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I Forge Iron

What advice do you wish someone had given you when you were younger?


rockstar.esq

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I'll throw in a few.

If your teacher/instructor/professor is proud of how many people fail their class, they're telling you that they're a terrible teacher.  Believe them, and find one that actually wants students to succeed.

Same kind of thing applies to experienced managers who boast that they've never given an employee an excellent review.  This is defining the manager's limitations, not the employees.

And finally.  You don't get to choose the form of your rescue.  I've been helped by unlikely people more often that I can count.  A lot of my knowledge came from rough people who had little patience for my struggles.  They were there when I needed them.  Now that I'm able to pause and lend a hand, I've lived to see young people turn it down because they don't see it for what it is.    

How about you?

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ooo, going deep are we.

1st one: You are dyslectic, not stupid:rolleyes:

2nd one: Don't ever listen to people who try to hold you back, who have no job, no life experience or actual knowledge about anything. Do what you think is right, fail or succeed, as long as you learn something from it.

3rd one: Always listen to two sides of the story, don't jump to conclusions before you know more then the other parties involved, and keep an open mind.

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You can be right and wrong about the same thing, some things are just righter than they are wrong. 

"You don't get to choose the form of your rescue." Truer words were never spoken I'm writing that down, thank you.

Frosty The Lucky.

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Rockstar, universities should pay you to give talks to first year graduate students. I can't begin to express how badly so many of my peers need to hear this (including myself several years ago). Students give too much credit to bad teachers and worse advisors who treat their students like trash. When I chose my advisor, half the decision came down to politics and different researcher's reputations. I recall being warned about a certain research professor who people quipped would've "spilled the blood of a young graduate student over his experiment as an offering if it got results." And how did this researcher's teaching/advising philosophy end up so twisted? Simple! They were treated the same way by their doctoral advisor!

Sorry for the rant, this stuff really gets me.

 

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2 hours ago, Deimos said:

1st one: You are dyslectic, not stupid:rolleyes:

Deimos,  That's absolutely true.  When I was incredibly sleep deprived by my colicky firstborn, I was a college student who absolutely couldn't remember a lot of stuff.  I had engineering exams that would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered the formula.  I passed them by deriving what I needed.    I had a family member with Alzheimer's who felt stupid for forgetting things.  They could solve complex problems, and render accurate snap judgements about things around them.  Intelligence isn't exclusively about memory, reading comprehension, or sequential reasoning.  

Thomas, there's a great wisdom in being open to changing ones mind.

Frosty, your comment reminds me that a lot of stuff is a work in progress.  Most of the time, it's too soon to tell.

Twigg, there were "sycophantic fan clubs" for terrible professors at my college as well.   Encouraging cutthroat mentalities in education is a pretty primitive way to swap quality teaching for the mythos of exclusivity.  Killing one prisoner per day doesn't make the survivors better people, it only feeds the depravity of the jailer.

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One of the issues with studying historical metallurgy is that many things that are strongly held beliefs today are only 1 dig or analysis away from being radically changed.  Reading the modern research shows that a lot of the earlier published "facts" are not.  In blade smithing; things like carbon migration in pattern welded steels or "Edge Packing" or the use of normalization to refine grain structure have all been researched and changes to our beliefs and methods have been mandated during just my smithing years!

"It ain't so much the things that people don't know that makes trouble in this world, as it is the things that people know that ain't so." — Mark Twain.

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If someone prefers to be negative, let them do it alone.  Remove their negative attitude and replace it with a determination to find another way to the answer.  Surround yourself with positive attitudes and positive people who want to help you succeed.  

If you are just average, that means 1/2 of the people in the world are less ___________ (fill in the blank) than you are.  Move up only one position by learning, experience, research, etc and YOU are now in the upper half of the world.  Do not settle with only one position, but add one more position every chance you get.  Does not take long to go from above average to well above average. 

Lend a hand and help others on their way up.  It usually costs you nothing but can mean the world to them.

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Choose your own pathway and if you preserve, you won't wake up when you are 65 realizing you "died"  when you were 25.

Life is real, there are no saves, no replays, and ctrl, alt, delete does not apply. So ride her hard and when you find out why the Rocky Mountains are truly rocky, get up, dust off your britches, and mount up.

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Before you point a finger at someone/something remember that 3 fingers are pointing back at you. In any situation, before passing blame, look at what you can do to change it, if nothing can be done by you or in your sphere of influence it means it is not in your power to change the situation and you should not worry about it.

If you let go of things, it gives you two free hands.

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The past, even a second ago, is gone and there is nothing you can do to change it.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

-Omar Khayyam

Woulda, coulda, shoulda are invariably useless and regret changes nothing.  Yes, you can learn from the past and your past mistakes and triumphs but you cannot change what has been done.  For the mistakes, all you can do it try not to repeat them.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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10 hours ago, rockstar.esq said:

Deimos,  That's absolutely true.  When I was incredibly sleep deprived by my colicky firstborn, I was a college student who absolutely couldn't remember a lot of stuff.  I had engineering exams that would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered the formula.  I passed them by deriving what I needed.    

I know that feeling, since I would always forget or misplace the the letters in the formula I would just repeat them over and over again when I entered the classroom. Put my notebook away at the last possible moment and as soon as I got my exam and paper, write every formula and what I was for on the paper. Getting a 1.7 (a D is a 5.5 over here, so a 1.7 is 5 levels of F) for French I could live with (my mom not so much). But failing math or physics hurts real bad if you never make a mistake on paper, as long as you have a book with the formula with you.

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In regards to blacksmithing, I wish someone would have told me how low the bar is actually set to enter the craft. Instead of wasting time looking for the perfect this or that I should have used whatever I had until I could get what I want. I'd be a couple years farther along had I known this. 

Pnut

Pnut

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It's not that the bar is necessarily low for the blacksmith's craft, pnut. It's that most beginners are looking at the wrong bar. The tool bar is very low, the skills bar is as high as you can push it. 

People who use "should" as a regular part of speech are, "should heads."

Frosty The Lucky.

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Don't be afraid of making mistakes; you will survive most of them! (Nobody commented on the gauze and surgical tape peaking out of my sleeve yesterday at work...)

Now the average thing is wrong: for example: take 4 people with IQs of 80, 80, 80 and 160; average IQ of the group is 100 of which there are 3 people below and one above! What you mean is the median where half the items being compared are below and have above---like median income or house price.

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With regards to blacksmithing: When I first got myself an anvil, built myself a forge and found a hammer and some tongs, I immediately thought to myself, "awesome, I am now able to do all these cool things I see other smiths doing! I should start telling everyone about my newfound abilities!" And from there I took on some commissions; mostly small things, but one way outside my true novice abilities. I haven't given up on that one as it is still a WIP, but I certainly jumped the gun. I wish I had the wherewithal at the time, in the midst of my excitement, to distinguish between ability and capability. What I can do now vs. what I will eventually (with practice) be able to do with the tools I have acquired.  

With regards to life in general: After high school and 2 years of community college spent trying to "figure out what to major in", I wish I had someone in life influencing the pursuit of a trade. I got that influence a little later, after meeting my wonderful wife. Of course, change is among few constants in life. Here I am between the change I made and the choice I made in school, enjoying both worlds but favoring one. 

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