I enjoy observing other humans. It’s a hobby. Usually, an amusing hobby.

Tonight, for dinner, I chose to dip into something different. OK, it’s something I dip into a lot, but never by myself. I’ve been craving Melting Pot for a long time, so I threw social norms to the wind and just went by myself.

They stuck in a fairly “intimate” corner of the second floor, at a table for two. It was a bit awkward, but I was hungry. Nearby, there was a couple that was obviously on what I can only hope was a first (and last) date. I’ll refer to this guy frequently as Douche #1. Halfway through my dinner, a second couple showed up and was seated at the table behind them, but facing towards me. I’ll refer to this guy as Douche #2.

Based on my observations of these two douches tonight, and adding past douchey dating observations, I hereby present my Ten Step Guide to Douchey Dating For Men. Doing everything listed here is all but guaranteed to ensure your success with very special women.

1. Never let the woman speak. Ever. Women have no original thoughts to add to a conversation, and they are genuinely interested in every stupid thing you make up in an effort to get in their pants.

2. Speaking of making stuff up, be sure to add as much embelishment to every truth, half-truth, or no-truth story you tell. Be sure to add in as many outrageous tales of events in foreign countries as you can, and be sure to express how much of an expert you are on every subject imaginable.

3. If the woman rudely interrupts you, say, while you take a long pull on your 12th drink of the evening, be sure to slam your glass down and interrupt her back by CALLING HER OUT on her interrupting you.

4. Women don’t know what they like, and need you to think for them. Do not allow her to look at a menu, and be sure to ask your server extremely intelligent sounding questions to make it sound as if you actually know something about the style of cuisine in question.

5. If your date is not paying attention to you, but rather something else (such as reading the book she carried in her purse and pulled out while you went to the loo), then be sure to bring her attention back to yourself by physically strong arming the offending object from her grasp.

6. If your date starts to gripe about anything, remind her of her place, and tell her that she is the one that is lucky enough to be out with you, since you could apparently be hunting ibex in the far south coastal area of Italy this weekend instead of being with her

7. Be sure to mention your ex as often as possible. Women are incredibly turned on by hearing about your exploits with prior girlfriends.

8. A first date is an excellent opportunity to discuss your personal prejudices against various ethnicities, and to explain your viewpoint about why these other ethnicities are holding back white students in our public schools.

9. Tell dirty jokes. Several of them. Every girl will want to go home with you if you tell her the one about the donkey, the midget, and the Catholic priest. Absolutely, positively nothing can go wrong from telling that joke — it is a surefire winner, every time!

10. If you really want to impress the girl, pull the “I forgot my wallet” bit and make her pick up the check. This will firmly establish your dominance as a real man and ensure a second date.

So there you have it. Follow these 10 simple steps and you’ll be amazed at all the woman just throwing themselves at you!

And yes, everything here is based on actual observations in the past couple years.

[Factual note: Ibex are native to mountainous regions, such as Northern Italy, not coastal lowlands.]

Dear recent high school graduate:

The necessity and urgency in attending college is one of the greatest frauds perpetuated upon our youth over the course of the past 30 or 40 years. Your parents, teachers, “guidance” counselors, and every other adult authority figure in your life has, more likely than not, been feeding you the same line of B.S. your entire life: “In order to achieve anything or become anybody, you HAVE to go to college straight out of high school.”

This was originally just going to be a Facebook status message, but it’s too important of a subject to cram into 420 characters. Teachers, professors, academics of any sort, are all going to hate me for the message I’m writing to you, but I don’t care, because YOU need to hear this.

If you are one of the millions of 17 or 18 year olds that recently graduated high school, you can probably recite countless reasons why you SHOULD go to college. Yes, individuals with a Bachelor’s degree earn, on average, double the income over the course of their 40 year working life than people with just a high school diploma. Blah blah blah. Money ain’t everything. In fact, it’s the least important thing. But, if your goal is to become a millionaire, getting a degree so you can work for somebody else is the absolute WRONG thing to do — over 2/3 of American self-made millionaires did it by being self-employed, NOT working for somebody else.

