Bob Dylan's song Blown in the Wind tells us"the answer is blowing in the wind" - What was the answer? →

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The song “Blowin' in the Wind” by Bob Dylan raises questions. It has been described as a protest song and poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war, and freedom but is it literature?

Both songs and poems often bring out human emotions, and both have patterns of sounds, which bring melody to the verses. Some say poetry is more literary because it uses words better and conveys deeper feelings and emotions. Both reflect the same social concerns as literature.

Before you dismiss this post and the question it presents, don’t forget, or if you never knew, let me tell you that the Noble Prize for literature in 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan for "having created new poetic expression within the great American song tradition.”

Another big thing, assuming you like Bob Dylan, is that Harper’s Magazine, after this award was given, said that “literary means not only what is written but what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form.” More restrictively, writing is considered an art form or any report deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.

"Blowin' in the Wind" was written and performed by Bob Dylan in 1962. The song became a symbolic song of fighting for people’s rights and equality in society and an anti-war song. It poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war, and freedom.

Lyrics

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly

Before they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind

Yes, 'n' how many years can a mountain exist

Before it is washed to the sea?

Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist

Before they're allowed to be free?

Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head

And pretend that he doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind

Yes, 'n' how many times must a man look up

Before he can see the sky?

Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take 'til he knows

That too many people have died.

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind

How does reading books help you become more creative? →

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Neil Gaiman’s book, the View from the Cheap Seats, talked about fantasy and imagination.  What he learned from his trip to China is very interesting regarding this subject. 

Neil Gaiman is a fiction writer, especially for young readers, and in 2007 went to a worldwide meeting for fiction writers in China. He knew that over the years, China didn't even allow fairy tales and fiction in their schools, so he was surprised that this event had invited him to China for this event.

He asked an official of the event what had happened and why the interest now was in fantasy and fiction. He was told that top Chinese officials had toured all the big companies they did outsourcing work with within the United States and asked those they met "what they read.” They all said science fiction was a top choice, and fantasy and fiction went along with this. They were looking for why these plants excelled in creativity.  It seemed clear from their findings that creativity was sparked by imagination.  Fiction and fantasy were added to the school curriculum in Chinese schools.

The book contains speeches, articles, introductions, and essays.  His first chapter sets the tone with his focus on "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.” He said in the introduction that he liked fiction because he wanted to "tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts."

A creative effort that I have spent years on has been my website:

( connectedeventsmatter.com )

The website has evolved to focus on first books, now around 500, and then positive influences, personal reinvention, career development, books I have written, and other interests that will complement these goals.

Reinventing Ourselves & Our Careers. How to “Be the Change.” How to Reinvent Yourself Each Day. Reinvent the Future. Make Order out of Chaos. Choose Your Direction in Life. Finding Inspiration.

As I added other areas of interest to the site, I found that the base and variety of reading were helpful and complimentary.

Reading helps us be open to new ideas and understand new things. We practice imagination by letting words describe a particular image and manipulating the picture in our minds. This strengthens our minds because we learn from others' experiences and adapt the learning to our environment.

Are we like the old or the new wineskin and why does that matter →

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A wineskin is an ancient container made of animal skin. Usually, a goat is used to transport liquids such as water, olive oil, and wine. Is trying to bring motivation, or even change, to an organization like putting new wine in an old wineskin?

The old wineskin has become brittle and set in place. It had done its job for years with no problem, but the new wine hasn’t fermented yet, and as it expands, it will split the old container.

The Bible, Mark 2:22, used this example to teach about dealing with change. “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.” ……. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine, wishes for new, for he says, ‘The old is good enough.

Good news for the Old Wineskins: A fresh wineskin can be a new wineskin, but it can also refer to an old wineskin that has been reconditioned. A reconditioned wineskin is as supple as new and can hold new wine. An old wineskin must be cleaned and soaked in oil to recondition it. The wineskin is soaked until it is rejuvenated to its supple and soft state to be ready for the new wine. So old wineskins are not thrown away or only being used to hold old wine. It can be made fresh again to have new wine!

Of course, we’re talking about people, not wineskins.

People, in their way, can also seem brittle and set in place. The problem is often the perception of what is happening around them. The roadblock is often just the attitude that “this is the way we have always done this.”

A person who has done something the same way for years can seem brittle or inflexible. Several years ago, I knew some managers at a small distribution warehouse with limited space. Jim, the warehouse manager, had a new boss who was expecting things to be done that he was not used to.

