(Image/thescoutlife.com)
“All models are wrong. Some are useful.” – Faris Yakob
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The Life Blueprint® is a lottery system which varies from person to person.
Two people have sex and conceive a child, and on the day the child is born, they are given their customized Life Blueprint.
They vary dramatically from place to place. The kid slinging rock in south central Los Angeles who never met his dad has a schematic which looks much different from the one handed to the private-school teen from Manhattan’s Flatiron District.
The fisherman’s son in the Philippines has a Life Blueprint that looks and feels different from that of a bank president’s daughter in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I was handed a Life Blueprint, too. Just like them, and just like you. While all of them tend to vary among the various cultural demographics, we are all united in that we were all handed one with no attached instructions.
No one told us we weren’t obligated to follow the blueprint, and because we were babies and stuff, we weren’t smart enough to ask: “Umm. Why do we do things this way? Might there be a better way? Are we allowed to study other Life Blueprints and experiment? Are there examples of other people doing things differently and succeeding? What if we studied the Life Blueprints of a bunch of people we want to be like, and then follow the steps that apply to us? Why isn’t that an awesome idea?”
Maybe some people have these conversations through their formative years.
I didn’t.
I was just alive one day and felt happy to be loved and fed and hugged and protected by those who cared for me. Maybe if you live in a place where bombs fall at night, or with frequent gun violence in the neighborhood, or where people die often because there’s no accessible sanitary drinking water, you aren’t lulled into the comfort of the Life Blueprint. Maybe when you witness a bunch of shit and horribleness in daily life, you’re always looking for an escape.
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So am I lucky? Because of my safe but perhaps sheltered upbringing?
Or unlucky? Because I accidentally believed one of Life’s biggest lies. The one we believed because no one told us differently.
The Way Things Are Here is THE Way.
We don’t see it as optional.
We see it as the path. Because everyone we see and everyone we know is walking it too.
What’s Your Life Blueprint?
I could have this wrong since I only have access to one brain, and it’s failed me before, but I’m pretty sure my Life Blueprint is shared by A LOT of people in the United States.
I imagine non-U.S. residents who haven’t spent much time stateside mostly think of New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and maybe San Francisco and Chicago as representative of typical Americans.
But I think most people grow up in places like me.
Some smallish town in what people on the coasts call the “fly-over states.”
We grow up going to Friday night high school football games, going to church on Sunday, knowing personal secrets about people in other families because so many people know one another, and we don’t have to drive far to see farmland.
I grew up in a small Ohio town just like that. There are many good things about such a life. And as with everything, there are tradeoffs, too.
The Way (When You’re Me)
My Life Blueprint was basic enough.
You go to kindergarten when you’re 5, and you go to school and do your best every day until you graduate from high school 13 years later.
You have to do a good job in school so you can go to a good college, because that’s The Way to succeed.
Then, when you’re 18 and know a million times more than your stupid, close-minded parents, you move away to college, but probably not too far, because out-of-state tuition is a bitch and because you need those idiots to give you money, and a place to do laundry and eat balanced meals when you occasionally come home because there aren’t any unmissable keg parties on the radar.
Then, you get your bachelor’s degree, which means you’re ready to be a professional-something!
Then, you have choices!
- Take a job doing a thing for very little money relative to the median household income and try to work your way up.
- Go get a master’s degree to demonstrate MASTERY of a subject.
Maybe it’s nice having a master’s degree. I know several people with them, and I don’t think any are morons. But after five years of an inefficient major-switching, college-newspaper-editing, pot-smoking march toward my piece of paper telling the world I Did It!, I wasn’t interested in sitting in any more classrooms.
The Career Way
I’d followed the Life Blueprint, but even I had the good fortune to walk a path different from the average college student.
I can’t be sure how other college graduates feel RE: preparedness to tackle their career upon leaving university life. But in terms of doing the job? I was in good shape. I graduated with a Communication degree with a concentration in print journalism after floundering through three semesters of Business school where I failed Intro to Computing—the basics of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint— TWICE, because that class was stupid and student loan money wasn’t “real money.” (I wonder whether I’m the only person to ever do that. Maybe!)
Because I was a college journalist lucky enough to be at a university with a fairly sophisticated newspaper published twice weekly (frequent by college newspaper standards), and hustled on summer and holiday breaks in professional newsrooms who welcomed my reporting, I had written hundreds of stories—including local front-page and even some national news—before getting a desk in the newsroom of a Florida paper after graduating.
I’m not sure what people who study economics, political science, or whatever feel after graduating.
But that’s kind of my point.
Take the poli-sci major who spends four years sitting in lecture halls and writing papers after reading pieces and parts of their 10-pound, $300 textbook. They graduate with $100,000 or more in debt, but they have their fancy new bachelor’s degree which will help political strategists or those managing political office staff realize how qualified they are!
Life Blueprint Challenge Exercise
What if the person who did that, instead of going to college, read one non-fiction book per week about political strategy, political history, biographies of politicians, or about any ancillary subjects important to those seeking political office?
What if the 18-year-old, instead of college, had volunteered all of her or his time to a local or state candidate’s election campaign, asking questions and experiencing life on the inside and building a network of strategists and elected officials?
What if, instead of going into debt $100,000 or whatever, they spent a fraction of that over four years traveling and gaining the kind of depth, perspective and maturity that only comes from experiencing new things?
Who do you want on your team, Elected Official or Person Running for Office?
The 22-year-old with mountains of debt, little to no experience, and a bachelor’s degree?
Or the one who read 200 books, worked on several campaigns, can pick up the phone for advice or to recruit help from a large network, has countless hours of real-world experience, and a ton of personal references from those she or he worked closely with?
On what planet would someone think the bachelor-degree way is better? Because the Life Blueprint said so, and so did all of our friends’, so we never question it?
And, honestly, Everyone 30 and Older Who Now Realizes Our Parents Knew Things: What is the WORST-possible outcome of this? Starting college as a 22-year-old and a ton of maturity and experience to apply to the classroom?
I don’t get it.
The Marriage Way
Where I’m from, you start thinking about marriage in high school or college. Anyone who has dated for two years might get married, and it’s not even weird. Seriously.
When you’re in high school, you’re surrounded by a bunch of single people just like you.
When you’re in college, you’re surrounded by a bunch of single people on the same general life path as you.
And even though Typical College Student demonstrates morally questionable behavior on the daily RE: sex, drugs and rock & roll, after a lifetime of church-going in Small Town, Fly-Over State, he or she has likely been taught that all sexual activity outside of marriage makes God, our parents, and most people we know really sad and/or uncomfortable.
Throw a bunch of college party-attending, single people with raging hormones, a lifetime model of seeing people meet and marry in their early to mid-20s, and a Life Blueprint in their back pockets reminding them they should hurry up and get married because of the sex thing, and also to have babies, because That’s Just What You Do—It’s The Way!, and it’s no mystery why so many young, well-intentioned people meet, fall in love, and get married without knowing The Things Married People Should Know.
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Why do we do things this way?
Well, because we can’t know what we don’t know. And the Life Blueprint says we should do it this way. We look around, and everyone else is doing it that way, too, so it must be what’s best! I mean, everyone’s happy and winning the Game of Life, right?
Why?
Because we (and our children, if we’re not careful) believe: This is simply The Way things are done.
Because, models. All that we see, which tells us do this, and not that, because this is normal, thus obviously best.
But what if it’s not?
Because all models are wrong. There’s no such thing as One Size Fits All in the human experience.
But some models are useful.
Seek. And ye shall find.
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