Category: Life
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Craigslist
Whether you’re looking to hire, or for your next career opportunity, try Craigslist (or Facebook Groups, or really any other job board or set of classifieds). Wherever people are, go to them. Listen. Respond. See Walter Chen on hiring from Craigslist, also Eddie Huang finding his first Food Network media opportunity through Craigslist.
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Taking your own advice
Giving advice often benefits the giver as much as the receiver. That helps the case for daily blogging; in the process of looking for ideas, you may often feel like you’re giving advice. Sometimes you could be writing an unsolicited comment that was too heavy for a forum post, or stringing a bunch together. These…
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The smart thing vs. the right thing
The internet is riddled with so many posts on how to do things the smart way. You’ll see it in other words—“more efficiently,” “optimize,” “pareto principle,” “shortcut,” “insight”—etc. Effectively, it’s an acceptable way of suggesting, “Here’s a secret.” You may also have been trained to keep a radar up for these things; to always try…
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Solomon’s Paradox
“Solomon’s paradox of wise reasoning, in which performance of wisdom differs when reasoning on an issue in one’s own life vs. another’s life, has been supported by robust evidence,” write Wentao Xu, Kaili Zhang, and Fengyan Wang in Frontiers in Psychology. Sometimes, we’re too close to the problem; maybe it’s directly in our blind spot.…
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Don’t live the someday life
In spite of the seasons in life, some things are too important to save for, “Someday.” Like, happiness. For those deferring happiness: bad news. The next promotion won’t make you happy. Quitting your job won’t make you happy. Learning a skill won’t make you happy. Dr. Hannah Rose wrote a great post on the proper…
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Perceptions vs. the truth
“One of the attractions of newsletters and podcasts for me is that the best ones throw off the artifice of knowing The Truth and instead are journeys of figuring it out. This is pretty much what being a human is about. We’ve always been trying to figure things out. I believe that’s what the attraction…
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Jeitinho
Mark Manson writes, “Jeitinho refers to the ability to find ways to cut corners or “hack” the system in some way. So if I figure out a way to renew my driver’s license without having to wait in line for three hours, that’s jeitinho. If I manage to find a way into the soccer game…
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Shipping early as self-sabotage
Once you’ve shipped a lot of work, you start chasing it. You no longer fear shipping or releasing work; in fact, you might be hooked on it. Ship early, ship often, you think. The challenge changes. Anyone can ship early, even amateurs. People use shipping to phone in bad work all the time; that’s how…
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Career patterns
It’s great to have role models or benchmarks of what success looks like. It also makes sense to study their career trajectories, strategies, and tactics. What doesn’t make sense is limiting your work and options based on you think the person you’re modeling after would or wouldn’t do. For starters, unless you know your role…
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Emily in Paris
I watched more Emily in Paris than I’d like to admit, so this piece taking it on tickled my brain. There are so many departure points for responses I don’t even know where to start; the signature of an exploratory, curious, piece. Lots of implications for creators (in the social media occupation sense of the…