Changing things that had always been done one way for years became an obstacle for Jim. The last straw was when an item bought weekly for years, 50 cases at a time, was changed to 100 cases, and the order frequency was changed to once every two weeks. Jim knew about the reasons for the change and the plan, but he did not feel right about all the changes. This resulted in him quitting his job, where he had spent 35 years working, and advancing to warehouse manager. 

Change itself was not foreign to the environment for this company, which had grown a great deal over the years. I was more than that “they had always done that way.” It was about the fact that he had always been the sole decision-maker.

Over the years Jim worked for this company, it had expanded its warehouse size many times. He faced increased reserve levels on many inventory items and changes to accommodate buying brackets. If he hadn’t been flexible, he would not have made it far as he did.

Why did Jim become brittle and set in place?  He was upset by what he was afraid the future would bring. After Jim left, he enrolled in some classes at the local community college and took some computer classes. Perhaps for Jim, it was more than just turning brittle and unchangeable. Maybe he was just smart enough to see that he needed more skill, but he still was not flexible enough to come and talk about that side of the issue before leaving.

The poet Maya Angelou said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Jim didn’t feel good about his new manager, and that reality was far more critical than the challenges of warehouse changes. The new manager didn’t know Jim and hadn’t had the chance to build a relationship of trust with him.

Are Side Hustles Entrepreneurial? →

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A side hustle is any employment undertaken in addition to one's full-time job. A side hustle, moonlighting, or gig, is often freelance or piecework, providing an additional income that a person takes in addition to their primary job to supplement their regular income.

Calling something or someone entrepreneurial can mean that they know their industry inside out and can exploit that knowledge to create new opportunities and profits. Being entrepreneurial can also mean just sharing ideas freely.

Aspiring entrepreneurs might start a side hustle as a stepping stone toward financial freedom. A side hustle can also allow you to focus on what you're most passionate about if you don't get that satisfaction from your full-time work.

When someone enjoys the type of work they make into a side job, that passion often leads them to become full-time entrepreneurs. Passion is often a driving force that can get you to do unique and challenging things. Passion is an emotion that wants to be acted upon; without action, passion yields no fruitful results. Passion is the fuel in the fire of action. When you have a passion for something, you love it even when you hate it.

A good lesson from the growing occurrence of side jobs is that it isn’t just extra income that motivates people to seek these opportunities. When the side hustle is more fun than work, that can be an important message and help when trying to find a new job. Finding your dream job starts by getting to know yourself * and what you need to know about yourself is what it is that you like. What do you have a passion for? Those areas are where you will find your dream job.

NEVER STOP BEING A STUDENT OF YOUR INDUSTRY →

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Burnout is often blamed on job stress that affects an individual’s physical and emotional state and causes mental exhaustion. Often burnout is considered the fault of management, suggesting that the workplace is not managed correctly.

Finding your ideas considered out of date leads to boredom. Placing the blame for boredom leads to denial of what may be the real problem of outdated ideas. I was talking with an old friend about his successful career. He told me he felt his longevity in the industry was perhaps perceived as a negative and wondered if others in the industry felt the same about his longevity. I had to ask myself how this could be. His vast experience should be viewed by himself and others as “added wisdom” gained by trial and error. His viewpoint spoke loudly to his own “burnout,” but is that what years of work must lead to?

The dictionary definition of burnout is “the end of the powered stage in a rocket’s flight when the propellant has been used up.” With people, energy is used up pursuing various goals, and when people are burned out, they feel bored and complacent. You can hear the burnout in someone saying, “We tried that once before, and it didn’t work, and it won’t work now.” Think of new approaches or new ways to use old products and concepts. This will provide you with renewed energy. As a veteran, you shouldn’t worry about making a mistake. You, of all people, should know that a failure or setback becomes an opportunity.

When worrying about burnout, we should stop thinking about the past and look to the future. Don’t start by asking yourself how things have always been done but look back at your past experiences and ask yourself what has changed and why. What is changing in the marketplace right now? Study your industry and learn new things.

Business analyst and author Peter Drucker said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." 

Your path forward becomes more apparent when you look back at where you have come from

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By Brent M. Jones

We see our own lives as a series of relationships and events, and as we connect them with the narrative, they become a story, our story.

