Some of these thoughts, stories, and personal history appeared in our newsletter, "Dō Gakuin News". Few members have been with us since our first issue in 1993. As such, ideas on this page may have been printed before, but are worth telling again.
Several
people urged me to join Linkedin - “It’s good for business”, they said. “You’ll
make important business contacts”, they told me. So I joined in 2010.
Then
they told me to accept every contact - “You never know who will lead to
someone else who can do you good”. Oh, so Linkedin is like Facebook. The
goal is to have 5,000 ‘friends’, only 50 of whom you actually know, and maybe
10 who you would actually want to hang out with. Got it.
The new thing (well, it’s been going on for a little while now) is to
have my contacts ‘endorse’ me for various skills & expertise. I’ve received
well over 100 ‘endorsements’, mostly from people who never met me or have any idea
of my capabilities. The funny thing is they’re usually endorsing me for skills
I do not possess. And then they want me to endorse them when I know nothing
about them! I usually don't bother to add their 'endorsement' to my
profile. Yesterday, a contact whom I barely know endorsed me on a new skill:
Operant Conditioning. I’m not sure I even know what the heck that is! And she’s
not the first person to endorse me for operant conditioning, so I did a Google
search and came up with this definition:
‘Operant Conditioning - conditioning in which an operant response is brought
under stimulus control by virtue of presenting reinforcement contingent upon
the occurrence of the operant response’
Great! I don’t even know what this definition means! Will somebody
please give me a definition for this definition?
I don’t ask for much out of life. If you are able to improve my career,
my life, please go to Linkedin and contact: Steven Gottwirt, President and
Chief Instructor of Dō Gakuin Shotokan Karate-do, Inc. Just please don’t offer
me a job in operant conditioning. Thank you.
