Category: Life
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Flexibility cost
Sticking to the plan is usually the least expensive solution. However! Plans are just guesses. Sometimes we guess poorly. Or, circumstances change, and our guess proves to be wrong. For example, you planned to quit our job, and entrepreneurship turns out to be nothing like what you guessed it would be like. Or you started…
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Oops
This is the ideal way to respond if you make a mistake by accident. As in: “Oops, I made a mistake, please let me find a way to make this right.” “Oops, I made a mistake, please let me try to figure out why and fix it.” “Oops, I’m sorry I made a mistake. Please…
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Decisiveness has an expiry date
For years, I’ve wanted to buy an external monitor for my laptop. I’ve worked with a dual monitor setup pretty much up till 2018. Working from a laptop screen was suboptimal. I’ve been meaning to buy one this whole time, and I didn’t until last Friday. Here’s what happened: As I started my search, I…
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10 questions to help you decide between career options
What do you want to be doing in a decade? What will your ideal day look like? (How can you make it feel like Saturday, every day?) Which game do you want to be over? Which game do you want to keep playing? What do you need to to keep playing the game, and how…
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A fisherman and banker exchange numbers
I put this together based on the parable of the Mexican fisherman, as made famous by lifestyle design and the internet. (See also the situation where this parable doesn’t work out!)
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Donald Glover, on productive gentleness
When Donald Glover asks himself, “What’s a good man to you?” he replies, “Someone who knows themselves. Who loves themselves. My father was really gentle with us. Physically and mentally. It felt radical at the time. I really miss him.” Similarly, when he’s recently asked what advice he’d leave with his kids (emphasis added): The…
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Interviewing experts to learn
I recently appeared at Rich Armstrong’s Twitter Spaces, and the topic of meeting other people (“networking”) came up (1:06:35). It reminded me of a draft for career advice that I pitched Forge (it was just sitting around, and this was an opening to unstick it). When I was a junior in college, I was at…
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“Evolve or Die”
“Evolve or die” is one of the mottos in 50 Cent’s Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter. He discusses his own adherence to the principle: When he put out new music in 2009, it still topped the charts, but he noticed the crowds at live shows weren’t responding to it as they used to. He observed that…
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Practice vs. perfection
If you’re wondering if you should’ve signed that email off differently, or worried that you didn’t convey a certain detail the ideal way, or if this is your only shot at something, you’re missing the bigger picture. When the stakes feel too high, something is off. Perfection shouldn’t be the expectation for a positive outcome. …
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Misunderstanding
It’s almost always worth giving someone else the benefit of the doubt. The experience of rejection, whether it’s as simple as a request to reschedule, or a long overdue response, can be a deceptive moment. Then there’s the bigger stuff: declined invitations or applications, missed weddings, missed connections in travelling. There’s no hint here; just…