Stories of outstanding leaders, who look back at their own lives and tell how their success came because of the trials and setbacks they had in life, are not uncommon. It is obvious that they didn't see the value of the problems when they occurred but only after years of rethinking the events. The self-acceptance of their challenges followed years later.

Previously I wrote an article titled “As You Look at Your Own Life Story You See Yourself Differently,” which included background research from Julie Beck's Atlantic Magazine’s 2015 article titled “Life’s Stories.” The subtitle of her article states: “How you arrange the plot points of your life into narrative shapes who you are and is a fundamental part of being human.” 

Beck quoted Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, saying: “To have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story.” This means we have to know our own story; as our perspective changes, we change, and the story changes.

If the essence of accepting yourself is to know your own life story, then the question is, what is the story? Author Bill George suggests building a timeline of your life that includes the highs and lows, reflecting on it daily. A summary of your life brings you to where you are today, and a timeline points out when things happened of significant influence, representing forks in the road. The more recent events in the story often help you see the prior ones differently.

Our narrative and perspective are choices, and how we look at the events and people in our lives changes as those memories are filtered against other events and all of our memories. A lesson we learn from an event today can help us see what happened before differently. Connecting events and concluding is weaving together our life stories and defining who we are. Who we think we are is related to who we become.

A daily journal captures the events of our lives, and a summary of the journal offers some opportunities for concluding. Reviewing a written life story yearly will show how we see our past changes because our perspective makes a great deal of difference in what we think our history was. Save your story, but rewrite it as you see it differently, and save that too.

Think about your story each day and tell your story to your family and others, but listen to how you see things have changed and will change.

Should your job define you as a human being, and how can LinkedIn help? →

About UsingLinkedIn RSS

This article below can also be found on my LinkedIn Newsletter site, where many subscribe to this and receive notifications when posts are made.

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The best answer to that question is no, and the support for that point of view is that a person is a being that has specific capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, values, and part of a culturally established form of social relations such as families. All these areas overlap the work time, often subjugate work responsibilities, and make it far easier to function when employment values align with an employer’s goals.

Apart from work, a human being’s life has some critical areas of focus, but even so, the reality is that time can be an obstacle to this definition. One week has 168 hours. Suppose a person sleeps an average of 8 hours a day; that takes 56 hours out of this total, leaving 112 hours. If a person works 50 hours a week working and commuting, then this leaves 62 hours or 8 hours a day to devote to your family, eating, hobbies, church, reading, study, and social relations.

The financial support from working 50 hours a week often is needed to support everything about the 168-hour week. Usually, it takes two adults to support a family, but full-time work leaves little time for reinvesting in oneself.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before age forty, and this number is projected to grow. Forrester Research predicts that today's youngest workers will have twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime.

If you probably have job changes ahead within your projected career, what can be done to create an upward trajectory in a career? One answer comes in understanding the skills critical to holding your current job in place and the logical following skills that should be added. Working until you are burnt out and want nothing to do with your past career focus can be a very costly career mistake.

The LinkedIn profile is a template for all the experiences and qualifications that came together to get you your current job. With that template in place, you can ask yourself where you go next when a job change happens. An easy answer can be to use LinkedIn to find out what skills your supervisor or that person’s manager has and identify what skills you lack for that job. You can look at competitors' profiles and find their employees’ skills and what is something that would help you. Another approach is looking at similar industries and finding job profiles based on the same or similar skill set.

You may have asked yourself if you could fit into the business and culture of competitors, suppliers, and customers from your own business experiences. Linkedin can show you the people who run those businesses and departments, and that can open the door to call and ask for 30 minutes in an informational interview to ask some questions.

The LinkedIn profile can point to the future as well as be a road map of where you have been, and that tool can prove invaluable for you. As we have seen, a working person's week isn’t much time open.

Living your life is about reinventing yourself everyday →

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Our lives change constantly, and those changes are additions to our life stories that enable us to see past events differently and contribute to seeing our past lives differently.

“How you arrange the plot points of your life into narrative shapes who you are and is a fundamental part of being human.” This is the subtitle in an interesting article titled Life’s Stories, published in The Atlantic in 2015. In that article, Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, offered much insight on this subject. She stated: “To have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story.”

When we create a narrative about the events in our life, it triggers the conclusions new experiences and knowledge has brought to us. We could conclude that all we did was add clarity to what happened, but in looking back, we have unique insights offering more transparency, and the events themselves take on new meaning. Through this experience, we reinvent who we are.

