consulting life

Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations

1. To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.

2. You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.

3. Small is more rewarding than big -

From the point of view of normal middle-class people fully invested in the paycheck lifestyle, gigworkers appear to unreasonably and perversely reject perfectly fine standardized consumption-based life scripts, scripts that have worked for a century for billions of people. We have weird lives with lots of non-default aspects. We live in unexpected

Being outside their organization means you can get closer to outer realities relevant to their business, while also remaining closer to their inner realities than most outsiders. This closeness may be some form of literal closeness. Maybe you spend more of your time going to industry conferences than they do, or spend more time tracking academic

The gig economy is defined primarily by the glitches, exceptions, and incoherencies of the mainstream paycheck economy. Our messy map is the reason their suspiciously clean map doesn’t fall apart.

The most obvious example of reality arbitrage is of course playing “chess postman”: picking up tricks watching one client and putting them to work on behalf of another.