Johanna
@johannaeinsiedler
Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
Johanna
How to Drop Out
ranprieur.com
When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
I still read through every scorecard and every offer going out at Gusto. The reason it’s still viable to do that in an hour is because the interview information is all brought together and packaged in an organized and consolidated way.”
First Round Capital • How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition
What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules.
Shane Parrish • Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You
Move faster. Slowness anywhere justifies slowness everywhere.
2021 instead of 2022. This week instead of next week. Today instead of tomorrow.
Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize.
Startups and
“Complain less” is one of the very best pieces of wisdom. That is positively correlated with criticizing other people less, though it is not identical either.
Marginal Revolution • How much should you criticize other people? - Marginal REVOLUTION
There’s often an initial apprehension that comes from welcoming a lot of new hires into the fold. But there’s also something deeper. What these comments get at is the sense that there’s a certain “unscalable” spirit from a team’s earlier, scrappier days — and that each new addition represents a slow chipping away at the je ne sais quoi that forged ... See more
First Round Capital • How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition
But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are c... See more
Brian Potter • Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?
It’s important to learn that you can learn anything you want, and that you can get better quickly. This feels like an unlikely miracle the first few times it happens, but eventually you learn to trust that you can do it.