Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School, talks about a world without bosses for the new Phoenix Lecture Series. His words are jarring and at first, way out there because from my American worldview working a corporate job, the hierarchy is just how things are and there is no other way to go about it. The business hierarchy is what our economy is fundamentally built upon. You break into the workforce as a bottom feeder, and after years and years of sucking up and smiling, you slowly inch your way up the corporate ladder. Such a system perpetuates only because as you reach that next level, it’s only fair that the fresh-faced recent graduate that has just started at your company yesterday goes through the same b.s. process. Helps build character, right? It sort of reminds me of that Kayak.com commercial I saw on TV about the “morons at the top”.

But Prof. Gary Hamel suggests otherwise. What if there was no hierarchy? What if you only did what you wanted to do and you couldn’t be compelled otherwise? What if the future of the company wasn’t about where the big dogs wanted to take the company, but was a crowd-sourced decision that everyone would be happy with? What if everyone is on the same level and you wouldn’t waste away the prime of your life sorting mail and getting coffee because your voice is as essential as anyone elses? I can barely fathom it myself but if there are companies out there that are as progressive as this, sign me up. As a pragmatist, I don’t see it working. I hope companies out there prove me wrong.

I just had to share this because it’s amazing.

I just recently started to diet and exercise again. It’s so funny how you can’t tell how much freaking weight you’ve gained until you want to lose it. I mean, I knew that I definitely wasn’t in tip-top shape anymore. But I definitely didn’t realize that I’d become so chubby. I guess one warning should have been the fact that I cannot fit into most of my skinny jeans anymore, and even if I do, they pretty much suffocate me throughout the day.

I was looking at myself in the mirror this morning, shirtless, and there were a couple things that I thought. First, I realized that my tan line is absolutely disgusting, and I need to stand out in the sun more without a shirt. I mean, my chest is SUPER PALE while any part of my body that has been exposed to the sun is super dark. Pretty gross. Second, I couldn’t help but wonder “how sexy would I look if I had kept up the diet and exercise I started a while ago?”

The problem with me is that I keep going in and out of “diet and exercise” stage. I’m sure many of you guys can relate. I think every year my body weight swings by at least 20 pounds. Last year, for instance, I went from 158 lbs to 142. Right now I’m at a STARTLING (I was so scared to step on a weight scale because of this) 164 LBS. This is ridiculous because at my height, my “ideal” weight is somewhere around 140 lbs. I weigh just as much as my friend who’s about 4 inches taller than I am. I’m aiming to drop my weight down to around 140 lbs. This has GOT to be bad for my body somehow.

And yet, the nagging question is persistently chirping in the back of my head: “what if you had stayed consistent…” I’m pretty sure I would have a six pack by now. I should have just listened to Michael Liu’s article, “How to Stay Fit as a Postgrad.” FREAK.

I share this little tidbit to reiterate a cliche: consistency is key. As hackneyed as this phrase is, and as many times as we hear it over and over again, the truth and weight of the statement doesn’t really hit home for a lot of us. We all expect results instantly. One of the reasons why I stopped dieting and exercising is because I wanted to get a six pack. I tried extremely hard for 2 months, and when I didn’t see the results that I had been hoping for, I became discouraged and stopped trying.

So many of us are working jobs we don’t necessarily like, or constantly switching back and forth between a million different decisions because we all want to see success NOW. We’re unhappy with the uncertainty, and once we hit a wall that we just can’t seem to get past, instead of pushing through and staying consistent, we become discouraged and try something else. But what if you just KEPT pursuing this one path, and fought through the walls with determination? What if you stayed consistent? Where would you be today?

Anytime you want to pursue anything in life, there’s always going to be reasons why you shouldn’t do it. Instead of creating reasons for why you should give up and do something else, sometimes you just got to make the decision to stick with the plan, and see it through till the end. I woke up this morning, and my body was incredibly sore from the past two days of exercising. The last thing I want to do is exercise again, and I hate Tony Horton with a passion. However, I’m beginning to realize more and more that pushing through the days when you really just don’t want to do it is the key to success. If you want to see the success in life you’ve always longed for, or want to be fit and healthy…the only way you’re going to do that is with a lot of consistency. Or, you could win the lottery. Frankly, I’m kind of hoping for the latter – but working towards the former.

Hey everybody.

