making a life > making a living

I’m always amused when I get credit for coming up with the 100-Day Project, because part of what makes it interesting is that there’s nothing original about it. It’s what we all do every day. We do routine things, and we do things that require acts of imagination that we’re never going to do again, whether it’s naming a goldfish or responding to a ... See more

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way t... See more

A lot of the time realising more in my personal life means doing less in my professional life, but I am absolutely fine with that trade off because my end goal isn’t to build a massive multimillion dollar business, it’s to build a life that’s creative and fulfilling.

“What would be the most effective way to design your life so that you get to do more of that—assuming nothing about the shape of the solution and reasoning up from first principles?”

Instead of thinking “I want to be a musician (and that means having a label and making albums, and so on),” I suggest that we think about it as a design problem. The fi... See more

And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living – and will live – and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. Yo

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