Matt Kiernan / The Recorder

43folders.com creator Merlin Mann came to campus to help students figure out what they need to focus on to be successful in their personal and professional lives.

“I think we have to find the problems that we’re comfortable with solving rather than the problems that aren’t there,” said Mann. Mann said that teachers can help students get on the right track, but they can’t help students figure out what they want to do in life. It’s up to the students to figure that out.

“I remember feeling a pressure to do certain things a certain kind of way,” said Mann on his time spent growing up.

He went on to say that there are a lot of opportunities out there for people to do interesting things with their life.

Mann told a story of how a college friend of his had known he wanted to be a lawyer since a very young age and one day became a lawyer and ended up hating it. He said that what you want to do and be today may change over time and that it’s normal for it to happen.

He went on to say that college is just the beginning of the rest of your life and that as you go on life will become increasingly more weird and exciting. 

“I don’t think you’re really going to learn anything until you’ve gotten your butt kicked,” said Mann.

The workshop aimed at helping students find jobs was lead by digital humanities student Alex Jarvis. Jarvis said that instead of focusing on making video games. He wanted to concentrate on how video games make people feel and that he’s fine with the possibility of changing his mind down the road of what he wants to do with his life.

Mann recalled being in junior high school and his class spinning a vocational wheel for finding what jobs there are and what they do. He hopes that instead of people focusing on the one thing they’re good at, they’ll think about things that freak them out and ask themselves why it freaks them out.

“Anything that has high value in your life will come from an awesome decision and a cool person,” said Mann. 

The term networking is one that Mann shuns, but thinks the idea of making connections with other people to progress in life is one of the most important things students can do to succeed in getting a job.

In another part of the workshops, Mann talked about controlling the amount of e-mails a person receives in their inbox and how to maintain it. Keeping your inbox closer to having zero e-mails will make your life much easier instead of having to worry about sifting through e-mails like it’s a second job.

Mann described attention management as when a person spends their time on things that are important.

Much of a person’s day in the workforce can be wasted on going through e-mails that are unnecessary. 

“E-mail is a medium for moving something from one place to another,” said Mann.

He went on to say that it’s not a place to hang out and that it needs to be emptied like a normal mailbox.

Mann thinks that if a person has the time to check their e-mail, they have the time to make a decision on what they want to do with it.