Category: Reading List

Every time I write a piece advocating escape from corporate servitude, I receive a few emails that contain a particular kind of scolding. They tell me that only an entitled brat could be unsatisfied with a stable job and a roof, in a world where so many pine for only these things.

According to my critics, even if you find your standard weekday boring, painful or unfulfilling, you ought to embrace it, simply because a third-world coal miner would kill for your benefits package. When so many have so little, attempting to escape a situation in which you can reliably feed yourself and fund a retirement could only be an act of the utmost ingratitude.

If you’re reading this, it’s nearly certain that you’re living with levels of potential freedom that nearly all of history’s humans would envy, and that alone is reason enough to feel uneasy if you haven’t yet made good on this gift. Continue reading “Working for the Man Should be a Last Resort”

We all have friends that we know only through certain other friends. Suddenly, I didn’t see my high school friends anymore because we all congregated around friend A. I didn’t see my former work friends anymore because we all kept in touch via get-togethers at friend B’s house. Friends E, F, G and H were great people and I liked them, but it we never made plans together without friend C. Friend D knows everybody — and I thought I did too, until he was gone.

Doing your half

Whatever our reasons, I suspect most of us don’t pull our weight socially, and we depend, possibly without realizing, on that wonderful minority of people who are tirelessly connecting us freeloaders and cowards. I can identify a handful of these people in my life, and I’m sure you could too if you thought about it for a moment.

In every relationship there’s a certain amount of initiative that must be taken, by someone, in order to make sure you still see each other. It’s reasonable to assume we have a moral responsibility to do at least 50% of this work. We ought to be extending an invitation for every one we receive, roughly, if we value it when people do it for us.

http://www.raptitude.com/2014/11/a-common-habit-that-costs-friends/

“Sure,” Lucy has been taught, “everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd.”  So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better.

Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they’re actually quite hard.  Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.

But GYPSYs aren’t about to just accept that. Continue reading “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy”

You might think that in a world where such a thing is possible, we’d all be trying on lifestyles until we found one that fit.

But relatively few do.

As it stands, the norm is to pick a popular one, perhaps fully aware that The Man himself is at the helm, and run with it for several decades, even well after its ultimate irrelevance and emptiness begin to show.

Meanwhile, we complain fondly about it, make knowing jokes with our colleagues about it, steal pens and toner to reclaim some of our lost self-esteem, and if we’re lucky, become at least numb to the work itself.

What makes it seem worthwhile is that the proceeds allow us to build, in our evenings and on our weekends, a fraction of the life we wanted all along.

Watched this dope TED Talk on Saturday morning (10/3/15)

• Marshmallow Test
• Intelligence – Not chess intelligence, not business school intelligence.  Adaptive intelligence: when you’re running down the street and a lamp post is coming towards you… seeing the lamp post coming and changing your course.
• Energy – health and a bias to action.  People who don’t get ill often, people when they get a cold there back to work tomorrow cause they recover quick, they sleep well.  Bias to action: people have a tendency to take action over thinking about action.
• Integrity – saying “no” to most things. An alignment between what your calendar says you do and what you say you do.

Tools:

• Intelligence: write stuff down.  If you write down ideas, people you’ve met, and things that are going on, 6 months from now you won’t be the intelligence of one moment: you’ll be the accumulated intelligence of six months of ideas, things written down, and people’s quotes.
• Energy: High-performance athletes… never let his mind see more than the next fifteen minutes.  never further than stroke, stroke, breath. Climb everest one step at a time.  What’s the next step?  Deal with next unit
• Integrity: T-I-M-E.  This world is full of good intention… But, if you say your parents are important to you, open the diary and show me the hours.  The coherence between a diary and your values is where integrity begins.  And it’s kind of horrific when you start to look and become aware of where your time goes.  So little of my time really goes to the things that I mean to do. So often I slip off into Facebook and what was supposed to be a minute, is an hour, and then lunch comes.  But once you start to get the minutes dedicated things that matter… success in life is not one massive good decision.  Success, is repeated, consistent, good habits.

We so underestimate what we can achieve in a year and so overestimate what we can achieve in a day. A page a day and you have a book in a year: you’ll never write a book in one day.

Welcome to the (Swedish Pop) machine

• Protecting yourself
• Operations manual
• Managing employees
• Legal issues
• How to set up your own intranet site
• How to use free resources (google drive, Dropbox)
• How to make sure employees don’t steal from you
• Start in the retail niche (salons, restaurants)
• Do interviews, case studies, webinars, 7-part series, get testimonials
• 10 employees or less is the niche
• Lots of people have ideas but they don’t know where to start.
• Maybe even have a space already.
• Need to put procedures in place to keep things organized.
• Clock ins, etc