Wasted Time

For all of the positive things I can say about taking a year off, there’s one negative thing that has become abundantly clear to me: I suck at time management. I don’t completely know what goes into this. On the one hand, I really despise the obsession with productivity that reduces the value of people […]

Excessive Professionalism

Some people really have a heart for business, worker conditions, training, and education, and that’s something the world needs. However, there is a widespread disease of excessive professionalism that has invaded everything. For whatever reasons, this seems to be very prominent in Asian countries. In China, the “996” lifestyle means working from 9am to 9pm, […]

Tech Layoffs and Systemic Inflexibility

Last night, I stumbled across some new social media site in which a lot of people were talking about their layoffs or fear of future layoffs from big tech companies, and some were pretty detailed and terrified. It got me thinking (“always a dangerous thing!”). First of all, I’m not unsympathetic. I have friends who […]

Career Economics

I made the mistake of starting to reread Jacob Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme”, and it has me fired up on a few things. One of the best points made in the book, in my opinion, is that specialization can be represented as a narrow but tall curve on a grid where the x axis represents […]