Cuban Lady All-Stars ;Salsa Vancouver

Video from our peformance at the PNE in Vancouver, Canada.

In the Prime of their (uncertain) lives by Harvey Schachter

Switching jobs every so often in our 20s, not being completely satisfied for long in our line our work, dreaming up more magnificant plans is not just something I do, or you do. Apparantly it's the trend of our generation - gen x & y - and it's a good thing.

I was glad to hear it and so here it is.

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Special to The Globe and Mail
August 29, 2007

BRAZEN CAREERIST:
THE NEW RULES FOR SUCCESS BY PENELOPE TRUNK

Many baby boomers and their parents faced mid-life career crises when they hit 40. Today, Generations X and Y - the young people populating our work places - will be dealing with what is being called the quarter-life crisis before they hit 30.

They leave university or community college in debt, often are still living in their parents' homes, and frequently move through a succession of jobs in their mid-twenties, unsure of what to do.

It looks like flailing, but Penelope Trunk - who experienced this herself as a professional beach volleyball player, software executive, entrepreneur, and now career columnist - says it's a good time in life to be trying out your dreams. "Better to do it now than when you're 40," she writes in Brazen Careerist.

But as younger people approach 30, the feeling of instability can mount into a crisis if the job hopping seems likely to continue endlessly. The way to avoid it, Ms. Trunk says, is not to grab on to something for life immediately after university. Rather, be more systematic about explorations in your twenties, so that, when you hit 28 or 29, you have sorted things through and have a sense where you want to land.

View detours as a route to happiness, she says. Embrace them. Be a sponge, soak up all that you can from the people you work with. Any job - and any person, no matter how weird - can help your career.
There will be uncertainty, and that's fine, she says, "Uncertainty is a good gift with bad wrapping paper."

"The only way to lead an interesting life is to encounter uncertainty and make a choice. Otherwise, your life is not your own - it is a path someone else has chosen. Moments of uncertainty are when you create your life, when you become who you are," Ms. Trunk says.

Accept uncertainty instead of fighting it. Indeed, prepare for uncertainty, through meditation and cultivating self-knowledge, she advises. Let uncertainty surprise you with what it brings - and allow you to shine.

"Some of you are stuck in your career. The only way to get unstuck is to create instability," she says. "If you can see your life in front of you, you've got a problem. If you know what's coming, then you probably won't need to grow to deal with it. If you can see everything coming, then what is the challenge? You're on auto pilot."

Graduate school has often been the antidote to uncertainty at this stage in life. But it probably won't help you fulfill your dream, she warns, but rather, just put off finding one. That's because, in school, we are constantly told what to do and rewarded for meeting other people's goals. "The adult world requires us to set our own goals, and that is something school does not teach," she notes.
Résumés are an essential part of the career process. She contends that when you break résumé rules, you hurt yourself because you look like you don't know them.

Her first rule is that you must keep a résumé to one page; someone sorting through a batch of them is unlikely to look at a second page.
"I don't care if you are the smartest person on earth or if you have founded six companies and sold each of them for $10-million. The point of a résumé is to get you an interview, not a job," she writes.

"If you have something great on the second page, put it on the first. Then you will have nothing great on the second page and you will be able to get rid of it."
Don't use paragraphs in your résumé. Use bullet points. No hiring manager, she insists, will read through paragraphs. List your achievements, not just the duties of the jobs you held. "Anyone can do a job, but achievements show you did the job well," she stresses.

Since some companies are using keyword searches to screen applications, you need to make sure your cover letter and résumé use the key words indicated in the posting or that such a job would demand. And tread lightly, she warns, on listing personal interests, remembering they are there to get you an interview, not to make you look interesting. Linage in your one-page résumé is precious, so only mark down interests that help you to meet the employer's needs.

"Personal interests that don't make you stand out as an achiever do not help you. And personal interests that are weird make you look weird, and you don't know if that's what your interview likes, so leave it off the résumé."
Her book is written in paragraphs, but brisk ones, with saucy comments and lots of useful advice for Generations X and Y, including how to handle office politics, build relationships, manage your boss, and not be the hardest worker (since that makes you look desperate).