This is Mike here. Sorry that we’ve gone off the grid for quite a while now. Life has officially waylaid our plans to get this blog booming but if you did want to stay connected with my personal projects, check out my new blog project.

The project is called Faith Palm and the url is http://www.faithpalm.com/. If I had to put what the project is about into a couple sentences, I’d say that it’s an honest look at the silliness of some acts of religion and zeal, a sifting of all of the mumbo jumbo out there, shaking the extra quirky stuff onto the pages of my blog by me.

Check it out, comment, subscribe. We have a Twitter feed, a Facebook group and all that jazz going. Look forward to hearing from everyone!

Maybe you’ve finally gotten that job you’re going for, like I have. Maybe you’re ready to put your job hunting days behind you, like I am. Conceptually, everything you’re looking for to stabilize your postgraduate life has been given to you. The question is, are you ready for it? Here are a couple things I’ve learned in my transition process:

1. It ain’t no cakewalk. We are creatures of habit and the habits that you’ve picked up as an unemployed postgrad should probably stay specific to that period in your life. I know that as much as I tried to stay disciplined, keeping up a high-level of productivity and positivity was definitely the hardest battle for me. It was just so easy to wake up late just because I could, shower only when I had to, eat at odd hours and so forth. This lifestyle won’t cut it once you’re employed because you’ve gotta tighten up your responsibilities, make an effort to stay hygienic and just live a life with some semblance of regularity and normalcy.

2. Be mindful of your spending. So you have an income now. You’ve got the money flowing in and can now justify letting yourself loosen up a little and let some of that money flow out. The economic downturn of yesteryear led to a culture of penny-pinching and watchful spending that I had never experienced before in my lifetime. And now, even before I’ve gotten a penny of my first paycheck, I’ve already gone and spent a large portion of it. In justification, I did have to upgrade my wardrobe a tad to match the corporate vibe of my new workplace but honestly, none of what I bought was absolutely necessary. If there is anything to be learned from the bad economy, it’s that nothing is for sure so if you want to ensure your survivability, you need to incorporate a healthy amount of saving into your life.

I can’t really expand much more on this topic because I’ve only been employed for a two-week block and it’s only been part-time so I’m sure more will come just with experience. What other changes have you guys made to adjust yourself to employed life?

If you’re like me, you had a pretty heavy week last week. Sometimes bad things just happen in bunches and there’s really nothing you can really do about it. First and foremost, the Haitian earthquake happened. That was and still is truly terrible. A tragedy of the worst kind, but like a lot of tragedies that occur overseas in poverty-stricken nations, we can disassociate ourselves from the actual event to lessen the impact that something of that magnitude would have on changing the way we live. We can text in our $5.00 donation, maybe even do it a couple times, and feel that we’ve done our part in helping the recovery process of a broken nation.

Other times, tragedy slaps you upside the head and forces a change. On Saturday morning, I got a text message from one of my good friends saying that his cousin, Justin, died in a car accident the night before. I tried to shake the sleep from my eyes, maybe even pinched myself a couple times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Justin was a member of our church. I watched him grow up but because he went away for school and found a job farther away, we really hadn’t been hanging out that much anymore. Every time he came back home, though, I made sure to at least invite him to hang out.

I spent the greater part of that morning trying to find an actual news clip of the event. I wasn’t gonna believe it until I got some actual proof. It was too tragic an event, too random of an occurrence. He’s winning our fantasy basketball league, for crying out loud. He just made a trade that went through a day ago. He can’t really be gone. I just expected him to walk into our lives and make everything right again.

And yet, that’s not the case. Reality set in for me when I saw his screen name online, signed into his Google chat account. I quickly IMed, not sure what to expect. It was one of the most hopeful yet devastating moments I can remember. Much worse than professing your love to some girl via IM and anticipating her response. This time, the response would determine whether or not a good friend of mine is really gone from this world, moving on to the next. And fate would have it that his brother was checking his account for him. At this point, the surreal became the real.

It’s funny how it takes a tragic event to help you get a healthy understanding of what matters in life. In hindsight, I could have done so much more to show Justin how much I appreciate him. Justin was very driven. He poured himself into school and engineering, and secured for himself a nice job working for a military contractor about a month ago. Things were looking up for him and he was maturing so much. Yet, in his passing, we don’t associate him with his schooling and career. We do remember his hard work ethic and his passion for everything he pursued. We remember the relationships he’s built, the convictions he stood by and the impact he had. We remember his faithfulness, zeal and even his quirks.

