The Importance of Giving People Time

One of the best feelings in the world is that of being valued and appreciated. If a person feels like someone values who they are, feelings often become mutual between parties. Humans wish to be respected by their peers and vica versa. Many a friendship, job, and employee have disappeared because this respect becomes lost.

The most direct way to obtain this respect is to give people time. When I strike a conversation up, I don’t think about how long I can talk for. I just talk. I treasure the flow of information and ideas. When presented with an alternate method of thinking I consider what is said and then respond. These methods hold true for almost every conversation I have. And they result in a fair amount of my time is consumed by conversations with strangers that I never intended to meet.

As an extrovert, I talk to everyone. People I disagree with and people I support are treated the same during a conversation. I will be more likely to talk to my friends than a stranger, but once in the middle of a conversation, I will dedicate myself to the task of making their opinion valued.

Some go through life with their blinders on like a horse. They always look straight ahead and don’t stop to talk to passers-by on their way to there destination. I do not, and my life is better for it.

One day I had stayed up to late into the night–an all too common experience for me during high school. I drank no caffeine, asked questions in almost every class, and planned to stay after school for three hours of stage crew. My friend finally cracked after watching me spend fifteen minutes talking to a lunch lady: “Do you run on fairy farts?”

No, I don’t run on fairy farts. I just believe in the power of giving people time.

Civic Issue
1. Social media invades and monopolizes time for almost all generations at every stage of life. It has been instrumental revolutions and grassroots political movements, but it also has been used for cyberbullying and the spread of sensationalized journalism. The invasiveness and addictiveness of social media will continue to be a hotly debated issue and as such could be a potential civil issue blog topic.

2. University is for many families another mandatory step of life. More people, from more cultures, are in universities than ever before and thus grades become an even more important distinguishing factor. With the mounting pressure on grades, Academic dishonesty at the Univesity level is a major issue. My civic issue blog could explore the development and any potential solutions to solve academic dishonesty.

Passion Blog
1. I am currently in the middle of reading The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, and by “in the middle” I mean only 7% of the way through the book. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Power Broker, is the biography of renowned urban city planner Robert Moses. As one of the single most influential men of the past century, his actions have directly shaped the road network of America forever. In this blog, I would hope to go section by section — as I read the book — in an effort to explain who Moses is, what he has done, and why he did it.

2. In the past year, I read two influential books that changed my life. They are Zen in the Martial Arts and The Art of Time. Each passion blog post I would break down 1-2 concepts I learned from one of these books (or any other influential books I read) and share it with my readers.

Reflection
Last semester, I put in the effort to make all of my blog posts presentable and turned in on time. This semester, I want to go beyond that. To be proud of my work and want to share what I have written rather than thinking about it as just “one more chore.”

With regards to framing and execution, my previous semester’s effort was passable. My formatting was great, so I plan to keep it the same. The only thing I will focus on is making sure that each post truly does build and connect with the others to make a cohesive work that ads value. In contrast, last semester was a bunch of loosely related mumbo-jumbo under the same roof.