A formulaic life

After months of being absorbed in LSAT study and then law school applications, I'm excited to be blogging again. I'm doing something a little different for Christmas this year. Instead of getting people things they don't need, I'm giving people a copy of the same book. I'll be reading this book and then blogging about it and I'm inviting all those who are receiving this book (and anyone else that wants to) to join the discussion on this blog. We'll see how it works.

Now for a few updates: I finished up my time at the National Geographic Society on a good note (they offered to keep me on) and have since taken a job as marketing director for the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) in Roslyn Heights, NY (on Long Island).

For those who know me, I'm pretty passionate about education policy and pedagogy and thus I'm really excited to be working in the alternative education field. Rather than talking about what my vision for education is, I want to discuss exactly why I'm passionate about education.

I've blogged about Donella Meadows before. In her article Leverage Points, Meadows talks about "systems thinking" and where we ought to intervene if we want to enact change. When it comes to our society and its problems, it is my belief that most problems are caused by two things: poor parenting and poor schooling. Hence, I'm immensely interested in both, but let me explain more...

Writing my personal statement for law school applications turned out to be a really fascinating and introspective process. I'm fairly introspective normally, but I rarely think about myself for the purpose of "selling" myself (which is precisely what one has to do in a personal statement). I came to an important realization. At one point in my statement I say:

I can unequivocally state that my life goals are expressed by the following: to identify social problems, develop solutions, and work to implement those solutions. 

The trajectory of my life has really developed into a three-point formula:

1. Identify social problems
2. Develop solutions to those social problems
3. Work to implement the solutions from item #2

Fortunately, this is not something that I have to put effort into, I do it automatically. I'm continually trying to understand why something isn't completely optimized or what could make it better. Constant improvement is the name of the game and I find it fun.

Ultimately, this formula is driven by something larger than itself (as they most often are). I'm going to blog more about this later, but I believe I've determined the purpose of life: to love.