There is one, and only one, group of high school graduates that should jump straight into college, and that group has to meet two critieria. One, you need to be absolutely, 100% positive that what you are going to study in college is truly what you want to do with the rest of your life, and you have no other interests, ambitions, or motivations. Second, that career has to REQUIRE a college degree in order to work in the field due ONLY to state or Federal licensing requirements or because of extremely specialized knowledge. The career fields that meet this second criteria are far fewer than you think. If you want to be a physician, attorney, engineer, or nuclear research physicist, then yes, you have to go to college. If you want to simply work in the general field of healthcare, want to work in the broad arena of the legal field, want to get your hands dirty on new aerospace vehicles, or want to work in a nuclear power plant, then NO, you don’t need a college degree. Period. End of story. Anybody telling you something different is either an idiot or a liar. Will it help you get a job interview? Yes. Needed? No.

So with that said, let’s talk about the 99% of you that honestly don’t have a freaking clue what you want to do with your lives. You might think you know what you want to be doing 5 or 10 years from now, but I’d put money on it that in the next few years that will change, or you’ll come to the realization that you have no idea what you want. That, dear readers, is the real world.

But see, there’s an interesting thing about the real world: There’s more than one. You, as an individual, have the ability to create your own reality. You can change your circumstances, your surroundings, your situation. And it’s really not that hard. There’s nothing that says you have to become the same things your parents were, or live the same lifestyle, or get dragged down into the same 9-5 drudgery.

You’re 18, heading off into the world. What do you want that world to look like? What do you want to experience in that world? What is it you want out of life? Especially considering the fact that you just spent twelve straight years already in school…Is that really what you want to keep doing, without even a break?

In most European countries, it is expected that young adults will take a break from studies for at least a year before going to university. They call it a “gap year”, and the idea is that they get out and see the world, broaden their experience base, and discover new interests and talents. This experience, in all reality, makes them into better adults in the long run, and helps them to see alternative viewpoints. It also helps guide them towards making a more informed career decision. Somebody that left London wanting to be civil litigation attorney and make big bucks may discover that his or her intelligence is best served coming back in 8 years to some small village in Thailand that is desperately in need of a local doctor. Or that person without much interest in formal education but with great mechanical aptitude may come back wanting to go to college to become an engineer to develop better water purification technologies for deployment to lands without much fresh water. The point is that many things can happen.

Let me tell you the story of two girls I know from figure skating. Chances are at least one of them is going to read this, and I hope they both do. They’re both great kids, smart, well liked, etc. Really, the kind of people that could most likely succeed in anything they chose to do.

First, let’s meet Amber (hi Ambers!!!). Amber is getting ready to head off to university in Arizona in about two weeks or so. She’s going to be studying Elementary Education, with a minor in Japanese. Why Japanese? Because she studied it all through high school and is fascinated by the people and the culture. Amber actually really would like to go spend some time in Japan, and keeps saying she’ll do it AFTER college? I don’t know the percentage of people that actually do something like that after college when they say they want to, but I’m willing to bet it’s incredibly low, given the pressure to find a job and make money after graduation to pay off all those student loans.

I’m getting ready to go to Japan myself for a few months, and she’s joked about wanting to come. I don’t think she’s joking — I think she really wants to go. Why isn’t she? I really don’t know. Parental pressure? The fact that her boyfriend is going to school in Arizona, also? She has an awesome boyfriend, and they’ve been together for over a year and a half — their relationship isn’t going to evaporate if she delays entry by even one semester to go to Japan. So why doesn’t she take a break and just GO? I know it’s not financial. I really wish I could understand it, because my fear is that if she doesn’t go now, she never will — it’s just sort of what happens when life gets going on around you.

Next, let’s talk about Stephanie. I don’t know Steph as well as I do Amber, but I know this much. Earlier in the summer, she was debating what to do after high school. She had been accepted to an in-state university that she was interested in going to, but when I talked to her about it, she wasn’t too excited about it. And, unlike a lot of figure skaters that burn out on skating and don’t really want to keep doing it after high school, she actually still has a passion for the sport. She’s senior tested, was a pretty good competitive skater, but everybody will acknowledge that her real self comes out not when she’s competing, but when she’s performing, and she knew that, too. She toyed with the idea of going off and doing ice shows, and she recently submitted her video audition to a company that does an ice show tour across Europe. Suddenly, college became her backup plan instead of her primary plan, and I think that’s AWESOME. Sure as hell beats sitting in a lecture hall, ugh.