Quotes about Reinvention

1. "It's never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Elliot

2. "When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." -- Lao Tzu

3. "The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps." -- Bob Black

4. "Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future; act now, without delay." -- Simone de Beauvoir

Finding Inspiration: Should Life be About Winning →

This article below can also be found on my LinkedIn Newsletter site, where many subscribe to this and receive notifications when posts are made.

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Finding Inspiration: Should Life be About Winning

Is winning a good life goal? Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach, said, "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." He is also one of several coaches credited with saying, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.”

The coach’s point of view sees winning as a victory in a contest or competition. Looking for my answer, I turn inward and consider the question as to whether I have ever won anything, which then suggests some game or random drawing.

Whom did I beat to win? If it was just luck, did it matter? Does winning matter? Good questions, but if winning is about getting a prize, is that a good reason to beat others? If it is about the effort, that helps answer this question.

Yes, in my life, I have many times focused all my effort on reaching a goal. When you win in life, you're living the life of your dreams, achieving your goals, and being content with where you're coming to at the end of the day. The point is that winning is about your dreams, and that still could mean that you want to beat everyone else, and if that is the case, then I have not won anything.

However, looking back, I have to say that my life has been about living and working towards my and my family’s dreams. Winning, for me, has been chiefly an adjective rather than a noun.

If I worked as hard and as smart as I could to achieve a goal and someone else also worked as hard and smart as they could to achieve a goal, and if we both reached the goal, did we both win? What if the other person’s results were better? Did we still both win? The answer would depend on if our goal was to do our best or to win the most. My conclusion is that working your smartest and doing your best is the better goal.

What happens when you have to win to survive? Is winning an accomplishment or a necessity? Can you start just wanting to improve on your best and sometimes being the best in the crowd and wind up in trouble if you are not? If winning is the only thing you value, then trouble will come.

Links to other Website Posts CEM Brent M. Jones Website Homepage

What is the Meaning of Life? →

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So for these folks, the meaning of life must be death. I say this because if their lives continue in some way after death with consciousness, they will see clearly what it all means.

On the other hand, the question of the meaning of life today, or maybe tomorrow, could be that day by day, somehow, we might qualify for what our status might be after death. So for them, the meaning might be “each day.” It could be added that one should find out what is wanted for the best situation after death and then do it.

Of course, a person could not focus on anything connected with death and not be led to conclude that a better focus is about life rather than death.

Looking around at what life is about each day, it is hard to discount that life is full of other people. Yes, many are weird. Others will have opinions about us and whether our actions make sense. Perhaps even the weirdo may have an idea of how others treat them compared to how they treat others. This being the case, it works in favor of concluding that the meaning of life is in how we treat others.

"The Human Factor How Finding Your Dream Job Starts By Getting To Know Yourself": →

“Introduction Page” to “The Human Factor”

July 25, 2022

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Despite our many differences, all humans share at least one thing in common. We all want to be the best version of ourselves.

Some of us define that goal as connecting to a community, having a big family, or excelling at a job we love. Others can’t necessarily represent it but seek the abstract idea of “happiness.”  Surely, once we find our “purpose and fulfill it, we will find that elusive “happiness,” right?

Alexander Pope said, “Act well your part; there all the honor lies” But what if you find yourself unsure of your place in this world? What if you know your part but find your goals too insurmountable to reach?

You need a change, and to get that, you need to change.

Only then will you have the confidence and focus on making that big career change or learning that new skill to help you jump into another profession. These significant life changes can be scary. It can sometimes seem impossible, especially after feeling you’ve lived a whole life without changing.

Other Newsletter Items

Several weeks ago, there was a lot of bad news. It seemed like the whole world was falling apart. Later that day, I posted thoughts and graphics titled "What a Wonderful World."

That day I also came across a Louis Armstong recording where he sang this song. The words inspired me, as did Mr. Armstong's voice and instrument.

The post below was inspired at that time when that week's news was anything but good. It was inspired by Louis Armstrong's recording of the song, "What a Wonderful World" I wondered what kind of feedback I would get. I was pleasantly surprised.

The website posts about "Bad Poetry" and "Writers' Symbolism" have also been well received. I am amazed at the number of website visits from google visitors worldwide about my website post on "Bad Poetry. 

Other Interesting Website Recent Posts