The Geek Girl Survival Guide

Arm yourselves accordingly to take on the world together.

Lovely girl geeks¹, gather close: you are some of the most important people to the future of the world. You love to learn things, and know things, and make things, and do things. The things you learn, make, and do can change the world for the better.

But you’re probably aware that it can be pretty tough for a girl in any field of geekery dominated by boys. You might be held to different standards than your male compatriots; people might find it harder to believe and respect you; and you might be treated badly. But I want you to stick with it because I think you can make the world a better place if you do what you do best.

So here are some tips for you to get through those extra bits of rubbish that you get for being a geek girl and help other people get through them too. You’re still going to need to work really hard to get really good at the thing you love.

1. Be good to each other.

Make friends. Be a mentor. Ask for advice. Forgive people. Pass on opportunities to others. These are things that can never really go amiss in general, but especially be good to other women in your field. It can be really hard not to fall into the trap of being super-competitive and mean to other women, but it’s always worth it to create positive relationships.

Five Steps to Living a Remarkable Life

Five steps to living a remarkable life by Debbie Millman

What advice would I give a young designer in order to help him or her succeed? I believe that every goal is achievable and you can live a remarkable life by following these steps:

1. Work harder than anybody else you know.

2. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t rest on any laurels.

3. Constantly try to find out and learn about the things that you don’t know. It’s really easy to learn about things that you know. And it’s pretty easy to learn about things that you know that you don’t know. I would suggest that people learn about all the things that they don’t realize that they don’t know.

4. Many people start out by thinking about all the things that they can’t do; once you take that path, it’s very hard to get off of it. Try not to take that path. The only person who can make your dreams come true is you. If you start out with limited dreams, you’ll achieve only limited dreams. This is not a good way to start.

5. Do not compromise! Consider what you would do if you knew you would never fail, and pursue that as if your life depended on it—because it does! Only you can create a remarkable life for yourself. Only you. Start right now!

Via: Meghan P. Coleman

How Moneyball Rules Apply to Real Life

Michael Lewis Tells Princeton Graduates How Moneyball Rules Apply to Real Life

"Don't be deceived by life's outcomes."

Steve Jobs: Advice to New Graduates

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference."

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to loose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Have the heart to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Paul Graham: What You’ll Wish You’d Known

Any high schooler will tell you, if they've been asked once, they've been asked a thousand times. “Well, what do you want to do with your life?”

One student found an answer to that question in the excellent Paul Graham essay, "What You’ll Wish You’d Known." He wrote about how the essay inspired him in an article entitled "What a High School Student Learned from Paul Graham." Below are a few of my own favorite passages from Graham's work.

“I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy.”

Geek Reading: Achieving Techno-Literacy

One of my all-time favorite tech writers, Kevin Kelly, published an excellent piece in New York Times Magazine entitled "Achieving Techno-Literacy." In it, Kelly discusses what he learned about technology from homeschooling his 8th grade son for a year.   It's really worth a read, but here's the meat of the piece:

Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the kind of literacy that we tried to impart:

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

David Brin's Advice to High School Graduates

Be ferocious. Be curious.
Use darts, dice, and balls to explore campus.
Good stuff.