In addition: Ottawa-based career consultant Alan Kearns takes readers through basic career advice in Get The Right Job Right Now! (Collins, 239 pages, $24.95). He offers solid recommendations and some useful templates to fill out, such as the "right job checklist," to identify the top elements of the job you should be seeking, and a "career balance sheet" to list your job assets and liabilities. He has a particularly strong section on common interview questions, and how to answer them.

Just In: In 1960, motivational pioneer Napoleon Hill and millionaire CEO W. Clement Stone teamed up to produce the best seller Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude, which has now been re-issued with a new introduction by Mr. Stone (Pocket Books, 356 pages, $16.99).


harvey@harveyschachter.com

Salsa Performance Video Summer 2007

Our group, the Cuban ladies all stars, peformed a few weeks ago. This is our video.

Some recent photos:

First published article

A few months back I began reading Alan Watts, who was a major influence in bringing Eastern philosophy to the West. At the same time I saw the movie "Surplus: The Terrorism of Consumption." My own jumbled thoughts about the life sprang forth on paper and with these two inspirations I began to make some sense.

I wrote a piece titled "Zen, Life and Consumption." It got picked up by a Canadian journal and can be viewed here.

"As I write staring at the beauty of the ocean and mountains of this region, I wonder how I could be thinking of future plans that would involve leaving. Even more astonishing is that I am content, enjoying life and so I ask, why is it so difficult to be still, in this moment, complete?..."

http://www.inscribed.org/

Istanbul - Pure Magic

Pure magic phenomenon – this is Istanbul. Time travel doesn’t exist, they say and yet each time I view a photograph, review a memory or say the city’s name – I do time travel, at least that’s how it feels. For a city, entwined with its past Ottoman history and 21st developments, traditional routines with modern lifestyles, holding its strong eastern past as it heads into its western future – in the midst of all of this, it is easy to feel lost.

Lost for all the memories passed before this moment and lost for all the exciting, hopeful and questionable future. And yet all one has to do is gaze at (or think about) this body of water - the Bosphorus. In its overwhelming beauty the complete awe and wonder of the world befalls you departing a calm joy, in reminder that it is not lost. It is here with you, slightly different than before, just as you have evolved.

Istanbul 2007 – the reunion with 20 something of my friends from all parts of this world shared in such a strong memorable experience that we have realized our vision to reunite once more in this magical city to share our stories and rediscover the city that we left two years ago. Istanbul – I am ready to meet once again.

For my friends – 603 united we live, travel and dream.

AdBusters

This alternative, globally read news source based out of Vancouver has established itself as a creative publication focusing on the impact corporations, mass media, advertising, consumption is having on society. The writing is inspirational, the graphic design mind blowing and the topics discussed remind us of the simple truths that are generally dismissed by the mainstream media.



In their own words:

"Culture jammers, it's time to howl! We are a loose global network of artists, writers, environmentalists, ecological economists, media-literacy teachers, reborn Lefties, ecofeminists, downshifters, high school shit-disturbers, campus rabble-rousers, incorrigibles, malcontents and green entrepreneurs. We are idealists, anarchists, guerrilla tacticians, pranksters, neo-Luddites, poets, philosphers and punks. We see ourselves as one of the most significant social movements of the next 20 years. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major rethinking of the way we will live in the 21st century. We believe culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights was to the '60s, what feminism was to the '70s, what environmentat activism was to the '80s. It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way insitutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way we interact with the mass media and the way in which meaning is produced in our society."

www.adbusters.org

Casino de Rueda de CUBA!!!!

I've been salsa dancing Cuban style for almost a year now and since summer 2006 I've joined an all female performance group!! Rueda is so much fun! It consists of couples dancing in a circle with a leader calling out certain moves that everyone performes together, changing partners as you...sort of like line dancing but in a circle. Of course Cuba is the latin country where the spirit lives in the music, the dancing and the people and that is so beautifully demonstrated in the rueda dance.


