You have a passion and you definitly want to do something with it later in life? You want to work in a field where you can exploit that passion and convert it into money? Of course! We all want that and we all have the right to do so. But maybe you are not sure enough about your passion, is this really what you love to do? Is this actually your passion?

Why wait until you’ve figured out?
You can wait until you’ve figured it out all of the blue, or you can take some actual action. Start right away, and the start doesn’t need to be very big, just start exploring, experimenting. Test what you really love, go beta on your passion!

How to go beta on your passion

• Find your passion. A big one and the most important one, you would say. But this is just a beta version of your passion! So you can be wrong, you can do something and find out that you don’t ‘absolutely love it’ and that is ok, cause this is beta! Look for your passion, imagine what you would love to do for the rest of your life. Found it? Great, next step!
• If it is something you can do for yourself, do it! Is your passion sharing ideas on kind of teas, or papyrus scrolls? Start a blog about these subjects! Find a readership who is also interested in the topic you are interested about and start develop yourself on that topic. After having a blog for a year, you will be way more knowledgable than before on the subject and it will be a great experience. And with a blog, you maybe can start to cash in on your passion just a little. Besides all of that, you are building an online presence and that can be your resume when you leave college, or start applying for a job.
• Go and intern! If your passion is something you can’t do from your own home, look for a company which does what you love! If it is your passion, you would do it for free (and of course, some experience, resume building), so go interning! Find a company what is doing what you love to do and find somebody who you can talk to who works there. Tell him/her that you are absolutely loving what they do and that you want to do exactly what do, but not right now. But you want to intern right now, in order to find out if this is really your passion. You are free, you are motivated, why shouldn’t they hire you?
• Evaluate. Is this what you really love to do, is this what you can do the rest of your life? Congrats, you’ve successfully found your passion and you may be ready to take your beta version to an official version! Is this not what you really love to do? Start over again, nothing is lost! You’ve just got more experience!

If you are not ready to quit your normal job, if you are not sure enough about your passion right now, start a beta version of your passion. Test, test more and find you ultimate passion, with experience and a resume as a bonus!

This is a guest post by Stefan Knapen who runs the blog StudySuccessful.com, a blog full of study hacks and personal development tips.

How often do you complain about something? Be it the weather, another driver, a service or simple about yourself that you’re not good enough? Everpopular are curse words (when your computer crashes) and quick sarcastic remarks. You’re not alone.

It has a been a while ago, actually it was back in 2007 when the pastor of a Kansas City church told people in his congregation he wanted them to test their limits. “The one thing we can agree on, is there’s too much complaining.” according to the Rev. Will Bowen, and so he asked the group to stop complaining, criticizing, gossiping or using sarcasm for 21 days. An insane idea so far, how would you monitor something like that.

Another stroke of genius: the Reverend issued purple bracelets to those who were willing to take on the challenge. If someone caught himself complaining he was supposed to take off the bracelet and place it on the other wrist. A simple way to physically label a complaint. As soon as a wrist-swap was made, of course the counting started over. Rev. Bowen took three and a half months to reach his 21 day milestone.

The media hype

On the website www.acomplaintfreeworld.org there is a counter stating that over 6.3 million of these purple bracelets are in circulation around the world. You could say that’s a huge number, or you could realize that there are over 307 million people living in the USA alone. They also have a twitter account, with just over 400 followers. On facebook just 12,000 people like them. Looking at it that way it’s not a huge success. But that’s entirely besides the point here.

Obviously you don’t need a swank purple bracelet. You could swap your watch, a ring, the keys in your pocket or even that mala you wear around your wrist. Anything that is easy enough to do but takes enough effort to make the act of swapping something to complain about. Use your own imagination here but choose something that you can consistently, anywhere and any time.

Complaining gets you nowhere

Most of the time complaining is just a way to vent irritation about something, to let the people around you know you disagree. But does that really do anything? A quick complaint is so easy, a quick stab at something. Does it change what just happened into something that no longer irritates you? If it’s a person you complain about, that person will either still be there tomorrow (a colleague) or they won’t (a total stranger in the street).

If that person is still there tomorrow, clearly complaining won’t do you any good because you’ll still have to be in their presence for some reason. If that person is not there tomorrow (or even in five minutes from now) and is a complete stranger, all you did was let the world know what you thought. Is the world waiting to hear your negative thoughts? Or will others start complaining about you because you complain?

Likewise complaining about a failing computer won’t get it fixed, complaining about a lack of money won’t make you rich and complaining about how other people drive (you -of course- are an excellent driver) won’t change how they drive. It might just be because they are not in the same car as you. Just a thought.

Investigating self

Everybody complains, it’s a simple fact of life. Although some people complain far less than others. Complaining actually can make a difference, but only if you complain to the right people who can actually do something for you. In general other people aren’t waiting to hear you complain about something just like you don’t want to hear others complain all the time. That is, unless you have a common subject to complain about in which case you get a group of people complaining to each other about the same thing, and nobody doing anything about it.

What do you complain about and what does it do for you? Please share in the comments.

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but nevertheless… I present to you, good people of the world, the new “official” asexual flag:

Or, you know, nearly enough. There’s still some debate about the hues of the colors above (or rather, the grey and the purple – black and white are, I think, fairly non-negotiable). This actually happened a week ago now, on the eleventh, but I am a student and I have Things To Do, so I didn’t update you, my faithful (heh – or not?) readers, until today.

Anyway, I was so moved by this news (and I do, actually, like the flag a lot – it may not be flashy, either in design or in color, but, quite frankly, neither are we – we aren’t known for being camp or fabulous or deviant or whatever else*, but rather occasionally awkward, slightly eccentric tea-drinking cat lovers**, so having something of a “dull” flag suits us. And besides, almost all of the other LGBTQetc. flags are entirely made up of horizontal bars, and for the sake of continuity, I’m glad that we stuck with that pattern) that I did this:

That, my friends, is the beginning of a scarf made with the asexual flag many times over. Yes, I knit. Yes, I’m making a scarf out of the asexual flag. Yes, I care about asexuality that much. No, I’m not that embarrassed.  Yes, my room is awesome, and, yes, it does look exactly how you would expect the room a messy teenage nerd/recluse to look (behind me you can see the top of a Marvin the Android – sadly the one from the film and not from the TV series, but I didn’t buy it – poster and one of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Standon – speaking of which, happy ninetieth birthday to the  nineteenth amendment!).

So that’s that. I hope to be posting on more substantial topics soon, but right now I need to go watch more of Merlin’s first season and do my AP English homework.

*And I’m not saying these stereotypes are valid or good, but rather that they exist, and if you compare the “gay community” and the “asexual community” … well, there are notable differences.

**Again, not saying that this applies to all asexuals, but if you look at the community as a whole, we’re an interesting-but-not-by-conventional-standards bunch, and we don’t have many scandals to speak of.

Do asexuals belong in the LGBTQ movement? This is what we dig into on this episode of A Life, using personal and other examples.