I wanna make another video that talks about discourse itself. While I enjoy making a persuasive argument, and I frequently, people go, oh, wow, that’s what you meant to know. I never thought of it that way. That isn’t my only goal. I’m not here to change your mind. I’m here to clarify mine. If you could hear me, if you can really hear me and disagree with me, that is absolutely right.
I’m okay with that because I know some of the things that I say really are controversial. I’m an art professor at an art school. Do you have any idea how people bring up the ethics of that all the time. How can you stand by and support somebody spending $200,000 on a arts degree and what is it by them? And I’m like, wow, wow, wow, like, is that my job? And you know, higher ads is scam and you’re like, whoa, do you know what higher ed is? So when people treat higher ed like vocational school, because that’s how they sell it a lot of times, I think that’s wrong. I don’t think. I don’t treat higher education as a type of vocational school. I treat colleges college. I remind the parents that my job is to make their children critical thinkers, lifelong learners and possibly the smartest person in the room. That’s my goal. What’s that worth? Hard to put a dollar sign on it. Definitely harder to say that you’re gonna get a job because of it. That’s a, again, don’t get me wrong, that’s a very difficult prospect.
But I know what I’m offering. I know what I’m providing, I know what the education done us. And what’s interesting is I often have to remind my colleagues that when a parent brings their child to look at one school or another, remember, I work at two different colleges. I remind them I’m not there to convince them the value of higher education. They’ve already are looking at higher education. I’m there to help them differentiate one from another. It’s a very difficult thing. It’s very challenging to explain to somebody why a four year, six year, eight year education is worth that amount of money. But isn’t from a day one it isn’t. But from a year 20 it might be. It’s challenge.
We there aren’t a lot of need call for fine art blacksmiths. I have a friend who’s a third generation fine art blacksmith and most of his money is made from the metal fabrication. For me also owns because there isn’t a lot of money being a fine art blacksmith anymore and definitely not with the amount of people he employs. Oh, you could be a solo practitioner, find out blacksmith and make a living, but that’s not a business that’s making a living. That’s earning enough money to pay yourself. And that’s different. He owns a business, which means he’s got to support all sorts of people. It’s way different when you describe it that way and when his grandfather was around. Oh, it was, it was a thing. It was a thing. A thriving business. But the nature of art changes. Technology changes, aesthetics changes. The demands that people want from art and artisans change over time. And yeah, I’m okay with that. There are fewer professional photographers, me included, than there used to be because the value proposition has changed. There are fewer woodworkers. There are fewer, you know, true master carpenters doing, you know, handmade furniture because the value proposition has changed. Is it wrong? We can have a, we can talk about society in general. What we can also talk about the fact is that the value proposition is changed, which means that all of a sudden, the handmade dresser is only gonna be bought by somebody very wealthy. And all of a sudden that we are looking at a way different type of economics. Strange. It evolves, it changes.
I’m okay with that cuz it happens with every field. Matter of fact, I used to work at a company downtown Cleveland that had one of the last freight elevators that had to be run by an elevator operator. Guy literally was an elevator operator for a living cuz it was one of those things where it didn’t stop on the floors. He had a precision started to stop it and I’m like, wow, you see the last elevator operator in the city. And he’s like, probably in the state. Things change. Technology causes that to happen. And by the way, we definitely move too quickly. We always move too quickly. There is no doubt about. We don’t think these things through, and that’s a mistake.
It’s also not something that I’m usually gonna be able to help with. I usually can help with towards the middle, maybe towards to, you know, when things are here, I can help clarify a little bit, I can even help navigate through it. But usually these things, the bell is wrong and there’s not much we can do about it.
And now we live in a world where things get faster and faster. And so, you know, the margins go further and further away. We don’t give anything, you know, room to breathe and room to grow. There’s nothing organic out here anymore. Now, is that a problem? Yes. Remember when a TV show could last a whole season before it caught its footing? Now things are like, dude, we filmed six episodes, we’re gonna air one. Never mind, we’re shelving it. Screw that, delete the footage. That’s the world in which we live and that’s strange and it’s tragic. I look at these things, I sometimes have to act like a realist. And you know what? Maybe my realism makes me look like a collaborator. Maybe it does. But as somebody who is trying to achieve a goal by navigating through our complex world, sometimes it’s good to go. What were they thinking?
Just the other day, my boss asked me about a platform we use at the office that I hate, my coworkers hate, and we all hate it, and we ask to replace it. And he said, tell me why we couldn’t just keep saying it’s icky. And I said, you know what? Screw it, I’ve never been trained. He goes, what? I’ve never been trained to use the platform? I go, none of us have. We’ve all just like done it. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I need trained. Maybe if I heard from the manufacturer, their point of view and their training, this thing would be a brilliant tool. And I just, maybe that’s the part of the equation that’s missing. And he’s like, really? I go, well, let’s waste some time and find out. Because if I go through training, it still doesn’t work. Then I’ll be able, I will be better equipped to explain what doesn’t work.
That’s where I’m trying to come from these days, partially because I don’t wanna have a heart attack. I just don’t. I don’t wanna be angry all the time. I wanna go, what’s going on here and how can I get through it and how can I leverage it? How can I use the world that’s already here? Because otherwise you’ll feel like you’re spitting into the wind all the time.
And yes, I know specifically I’m talking to some small business owners, people who are independent artists. I’m an independent artist and a small business owner and I have two full time jobs. I’m really, that’s it. I don’t know about artifact. I like to see things from multiple points of view and I like to take the, well, what can we do perspective. And a lot of people I think are a little bit too optimistic in their protestations. Like I don’t think anyone cares what you have to say. I mean that in the sense that I don’t think that I can make an impact by ranting about the bad things that are happening in this world. But I can make an impact by showing paths that might move individuals forward. I can make an impact by saying, what are the considerations that we need to keep our eye on if we’re gonna exist here?
What am I need to look for? I always say my favorite piece of advice when I was doing Taro reads is that the best piece of advice anyone can ever give you is duck. That’s the best piece of advice ever. And a lot of times that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe it looks like I’m on the defensive. Maybe it looks like I’m a collaborator. But really what I am is a pragmatist, somebody who wants to use the resources that are available to them and realize that in a world or each of us can do good or bad without even breaking the law, or we can be ethical and unethical without breaking the law, that the best thing we can do is model good behavior. That’s it. Model good behavior or use these tools that someone’s being an about and demonstrate that you can use it for something good. Because the tool itself isn’t inherently evil. It’s just that most people are .