Mush brain
Are you thinking of taking time off to ‘figure out your next move’?
Great!
In knowledge work world, it’s a good time to switch things up and explore different avenues.
But first, surfing!
When I decided to take time off between jobs, the one thing I kept thinking of was this hot, tropical location, where living costs are cheap and I could surf everyday.
I could maybe even pick up freelance work while I was there.
El Salvador was my pick.
Reality quickly set in.
Reducing your living costs is a smart move if you’ve just turned off your primary income source. My monthly costs in El Salvador was something like 700 USD, for food, rent, everything. But it’s a trade off, obviously. Internet speeds were glacial. I had incredible meals, but good quality food (think basic stuff like fresh milk, fresh bread, fresh eggs etc) was a mission to find. I was staying in cheap locations and moving once a week or fortnight. Again, uprooting yourself continuously is not conducive to productivity.
The weather was incredible. I hardly needed to wear shoes or a shirt, there was a fresh breeze off the beach in the afternoon and the most vivid sunset every night. But it was stinking hot for the majority of the day. And once the honeymoon period finished, I realized I could barely string two coherent thoughts together. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t analyze. I couldn’t plan. My brain had gone offline. I probably had less anxiety and was more present than usual, but it was painful as I attempted to find work or prepare for interviews.
By quitting a 9-5, you’ve freed up about 40-50 hours a week. At first this feels like a miracle. You see this meme on twitter, a screenshot of an empty week on google calendar with a caption like “the true meaning of wealth”, and there’s something to that. At first I filled this time with relaxing, fun activities. Reading, socializing, eating, surfing. Then I tried to be more productive. I would go on day trips, head into town or up the coast, dealing with zero English speakers, crazy chicken buses and a million other minor obstacles and curiosities. Turns out there’s such thing as having too much free time.
Productivity and wellness isn’t everything. If that’s the goal, we would all be living in some sort of Equinox x WeWork hellbox, but these turn out to be big lumps of your waking life, and ripping them out, heating them up and smashing them to bits will have fairly serious impacts on your mental health and ability to ‘get stuff done’.
It’s healthy to ask yourself questions like ‘where do I want to live’ and ‘what do I want to do next’. But that ‘next step’ will not magically appear – no matter how beautiful the sunset is!
Kevin Kelly in the Office
Selected advice from Kevin Kelly that applies to an office job. Ditch your company values, try and internalize a few of these.
Work and problem solving
(Work on) tasks that you never want to stop doing.
Make stuff that is good for people to have.
When you are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make “explaining the problem” part of your (design) process.
Only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
Communication and public speaking
It’s possible that a not-so smart person, who can communicate well, can do much better than a super smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to (people you don’t work directly with).
Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.
Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
When speaking to an audience it’s better to fix your gaze on a few people than to “spray” your gaze across the room. Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you are saying.
When public speaking, pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way, pause after you have said something you believe is important, and pause as a relief to let listeners absorb details.
Running away
“Great cities attract ambitious people.”. Ambitious, individualistic people often run away from home.
If they find the right city, people who run away feel like they’ve arrived. They are seen. And if they ever return home, they are changed. Hero’s journey type stuff.
Western culture has no shortage of stories of heroes and heroines who took ‘the midnight train goin’ anywhere’.
In some cases, you are left wondering ‘what if’. Maybe of all the universes out there, this is the worst one?
Anyway, I believe there’s two ingredients needed for this recipe that taste a little salty when mixed together. Ambition and individualism.
Moving away, or running away, is one of the most ambitious things one can do. Take investment banking. A city like Melbourne, Australia does not revere bankers like Manhattan does. And say what you want about them, they are working really hard. It’s an extremely demanding job. If you don’t have much ambition, that sort of lifestyle will be hell for you. And vice versa.
Moving away, or running way, is also very individualistic. For millennia, we have stuck together. We are social. We are happier together. But I also think there is clearly an individual urge within some of us. Think of it like two archetypes. One sits happily around the campfire, with his family nearby and the other is restless and wants to experience unknowns. “Where are you going?” “Uh, I just want to wander around over there, you know, for fun?” Humans weren’t designed to just ‘feel nice’ and an urge to explore has led to a lot of important discoveries and action.
Both of these qualities obviously have good and bad elements.
Modern life has never been so individualistic, and even for an introvert like me, it’s not healthy. “A person living in a modern city or a suburb can , for the first time in history , go through an entire day — or an entire life — mostly encountering complete strangers.” *
Both are ‘baked in’. Although it feels natural for me to ‘voluntarily leave a group’, and I have enough ambition to try out new things, I believe that finding the right place to live is about balancing the amount of ambition you have with the sort of life you want to live.
