Category: Life
-
Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something Useful
You should only work on the weekends if you’re learning something that supports your future or puts you on a path to enjoying your work.
-
How to Ease Brain Overload without Trying Harder
Our brains are overloaded. Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short at the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego suggest the average American took in around 34 gigabytes of data per day in 2009 (here’s the original estimate, via NYT). That was a year before Instagram was released. Nobody was searching “side hustle”…
-
The Rise of Personal Infrastructure (Redux)
“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!” Jay-Z famously raps on the Diamonds remix. There’s a lot of chatter at Twitter about individual people (“creators”) scaling up million dollar businesses. I thought Elaine Pofeldt did it first, but apparently micro ISVs have been around. Either way, this is a growing possibility for more people…
-
The Kanye West Religion (Part 1)
Who Is This For? Artists and creative independents. Kanye West’s most recent albums sound nothing like the one before. In an age of blockbusters and calculated risk, he proclaims his strategy is no strategy. Yet he has also cultivated one of the most fervent fan bases, rivaling the Beyhive, Beliebers, and the Swifties. Rolling Stone…
-
Your Success Does Not Depend on Productivity Rules
Your productivity settings should evolve to keep up with you, not the other way around Image: Helena Lopes/Unsplash Productivity advice seems to be everywhere these days, but the more you read, the more you’ll see its contradictions. For example, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen used to advise against keeping a schedule, but now he keeps a…
-
An Alternative to College this Fall
Image: Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash If you’re enrolled in college for September, there’s a strong case to defer your semester in September. There are better ways to learn during the four months. For example, you could start an online business, or build projects to learn new skills. Both of these ideas have small risks (e.g., four months),…
-
You should only compete with one person: yourself
Source: The Mushroom Kingdom It’s easy to compare yourself against other people especially as they flood our screens with images. But when you compete against other people, you judge yourself based on their values and metrics. The problem with this is even if you win, you only do something that’s important to them, not you.…
-
Why you should work on one thing at a time
I grasped one of the my important productivity insights when I worked at Xtreme Labs: the importance of doing one thing at a time. Our VP of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, was a proponent of “monotasking,” and he warned against multitasking and distraction. Professor Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine, told Fast Company that…
-
How the U.S.A.’s first billionaire destroyed the myth of hard work (i.e., “hustle”)
The lazy, concentrated, approach to work that made John D. Rockefeller “I attribute my good condition to my almost reckless independence in determining for myself what to do and the rigid adhering to regulations which give me the maximum of rest and quiet and leisure, and I am being richly paid for it every day.” — John…
-
Don’t wait until you feel more confident. Action comes first
There’s a quote often attributed to Henry Ford, “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Something like this might your mind as you watch as these other people, chin up, assured, relaxed, almost effortlessly do exactly what you wanted to do. The reason many of them are able to…