Let’s not overlook what really matters in our own lives. Sometimes we get so caught up in living for achievement and success that we forget to cultivate the relationships we want to share life with.

So Cal is weeping for you, Justin Chang. We’ll see you on the other side. 9.26.86 – 1.15.10.

Dear Postgrad,

I know the difficulties that surround your life. The elusive future is always set before you, and the goals and ambitions you once held so dear are constantly shifting to adjust for the realities of your circumstance. It is a difficult position to be in; youthful naiveté collides full on with bitter reality, and the resultant outcome is an unmotivated, undetermined, uninspired version of you. It’s hard to be gung-ho when the cloudiness of what’s in front of you obscures your destination.

So you drift haphazardly along, feeling the weight of pressure constantly mounting on your shoulders. There are nights that you sit at home, and think for endless hours about your situation. Not many of us are exempt from this. Whether you are working or not, the thoughts are still there. Plaguing. Questioning. Is this what I thought my life would be? Can I really see myself doing this for the rest of my life? What do I want to do? Why am I here? How can I gain significance in a hostile and competitive world?

You’ve never felt so little, so unimportant. You feel the tinge of depression; college was so much more exciting. You had freedom in college. You had a “defined” goal, in college. As a matter of fact, your entire life, up until this point, has always been defined. Get through Elementary. Get through Junior High School. Get through High School with a 4.0 GPA, great SAT scores, and 20 completed AP tests. Graduate college, and then…

The question is left unanswered. There is nothing definite, anymore. Grad school? Work? Teach? Play? You have to make your own decisions, now. There’s no one there to walk you hand in hand, anymore. And that void is tough to fill, to negotiate. It used to be as easy as making an appointment with the school counselor. Now, for a little direction, you have to take the initiative and seek out your own counsel.

To you I say one thing: keep on walking, there is significance ahead. Don’t lose sight of your hopes and dreams; tomorrow is another day. If you trudge along, and keep your head up, there will be moments in your life where things begin to come together. There will be days when the “lightbulb” clicks, and things begin to make sense.  During those times, the journey of life begins to work out in your favor, and all the tangles and knots begin to unravel themselves.

Friends come into your life, and speak truth. You pray; an exercise, that perhaps you haven’t practiced since high school, when your parents forced you to go to church (or your friends convinced you that you should attend their high school retreat). But this time, the prayer doesn’t go unanswered. This time, there’s a response. A glimmer of hope.

And slowly but surely, you climb out of the uncertainty. One step at a time, you get through the loneliness, the fear of failure, the (insert difficulty here). Your life begins to have purpose again.

Keep on walking. Keep on moving. Don’t lose faith, don’t let jadedness or bitterness consume you. There’s hope, there’s joy, there’s happiness to be found in spite of it all. And if all else fails? Buy a motorcycle.

It’s easy to get caught up doing our own postgraduate “thing”. The drive for success, for career, for love, for pleasure and for personal security is something we all share but sometimes, events occur that are so sobering that we have to lay aside our own agendas to make the biggest difference we can.

On January 12, 2010, Haiti experienced hell on earth. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck off the coast and the ensuing destruction is so tragic that the quake has been called the worst in the area in the last 200 years. It directly affected the densely populated Haitian capital Port-au-Prince (about 1.8 million people) and early estimates have said that 50,000 people have died but reality may prove to be much worse.

We here at The Postgrad value your support. Those of you who have helped us by reading faithfully and clicking on our sponsored links from time to time have helped us acquire the resources we need to keep the site up and running. You guys have done a lot – more than enough to get the job done. We were going to use the surplus to give a little back by holding giveaways – ipods, itunes gift cards, whatever.

Now our plans seems so petty when placed in this context. So we’re going to pledge all of the money we’ve earned to help the Haitian earthquake relief efforts. It isn’t much but any little bit helps at this point. We hope you don’t mind. We’re proud to be able to help preserve human life and help rebuild a broken country. We sincerely hope you can join us in this effort. There’s no marketing gimmick here. Let’s do the humane thing.

The Big Picture – Earthquake in Haiti

Haiti Earthquake Relief – How You Can Help