So, is there something you’d rather do than go to college? I’m willing to bet that there is. DO IT! For crying out loud, DO IT! It doesn’t even matter what it is, just go do it.

Were you a successful team sport athlete in high school, but didn’t get recruited by a school? SO WHAT!! Did you know that NFL and NBA free agent rookie tryouts are going on right now? Did you know that Pony League and A level minor league baseball teams will pretty much let a player show up and try out just about any time of the year except during their playoffs? Did you know that minor league hockey teams will hire players off the street? Pick a team and show up dressed down for a tryout. GO!

Is your passion up in the clouds??? Did you know that it’s just as easy to get a student loan to cover the $95,000 to attend ATP or another big commercial flight school as it is to get the $10,000 student loan to cover your freshman year at college? Go FLY!

Are you passionate about art, writing, or some other creative talent? Don’t go to art school, don’t get a fine arts degree, don’t get an English degree. Just paint, or write, or whatever you. The degree doesn’t make you a writer — writing makes you a writer! I’ve written several books and recorded over 200 CDs, and I have no professional training in either arena, and I’ve made a living off selling what I wrote and recorded. You don’t need an MFA to get your paintings into a gallery — YOU get them into the gallery, by showing up and coming to terms with the gallery owner on a deal to get your work displayed and sold. Writer? You can self-publish a book and get it listed (and copies sold!) on Amazon for about $10.

Are you clueless about what you want to do, but just want to get AWAY, travel, see the world? Then do it! You would not believe the places you can go, and get a working holiday visa to allow you to do a little work to make money along the way, as long as you are between the ages of 18 and 30. This, this right here, is what I *want* to be doing right now, but I can’t….because I’m 32. And while I think that totally blows, it is what it is. But you…you’re 18! Take your savings and blow it on a one way ticket to some country you want to explore that will let an 18 year old get a working holiday visa.

Hey Amber…Japan is one of those countries, and there is a Japanese Consulate office in Denver. The visa application fee for you is FREE.

Do you want to be of service to your fellow human beings? Volunteer with your church humanitarian program or missionary program, join AmeriCorps, Peace Corps. Volunteer in southeast Asia — their are non-profit organizations up the wazoo that need your help, and some will even pay your airfare.

Are you environmentally oriented? Go to South America, Hawaii, really anywhere, and help protect wetlands, save species. Heck, you don’t have to leave your own area. Here in Colorado, there are numerous organizations you can spend months or years working with to help protect mountain tundra, maintain trails so people don’t destroy other areas, do climate research, study really cool animals, and more.

Kind of a hippie sort of person? Hook up with the Rainbow Gathering, find a commune somewhere, or go to Australia and live on an organic farm for free in exchange for labor and learn how to live off the land with some really cool people in a great cultural environment.

On the other end of the spectrum, are you super patriotic? Well, march your ass down to the recruiting office and there’s somebody that would be very, very excited to talk to you about career opportunities. The U.S. Navy owned me for 6 years, and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. You go interesting places, meet interesting people, experience things you never otherwise would. At the age of 18 or 19, you get placed fully in charge of multi-million (or even multi-billion) dollar pieces of advanced technology that most people never even get to see. You get the satisfaction of knowing you did something that other people won’t do, which is defend our Constitution and our way of life, and in some cases defend others from tyranny and oppression that they could not defend themselves against. If you want to be in healthcare, you can do that. You can help save lives in a variety of ways.

Of course, there’s the other aspect of the military, too. Are you looking for the most rigorous physical and mental challenge you can find in the world? Are you psychotic and just want to kill people? Are you a pyro and just wanna blow stuff up? Do you derive satisfaction from hitting a target half a mile away? Well trust me, there’s a job just for you in somewhere in the military. If you’re tough enough, try out for BUD/S (Navy SEAL training). Become a Marine or Army sniper. Wanna go Mach 3? The Air Force or Navy might have something you’re interested in.

Is business your passion? Then just go start your business, whatever it is. You do NOT need a business degree to be a business owner. You can learn everything you need to know about the legal and tax crap of running a business from any number of good, comprehensive books out there. Heck, “Running a Small Business For Dummies” is really all you need. Don’t wait for permission from society to become a business success: Just go do it yourself.

