<ul><li>If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.</li><li>We count the ways you've been told how busy you are, and the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have."</li><li>It's almost always people whose busyness is purely self-imposed.</li><li>They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.</li></ul>

The Busy Trap

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, and in-demand every hour of the day.It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

The Collective Curse Of Busyness

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.

The Pursuit Of Idleness

The “crazy busy” existence so many of us complain about is almost entirely self-imposed.

productivity

Productivity

mindfulness

Mindfulness

timemanagement

Time Management

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The 'Busy' Trap

Deciding to take your side hustle full time or thinking about starting one is not an easy choice, especially if you’re stuck in a job and you feel you should stay simply because you’re lucky to have one right now.Emergencies fast-forward history — personal, political, and societal. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours during a crisis.

A Job Vs Your Own Thing

If you’re stuck in a job, should you stay simply because you’re lucky to have one or take a risk on your passion project? If you’re just entering the workforce, should you spend time competing for a role or focus on building a business of your own?There are many factors you need to weigh before making these decisions.

Time To Decide

If you have a business idea in mind but you aren’t sure that it’s addressing a real problem, you might end up spending your time and energy building the wrong thing. Great businesses are built on deep insights. Consider if you truly understand the unmet needs of the customers or community you are serving and if you have enough data to validate your idea.Ask yourself:<ul><li>Does the customer really see this as a problem?</li><li>Will it make their life better?</li><li>Would they be willing to pay for it?</li></ul>

The Passion Project Solving a Problem

Even after you validate your hypothesis, you need to test your minimum viable product (MVP). Simply put, an MVP is a functional prototype with just enough features to convey your idea in its simplest form. The goal is to build something that your customer can actually use so that they can give you critical feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

The Product Or Service Actually Working

In essence, you want to use this stage of product development to a) build a community interested in what you have to offer and b) figure out a business model that serves their needs based on their feedback. Doing this will empower you in two ways: First, it will help eliminate the gap between your product development and revenue generation. Through your MVP, you may have opportunities to make a decent revenue before officially launching. Second, you can use any revenue you do make to help you build the next version of your product or service.

Using The Early Stage Of Development

1,000 true fans, or unique customers reached organically, is an alternative path to success other than stardom. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for a direct connection with a thousand true fans. On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

The Starting Goal: 1000 Customers

Your goal doesn’t necessarily need to be to build the next Google or Facebook. And even if that is your goal, you still need to figure out how to get those first 1,000 people to pay for what you are building if you want to succeed. It may sound easy but getting people to pay for a product requires substantial grit, especially if you don’t have investors on board.

You Cannot Be Google In Step 1

Quitting your full-time job to start a company is like proposing marriage on the first date. … The most durable businesses are typically started by people who play it safe.

Risk-taking is often glamorized by touting isolated examples of moonshot successes, but the best entrepreneurs are those who are able to figure out the optimum risk-reward ratio that works for them.As an entrepreneur, you need to understand what you’re inherently good at and like to do and what you need help with. You don’t need to possess all the skills required to run a business, but you need to be able to find people with skills that complement your own to help you realize your dream.

Managing A Business

Deciding to take your side hustle full time or thinking about starting one is not an easy choice, especially if you’re stuck in a job and you feel you should stay simply because you’re lucky to have one right now. Utkarsh Amitabh was working a full time job and balancing his side hustle, Network Capital until recently. In June this year, he decided to take a risk on his passion project and quit his job. In this personal essay, Utkarsh shares how he went about making the decision and highlights the questions you need to weigh in on: 1) Is my passion project solving a problem? 2) Does my product actually work? 3) Have I reached at least 1,000 customers, or can I? 4) Do I really have the skills and resources required to manage a business right now?

career

Career

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

Should You Choose Your Passion Over a Paycheck?

<ul>
<li> Don't cap compensation. If someone does an amazing job, pay them an amazing amount. </li>
<li> Know sugarcoating is lying. Provide honest, specific feedback, even if it's hard to hear.</li>
<li> Find poor performers another role or get them out. It's unfair to keep them in roles in which they're unsuccessful.</li>
<li> Know their goals are just as important as yours. When you help someone with their goals first, they'll help you more.</li>
<li> Hire people who want to start their own businesses. If their personal goal is to leave your company and start their own business, help them get there. They'll stay with you longer.</li>
</ul>

