

Sounds weird, but one of the skills I’ve had to practice the most since starting working is articulating what I do and what I want to do. I know what my job is, I know what I’m working on every day, so it seems like explaining these things would be an easy task. But finding a clear way to articulate my job in one sentence, one minute, one document, or one formal presentation is something I’m continuously learning how to do. On top of that you have to find a clear way to explain what you do to a coworker versus a total stranger versus someone extremely familiar with the industry versus your grandma. The third layer of the challenge is finding out how to articulate those same things with what you want to be doing—how do you effectively convey that to a hiring manager, your boss, an industry peer, and so on. I wish in college someone would’ve forced me to coherently explain a hypothetical job and my dream job in all of those ways over and over again until I was reciting it in my sleep. Lesson 2: This is what I do and how I do it. This is what I want to do and how I will do it. This is every way I can explain those two things.

Givers and takers and energy exchange

I’m one of those obsessive emotional intelligence people sooooo therefore think it should be more interwoven throughout education. Adam Grant has a theory that in the professional world everyone is either a giver, taker or matcher—i.e. you’re either entering interactions figuring out what you can give to someone, what you can take from someone, or keeping score to ensure all giving and taking is even. Not sure I believe in that, but I am interested in exchanges of energies, or how things like passionate leadership, a crap coworker, an empathetic boss, a cutthroat office culture, or interesting educational opportunities either suck our energy or feed us energy, and how our energy affects our teams, our productivity, our work, and our culture in return. How can we better create and contribute to a wonderfully symbiotic exchange? ♾️ Lesson 3: Exchanging of energies—sounds like a Hogwarts course, actually a real world skill!

Joke’s on you, studying never ends

Surprise teenage me, studying doesn’t/shouldn’t end after school! If you have a craft about which you’re passionate and want to continue learning, then you have to learn how to study your craft in all kinds of ways. Keeping an eye on what people in your orbit are doing, playing around and experimenting with new technologies, listening to tangentially-related podcasts and reading tangentially-related articles, trying to understand why the tween unboxing influencer has found so much success and why the Post Malone/Crocs TikTok weirdness found so much success, and other normal things. You learn on the clock, but I’d argue you’re supposed to learn much more off the clock, and those are the lessons that you bring to the job the next day that help you have a more well-rounded, creative, ever-evolving perspective. Lesson 4: Studying your craft, aka scrolling through TikTok endlessly.

I don’t know what I’m saying but I will make it sound ~great~

I can’t remember who said this—maybe the mayor of LA?—but a few months ago I was listening to a podcast and some political leader talked about how the best thing he ever did for his professional career was taking improv classes because they taught him how to handle situations he was unprepared for in an agile and confident manner. Forced to wing a call? No problem. Meetings that go totally off the rails? No problem. It’s impossible to be completely prepared for everything, so why chase the unattainable—learn how to be poised and nimble when you know your shit, and even more so when you don’t know your shit, instead. Lesson 5: I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m doing it well.