It's funny to see in Vancouver, the 'North Americanization" of latin dancing, the so called LA style where skill is flaunted in super fancy twists, head spinning twirls and back breaking acrobatic moves. We're keeping it real though, Caribbean style.

So until I get our videos youtubed here is the best salsa in the world, the CUBAN RUEDA CHAMPS!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebGJKyPZ_Ss&mode=related&search=


And a wonderful short little documentary rueda, you have got to watch this!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJVe0rrMFKY


We are so seriously salsa addicted, that one of the ladies has started a salsa blog for our group.

http://salsaruedaallstars.blogspot.com/

Stability

Stability – highly valued and strongly sought – steady income, solid networks, significant other, residence, furniture, belongings – things we aspire to or believe we should aspire to. Yet these same goals may one day become the source of our misery, binding the present and future, inhibiting freedom and limiting choice.

For some, the struggle is in leaving a stable life to find themselves and experience freedom by exploring the unknown. Perhaps for others, only in keeping a routine can we truly appreciate our surroundings and find adventure and beauty beyond the daily chore.

And so while the temptation to set off once again lures in the background (and probably always will), only in staying out of that comfort zone and embracing stability, will I grow.

Vancouver photos

I've put up some new photos of Vancouver from this past summer.

Paulo Coelho

This writer is a genius.

Quotes from his latest novel "The Zahir" about freedom and love.


"Zahir is Arabic means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which once we have come into contact with them or it, graudally occupies our very thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness."

“But what is freedom?
I’ve spent a large part of my life enslaved to one thing or another, so I should know the meaning of the word. Ever since I was a child, I have fought to make freedom my most precious commodity. While I was fighting I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents’ wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person “for the rest of their lives,” to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying “No” or “It’s over,” to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn’t even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best.”

“In my book about the road to Santiago, I discuss other possible ways of growing and end with this thought: All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step.”

“We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop.”

“Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don’t give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I’m going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they’re busy doing that, they’re like bulls looking for the bullfighter: they react instinctively, they blunder on, with no idea where the target is. They get their car, sometimes even get a Ferrari, and they think that’s the meaning of life, and they never question it Yet their eyes betray the sadness that even they don’t know they carry in their soul.
Are you happy?”

Engage Yourself

Disengagement.

That was the word used by my boss to describe what happens to people after they move to the West Coast. I had felt the beginnings of it happening to me, unfolding with each night out, each outdoor activity washing away the brainpower reserved for storing knowledge.

It doesn’t come up in conversations, the “seriously west coast” newspaper doesn’t do it justice, and the lure of the ocean and mountains wipes away the inkling of those on the verge of taking notice. I’m talking about national politics, and the events unfolding on the international scale. Don’t get me wrong, I considered myself ill-informed but I make the effort.

I don’t know where the beautiful hiking trails are, or what makes a good mountain bike but shouldn’t everyone be concerned with who might be running this country?

Disengaged.

I guess living in Ottawa has left my politically soiled ass………well, a bit spoiled.

But this is great, Vancouver will whip my lazy East Coast butt into some serious yoga/snowboarding shape while keeping everything else in tact.

Renewed focus

My, my it’s been a long time. All I can say is that … I’ve been having too much fun.

This definitely has been one of the best summers……spent many weekends on the beach, salsa dancing Cuban style, working, and breathing.

After coming back from the Ottawa visit, I started a new job in fundraising and it’s turning out to be a great fit; it’s exactly what I wanted. I’m working with a fundraising consultant in a small business (3 of us). So basically we’re helping charities develop their fundraising program. There’s been a lot of learning going on and there’s hardly ever a dull moment.

The wonderful weather went on until the end of September, hell it’s still nice, but it’s refreshing to feel the change in season and recharging from the hustle and bustle of summer fun. And with all the students back in school there’s a sense of renewed focus on education and learning for everyone. I’ve been staying in at home and it feels good.

I feel settled here…..and Vancouver has definitely been redefined as my new home, especially after the trip back from OT. There’s so much beauty in this place and so many things to learn…..