This is the Way

When my brother and I were little kids, we were sitting around our grandparents' house on the Cape one sunny summer day doing absolutely nothing, waiting for something to entertain us. One of us made the mistake of telling our grandmother that we were bored. She wasted absolutely no time lighting us up, all but physically kicking us out of the hous

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If money makes you happy, so be it. If it’s having fun, likewise. If helping other people is what drives you, so much the better. As your father, it is not my place to assign you a motivation, but rather try to make sure you understand what your motivation is, and more importantly, the tradeoffs involved. If you focus on making money, you may sacri

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That’s as may be. On an individual level, there’s basically zero you can do about the intrinsic human tendency to form multi-layer, complex social constructs to operate within. What you can do, however, is not buy into them personally.

In practical terms, this means that you are not better than someone else because of the job you have, the money you

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Your job will not always be what you want to do. Some of your jobs will be unpleasant. Some will be actively miserable. This is not relevant. You do your job anyway because that is what we do. Whatever your job is, you will work like a dray horse. Many things in life will be out of your control. Your effort level is not one of those things.

I don't

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Setting aside the normal day to day gripes, which aren't the problem, ask yourself this the next time you're tempted to complain: what have I done to fix this?

In our house, we have a rule: no bitching about something you haven't tried to fix. If you've made the effort to address an issue and been unsuccessful, ok. Bitching still isn't encouraged, b

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“ I wanted to pass on another nugget I’ve learned about how to approach and define problems: working backwards. I’ve found this to be useful in both technical and business situations and I use it all the time.

Basically, start with the end result you want, and figure out how to get there from here. If you can’t define the desired outcome, then ste

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