Basically, I think you get the point. You’re young — get out and do something interesting. Do something you want to do. Don’t just sit in a room full of other drones getting fed the lines of crap that academia wants to feed you. Our society as a whole is structured to create automatons that become slaves to their jobs, because they need the job to buy the crap that society says you need to buy, and college is usually what gets you that job.

Don’t become just another robot. Make your own path in life, and you’ll find what truly makes you happy. If that involves college at some point, then fine. But if not, that’s perfectly fine, too. You can be a productive member of society without ever stepping foot in a classroom.

I don’t expect my little rant here to change the minds of very many of you heading off to college. But if I can somehow encourage even one person that was on the fence about their life and help them to become a better, happier person by doing what they want to do, then I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.

Sincerely,

Jassen Bowman

P.S. In case you were wondering, yes, I have a Bachelor’s degree (in nuclear engineering technology). It took me 8 years to finish, and by the time I finished it, I had already left the profession that my degree would have “allowed” me to work in. I have also gone literally half-way through two different Master’s programs (radiochemistry and space science), without finishing either one, and am about to return to school to obtain a graduate certificate in sports management. By profession, I am currently an IRS licensed Enrolled Agent, and negotiate tax debt resolutions with the IRS on behalf of small business clients, and I make a pretty good living doing it. See how none of these things have anything to do with each other? It’s quite intentional, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

In life coaching, they talk about clearly defining your dream and transforming that dream into smaller goals to help achieve the dream. In the business world, there is a lot of talk about goal setting and taking massive action to accomplish those goals. In some circles, you’ll hear or read about ladder jumping, creating your own hierarchy, in order to achieve what you want to achieve.

I have long separated my world of “dreams” from that of “goals”. For me, “goals” have always been specifically related to business, as they need to be measurable in order to be achievable. On the flip side, I’ve long looked at “dreams” as something very hard to measure. I, like a lot of people I’ll bet, view dreams as almost unattainable.

Let’s take a quick look at very related, yet very different, versions of a goal and a dream. Somebody may set the goal of writing a novel, and another person may have a dream of making their living as a professional novelist. These are two vastly different things we’re talking about here. Anybody can write a novel. Yes, even you. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world do it every November, as part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. Write 1,667 words per day for the entire month of November, and bam…you have a 50,000 word piece, the minimum length considered adequate to be called a novel. Quality? Who cares! Just write! That’s the theme of NaNoWriMo. And it’s really not that hard. I’ve participated three times – finished my first year, almost finished the second year, and got way sidetracked last year.

The dream of being a professional novelist, on the other hand, requires a LOT more work, diligence, effort, and planning. 99.9% of NaNoWriMo novels produced straight up suck, and everybody knows it. A novel for mass publication can’t suck…Quality matters. On top of that, there is the whole matter of getting it published, marketing it, getting good reviews, etc. Then, once you’ve done this, you have to do it again. And then again, then again. That’s what is involved with becoming a professional novelist. I couldn’t find accurate statistics online for purposes of this article, but I’m willing to bet that the odds of making a living as a novelist are worse than making a living as a professional athlete.

Does that mean that dreams can’t be reached? Absolutely not. But how can this be? Because people achieve their dreams every single day! We are awash with stories on a daily basis of individuals that strived for only one thing their entire lives, and achieved it. To be completely honest, such stories are commonplace. Some people do it early in life and make it look easy, some do it after decades of struggle.

There’s a girl I figure skate with that illustrates this quite well. She recently told me that being a model is her dream in life. I think she’s 15 or 16 years old, and she’s already had some modeling work, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she already has an agency or manager. I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see her in some national marketing campaign for an apparel line or a clothing store sometime in the next few years. Although her life’s work so far, as it may be, has more to do with figure skating than anything else (she’s pretty good at that, too), her dream, her drive, and her path has to do with modeling.

Contrast that with a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model”. That show is an occasional guilty pleasure. I love the little challenges they make the girls go through, even though most of them are kind of dumb. Most of the girls on the show are dreamers. Most of them are on very different paths in life other than modeling. Keep in mind that the ones you see on the show are the ones that made it through — there are thousands of other dreamers that didn’t make the cut.