Read in your 20’s
A photo of several books was posted on Twitter, and lots of people I follow have been piling on and roasting it.
Visually they look very similar, you may have read a few or seen these prominently displayed as you transfer at LAX airport. “The 5am Club”, “The Miracle Morning” that sort of fluff.
Thankfully, for my ego, I’ve only read a couple of these. But I hope that people on twitter don’t see these critiques and get put off reading. I think reading is good™. What’s helpful is to have a few good reasons why you read.
I started properly reading when I took a job that was way out of my comfort zone, and I felt pretty scared and out of my depth.
I ordered several books on amazon, mainly related to my job and vowed to not feel that out of depth ever again.
I suppose that is still a big reason, a sort of second or ongoing ‘education’. Whatever I did at University, and however helpful it was, it was still only a few years of my life, at a pretty young age. I’d hope to keep learning about new things for many more years. A good book can help me think a bit clearer, write a little better and generally improve my understanding of the world.
Otherwise, I read for entertainment. And really that’s the main reason why anyone should read - it’s nice!
I’ve gone through many different stages. I’ve gone too deep into self help. I’ve read books for the wrong reasons. I’ve stuck with bad books too long (don’t). The main reason to avoid bad books is it takes a lot of time to read a book and we only have so much time on earth.
But I’ve also stumbled across books that have really helped me.
That’s why I read, and I enjoy it. The toughest thing of course is finding time and energy to build a habit.
Stephen King has the best advice on this: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time to write. Simple as that. Waiting rooms were made for books –– of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone’s favorite, the john.”
You heard it. Read when you can, and you’ll start to see some cracks of available time where you’d better off be reading.
Lastly, a guiding principle that I’ve followed for a while now.
Likely around the time that I started investing in books. I subscribed to an email newsletter by author Ryan Holiday. He ends each email with: “ I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it.”
Skip Intro - Netflix Case Study Breakdown
I stumbled on this short case study/retro on the infamous ‘skip intro’ button from Netflix. Here are my thoughts. Emphasis mine, and lightly edited.
“On Netflix in a typical day, the Skip Intro button is pressed 136 million times, saving members an astonishing 195 years in cumulative time!”
It’s always nice to start at the end. The writer explains why this is an important project, backed up with hard numbers.
“…some designers and I were discussing how to help members get the most out of their Netflix experience. Sometimes you want to find a particular moment you love — that awesome action scene or the big reveal of that can’t-believe-it twist — or rewatch a favorite joke.”
This answers important initial questions like “How did the project start? Who was involved? What was the original user problem/need?”
“An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments. The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment.”
Original design solution and rationale.
“But why skip forward 10 seconds?”
Uh oh. Here’s the conflict. Their solution isn’t elegant in all situations.
“At the same time, I was watching Game of Thrones, which has a famously long (and beautiful) opening credits sequence. I found the show so compelling that I wanted to skip the credits and jump right into the story, and I found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to just the right place. Sometimes I would jump too far, and sometimes I would jump too short. I wondered whether other people felt the same.”
Here’s a new insight/understanding about user behavior. There’s a specific user frustration that he believes might impact many users.
“We did research and found that in about 15% of the time members were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro.”
Boom. Validates the hypothesis.
“Rather than build a general purpose solution that might help a little with several different needs, like a skip forward 10 seconds button, we designed a single purpose solution that did only one thing really well.”
Solution + rationale. We designed something that solves this particular problem.
“Our goal was to make this option as simple as possible while also giving members flexibility if they want to listen to that catchy theme song again (and again). The button should appear on screen only when needed and it should work with a single click. To find a name for the button, we brainstormed a few options including Jump Past Credits, Skip Credits, Jump Ahead, Skip Intro and simply Skip and then started to test the feature with a random set of members.”
Here he’s answering, “Why did you design it that way?” This is the design approach, including some rough principles to guide how it should work. Explains his design decisions, including the name, which they tested thoroughly.
“Our simple idea had huge engagement from members (with Skip Intro the best performing name) and lots of love on social media. Over the past five years, it’s been gratifying to see Skip Intro become a beloved feature adopted by many other streaming services, bringing a little moment of delight to audiences around the world.”
We already knew this was a success from the intro paragraph, but here’s some more results. Not only did they solve the problem, but it was so successful that other products copied it.