Train Thoughts

Welcome to March! It was a warm 37 degrees when I left New Jersey and it will be a scorching 43 degrees when I make it back to Virginia. I have been sitting on a train for around an hour and a half and finally officially wrapped up my book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. This is quite possibly my most eye-opening book I have ever read. It has challenged my way of thinking in the best way. If any of you have looked at my Instagram I have posted on my stories questions from the book and the results were very interesting. One of them was the Linda Problem and it is a tricky one. It shows just how we as people fall victim to the conjuncture fallacy because our quick thinking mind, System 1, uses context clues to falsely create an associative effect to one answer versus the other. In the Linda problem people are more likely to think that Linda being a Bank Teller and Active in the Feminist Movement rather than her just being a Bank Teller just because she is described as being “Deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice”. This means that somewhere in our minds something is making the quick association of Active in Feminist Movement to her being deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. I urge you to ask your friends the Linda Problem and see what they say! I will guess that 4/5 of your friends will answer it wrong. I even bet some have major issues with being wrong and will not accept being wrong. This is normal and this person most likely uses their System 1 more often than their System 2, meaning they make hasty judgements and tend to accept more things as true than they care to believe. But this is one topic of the many Daniel Kahneman goes into in his book.

March is a month of change for me. I will be rolling off my project in New Jersey and will be moving on to a new project where I could be traveling to the Haag, Bangalore, and/or Houston. I also have signed my next lease on a place in Washington DC for the next year with two of my really good friends. I am excited because its near the Wharf. I also will be going to SXSW in Austin, TX with another good friend I interned with in the Summer of 2015. I am honestly so honored to be afforded the opportunities I have and I look forward to sharing them with my friends and having those moments last for a long time. Also now that I have finished my book, it is on to the next one. I am always up for suggestions of books to read so if you have a great read please comment it on this post below. For now I will be hoping into a book that was given to me by my work, “One Bullet Away, the Making of a Marine Officer” by Nathaniel Fick. Other than those few things I just recently passed by GSEC Certification from SANS and look forward to use the time I was using for that for some more personal development.

Today’s Writing Playlist: Hiking Playlist Vol. 1 from Spotify

An Extrovert Learning to be Introverted

The problem that I have when traveling is I really want to experience things with people and not by myself. I have always been the person pushing people to try new things and have new experiences. However, I have also been the person to not experience something because I do not have someone to experience it with me. This has made me miss out on awesome opportunities in my time. Combine this with my now flexible travel schedule because of work, I have a LOT of opportunities to experience things and I do not want to miss out on them. This is when I realized I really need to push the boundary of how I operate as a person. James the Extrovert needed to become more of an introvert and go on adventures when people are not available. For me, this is really not an easy task. I actually have made my life on convincing people to come on adventure with me. Now I and doing a 180 and taking adventures as a way to find out more about an area and the people who are there. So what have I done to try to adapt the introvert ways when traveling:

1. Determined what I do in an introverted fashion now, like:
   1. Working out
   2. Going to get food
2. Use those experiences as a mental starting point
   1. When I go to do something new remind myself, it’s just like getting food or working out…
3. Appreciate more!
   1. I will go on a really cool hike, or a new brewery with friends but really what I am doing is getting my socializing in at a new location. I forget to learn about what makes the place different and appreciate what’s around me
4. Use social media as the “Social Factor”
   1. I love Instagram and posting my adventures. So if I know I can take a cool picture or video, I now have created that social factor to my solo adventure

Using these ideas, I have been able to really enjoy venturing off on my own and just experiencing different areas. I found a really cool new brewery, Brewery Bhavana, just recently in Raleigh, North Carolina where I met a really cool bartender from Kentucky. Then she suggested I check out this really rustic coffee shop called Morning Times where I posted up for the rest of the day to do work. Another time I was almost moved to tears, multiple times, by one of the best museums I have ever seen, The 9/11 Museum in NYC. This is only a taste of the adventures I have had and just the tip of the iceberg for what’s to come.

The Motivation of The Moving Millennial

“I want this blog to move the spectrum on thoughts of Millennials while also taking everyone along a thought and pictorial journey to different places, cities, and experiences wherever I am.”

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There is a lot in life that people work to make happen but I think people forget how lucky they may be. I am LUCKY. I would not be sitting in the 14th floor of this Courtyard Marriott overlooking the Macy’s on Herald Square and the Empire State Building towering over me in New York City had I not been lucky enough to be chosen to be apart of Booz Allen Hamilton. I also would not have been lucky enough to be apart of Booz Allen Hamilton had I not been lucky enough to be chosen to go to Penn State main campus. I have worked my ass off but I also have been VERY lucky. So here I am, sitting doing expense reports, fielding client answers, and sipping down a venti black coffee while figuring out how I am going to express to you the motivation behind this blog and what it means to me. Well, here we go!

There is a part of me who thinks, wow James, you are being “That Guy” in doing this whole branding yourself as “The Moving Millennial”. Yet, the motivation behind this is not to be “That Guy” but to try to breakdown what I think people have not thought about Millennials and understand that Millennials themselves all come from different backgrounds. I want to help influence a different understanding of what a Millennial is and try to Move, see what I did there?, the thoughts people have about Millennials.

I am a Millennial who grew up in poverty, had their father die when they were 10, worked their ass off in school to support themselves and be able to go college, attended college while they were still in high school, was lucky enough to be accepted to a great college, moved 17 hours away from home to go college and be the first person in their family to go to college, changed majors after having a college slap them in the face, went on to get deans list for the next 5 semesters, had a job throughout college, completed 3 internships during their time in college, held many different positions in different organizations, and had their full-time job locked up a month into their senior year of college. In between all of this also lost their best friend to a car accident and had to also go through the constant, how am I going to pay for college struggle. All of this has shaped who I am and continually fuels who I want to be. I am luck and humbled by this fact because if it wasn’t for me being in the right place at times, I may have never been where I am today.

This is all background for you. I don’t want people to sit there and awe at the struggles I have been through. I want to inspire and break the idea of the work type and person type millennials are. While growing up I never went east of Chicago, never went west of Mitchell, South Dakota, and never sent south of Dallas. I never took a plane ride until I was 16 years old, and had never left the country until a high school trip took me to Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and France in a swift 13 day myriad of sightseeing. I was inspired by my quick trip to Europe and at that point I knew I wanted to travel. I now have been blessed that I am in a position where work helps fuel my travel and make my dreams a reality. I CANNOT wait to bring you all along with my in my travels. I still don’t know what kind of blog I want this to be, but I want to make it one that’s engaging and empowering. I so look forward to the future and what trials and tribulations it may bring forth.