I do recall ONE girl a few years ago on the show that was a career-minded professional, mid-20′s I think, that had no interest in modeling, and her friends dragged her to the tryout for the show, and she ended up either winning or runner-up, I can’t remember exactly. THAT is a different scenario altogether, like a bonus in life, and I remember some of the other girls being pissed off because she won and it wasn’t her dream.

A note on ascending a ladder versus creating your own. The contestants on that and similar reality shows are climbing a ladder created by a specific group of people. Every dreamer that tries out for that show and fails goes home still dreaming. Skater girl, on the other hand, is a dreamer with an important addition: Action. She has her professional shots, she has her portfolio, she makes the contacts she needs to make, and whatever else goes on in that world (I really have no idea what’s involved). But, the difference is, she’s doing something about achieving her dream, not just dreaming about her dream.

When I was a kid, I had a few different things that I thought were my dreams. The most predominant was that I wanted to be an astronaut, and I didn’t grow out of that as I went through high school. I joined the Navy, eventually entered an officer program, passed the written aviation screening exam, and was all ready to make the transition from Navy nuke to Navy aviator, and that’s pretty much as far as it went. Back to the enlisted ranks I went, and it wasn’t until a few years later, as I was getting out of the Navy, that I came back around to it and started taking private flight lessons and bought an airplane. That airplane did a lot more sitting than flying during the couple years I owned it. I have made starts and stops in the aviation world ever since, even to this day as I occasionally pick up the book to study for a glider rating.

So, did I really want to be an astronaut? Did I really want to be a marine biologist? Did I want to be a career military officer? It is an extremely long story about how I came to the realization of what my real dream is, but there are two points on it I want to get out:

1. Defining your true dream in life is a process, not an event.
2. Even once you think you have it defined, your dreams in life can change, just like everything else.

It turns out for myself that my dream has absolutely nothing to do with being anything or achieving anything. It turns out that my dream in life has more to do with being part of something tangible, and in doing a bunch of cool things I just sort of feel like doing. More than anything, my dream is a lifestyle, one that is filled with near constant change in my surroundings and experiences. I don’t really want to be an astronaut — I just want to work in space for a few months. Even if I never achieve that, I’d probably be just as happy paying the $250k for a ride on Virgin Galactic’s suborbital tourist shots.

Sometimes I get depressed and feel like I haven’t achieved anything in my life. But when I really examine it, I’ve done a LOT of cool stuff in my life that most people only dream about (there’s that word again!). I’ve jumped out of perfectly good airplanes (10 times), lost 40 pounds (and still going!), been a race car driver (SCCA Solo II in a 1988 Pontiac Fiero GT), done all the ice sports (curling, hockey, speed skating, figure skating) just to be able to say I did, climbed 14ers, served my country, been a competitive shooter, hit a 1500 yard shot, dated a model, been a competitive swing dancer, driven a HMMWV (a real one), been through a hurricane, been on the open ocean, worked on nuclear power plants, been to graduate school, trained at the Olympic Training Center, rubbed elbows with Olympians, and a boat load more. I change hobbies often, and even with my current 2 year dedication to figure skating, my interests have gone from singles freestyle to ice dance to synchronized (team) skating, and I will not stop until I have competed internationally as an ice dancer (there is an annual adult-only event in Germany that serves as a de facto “adult worlds” of sorts).

From this, it should be obvious that my dream in life is to accumulate experiences, including bad ones (like being in a drive-by shooting, crashing a motorcycle, and a few I can’t mention here). I like being able to walk away and say, “Whoo! That was AWESOME!” Actually, I guess that’s my dream in life: Accumulating a lifetime of awesome moments.

What about you? What is your dream? Can you define it in one sentence? Have you mapped out an action plan for achieving your dream?

Whether your dream is to retire as young as possible and travel the USA in an RV, or analyze soil samples on the surface of Mars, there *is* a path for achieving your dream. But nobody is going to get you there except you, and nobody is going to give you a roadmap. Particularly in this culture in which we live, in which mediocrity is accepted as the norm, the achievers that can step up and run (or even plod) towards their dreams are fairly likely to achieve them, given enough motivation and action.

So, find your dream, then get off your ass and do it!

Until next time,

Jassen Bowman