I'm a stranger.
After I wrote my first blog post, here, I noticed that the word "goal" had been auto-linked. The link connects to a paragraph as follows:
"Motivation is literally the desire to do things. It's the difference between waking up before dawn to pound the pavement and lazing around the house all day. It's the crucial element in setting and attaining goals-and research shows you can influence your own levels of motivation and self-control. So figure out what you want, power through the pain period, and start being who you want to be."
Yikes. This is not how I think about motivation, goals, power, or pain. This looks like the typical "just get going stupid!" mentality that doesn't work except with people who don't have a problem with goals, don't struggle to know what is the right thing to do, never worry that to invest their life in a goal may be to squander it. I disclaim that paragraph, O Anonymous Psychology Today Thought Borg! (shakes fist at sky)
But it got me to thinking how I'm a stranger here.
I'm blogging amidst a bunch of other thinkers whom I've never met, and whose way of seeing the world may differ greatly from mine. Many of them have "Ph.D." after their names. That means they obeyed their teachers. (I choose "Hs.D." for mine. That stands for high school dropout, because I wasn't willing to obey.)
How should I approach this? I could be combative, polite, or funny. Oh, but I love to argue.
Being an Intellectual Stranger
My friend Michael Butler is a man who lives his life in constant analysis of himself and the world. He has no degree and he makes his living clerking at an electronics store. He sends me a steady torrent of links about engineering, physics, mathematics, and social philosophy. But he refuses to call himself an intellectual. "I eschew the term as poisoned rhetoric," he says. "I'm just a guy who likes to think."
It is poisoned, I guess. But I embrace the idea. I am an intellectual. I will suck the poison from the term and spit it away.
I see his point. The snake that bit the word "intellectual" is long and venomous. Intellectualism has become professionalized and ritualized, in the last couple of centuries. Research universities now seem to dominate the thoughtscape, with their great myth-making machines projecting images of spectacled people in tan cardigans or white lab coats, scowling at beakers of smoky liquid, or hefting copies of Chaucer (or doing both at those wild Chaucer drinking parties I've heard so much not about). This is good and bad. I love that it's facilitated a vast collection of ideas and produced communities of interdependent thinkers. I'm frustrated at some of the seemingly silly barriers between academic and non-academic culture.
Therefore, I define myself further: I say I'm a buccaneering intellectual. I feel a kinship with the men who called themselves the Brothers of the Coast and lived a wild life in the Caribbean for a few generations. They preyed upon the treasure ships; I prey upon the ideas of many disciplines. Anyone can. Just as the New World created an opportunity for the settlers who would become the historical Buccaneers, the Web makes a new world opportunity for outsiders like me.
(Notice that? The phrase "outsiders like me." Paradoxical eh? Collect outsiders together and you have a community. Now the outsiders become insiders.)
I won't claim that it's easy, but there's room in the world for people who think differently. Today, there's more room than there's ever been. I've seen too many people in my line of work (software development) who think they need a school to teach them computing, instead of jumping in themselves and siezing the knowledge for themselves from a thousand sources all around them.
Anyone can be an intellectual. Don't ask for permission! Education is not gruel doled out at a workhouse. It's abundant and cannot be denied to anyone for whom learning is a way of approaching life each day.
What About Credentials?
Even outsiders must develop credibility, we just do it in a different way. Buccaneering intellectuals collect credentials just the way real Buccaneers did– and you can do the same thing: by telling true stories of exploits. I don't have a degree, but I can proudly say that I taught critical thinking skills to engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (I have a polo shirt to prove it). I never took the SAT, but I served on a merit review committee for the National Science Foundation. And, heck, I can say I blogged for Psychology Today! Even if they kick me out right now, that one's going on my resume.
Degrees are designed to be interchangeable. Stories and experiences are unique to each of us.
Even as I fashion my own little stripes and medals, and continue to improve my education, I try to keep in mind how frail reputation can be. I remember the day my publisher decided to publish my book on self-education. I caught myself thinking "Now I'm a self-education expert!" Well, wait a minute. Two people at Simon and Schuster liked my book. Therefore it was published. Therefore my work can be cited on Wikipedia. But those two people are not themselves self-education experts. They just trust me. My reputation as an autodidact rests on the opinion of two people with university degrees.
Of course, I really am a self-education expert. I think. I wrote a book...
Do I Belong Here?
You will be the judge of that. (Oh, and so will the Psychology Today editors. Yeah, pretty much mostly them.)