The Rules of Leadership Generosity

<ul>
<li> Shine a light on the path forward. Communicate a clear vision that people can grasp and understand. </li>
<li> Delegate work and get out of their way. Give them work to do. Let them learn failure and success without handholding.</li>
<li> Give them your direct phone number. Be generous with your time. Be available. Instead of telling them, "My door is always open," tell them if they contact you, you'll come to them.</li>
</ul>

Leadership Generosity: The Personal Touch

<ul>
<li>Make sitting in on other team meetings normal. Let your team members sit in on other teams' meetings so they can learn more than is required to do their current job.</li>
<li> Do not allow people to get stagnant. Always give new nonrepetitive work at increasingly more complex levels.</li>
<li>Failure is not a bad word. Allow people to experiment without fear, in a way that feels safe doing so. Failure should be celebrated. Full stop. </li>
<li>Blame yourself first. Before blaming them, find out if you provided clear direction, clear expectations, sufficient resources, and did the system allow them to do their job?</li>
</ul>

Leadership Generosity: Moving Forward

Generous leadership is different from paying a high salary, though fair compensation is table stakes. Being generous means truly wanting what's in your team's best interests, so in return, you will get what you want and what your business needs: engaged associates who reciprocate by doing their best without ever being told to do so. Autonomous excellence.It's not only about giving more money. It's about giving more respect.

The Bottom Line

Being a generous leader is about more than just paying a suitable salary.

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Principles of Generous Leadership

Good technical design decisions are very dependent on context. 
Teams that regularly work together on common goals are able to communicate regularly and negotiate changes quickly. These teams exhibit a strong force of alignment, and can make technology and design decisions that harness that strong force. As we zoom out in a larger organisation, an increasingly weak force exists between teams and divisions that work independently and have less frequent collaboration. Recognising the differences in these strong and weak forces allows us to make better decisions.

The Forces Of Architecture

Technology governance and what is considered ‘good architecture’ is mostly considered with a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
<ul>
<li>Many organisations try to apply the same strict governance at all levels - limiting tech choices, and disempowering teams. </li>
<li>Others have allowed teams complete autonomy at all levels, meaning teams are left to make their own choices with no constraints at all. </li>
</ul>
Neither of those approaches are ideal.

One Size Fits All Approach

Within a domain we have multiple teams, each being responsible for some capabilities and underlying systems within the domain. 
Sometimes this is perfectly aligned, with each team being custodians of a neatly bounded set of systems. More often this is imperfect in reality, with custodianship of some systems being shared across teams - often for legacy reasons. For teams within a domain, there is a very strong force of alignment.

Within A Domain: Strong Forces

In the middle ground we have our vertical structure, with multiple domains. The social distance between the people in one domain and another is getting stretched. 
This makes negotiation and reaching alignment more strained and slower, and so necessarily this impacts our technology choices and approaches.

Within A Vertical: Weakened Forces

When we zoom out to all of the organisation - the force of alignment between the verticals is very weak indeed. It is quite hard to make changes atomically across the landscape - mostly because the prioritisation of work for each vertical is deliberately independent. 
Coordinating work at this level is necessarily much slower and limiting. This means our design decisions and approaches need to adapt accordingly.

Whole Of Organization: Weak Forces

<ul>
<li>Within a single domain, there should be a small set of technology choices agreed upon.</li>
<li>Often this follows Default Trial Retire for each class of technology required.</li>
<li>Informal governance through technology leadership is usually highly effective.</li>
</ul>

Technology Choices: Domain (strong force)

<ul><li>At a vertical level, there would be a slightly larger set of agreed technology choices, to cater for the differing needs of the multiple domains.</li><li>It is beneficial for the vertical to be able to move people closer to high priority work, so keeping aligned on technology is important here.</li><li>More formal sharing of solution options and proposals keeps choices aligned effectively.</li></ul>

Technology Choices:  Vertical(Weakened Force)

<ul><li>The weakest force for aligning and governing technology choices is at the Whole of Org level.</li><li>Solution options and proposals encourage dialog and improve alignment.</li></ul>

Technology Choices: Whole of Org (weak force)

<ul><li>Within a single domain, even across 3-5 teams, we should have high bandwidth communication and a short distance to empowered leadership.</li><li>This means that when a change needs to be made to shared code or infrastructure, we can quickly inform and prepare for the changes.</li><li>The coupling introduced by shared code and infrastructure has less impact, and the benefits often outweigh the costs.</li></ul>

Shared Code And Infrastructure: Domain (strong force)

Sharing code, artefacts, and infrastructure can often be managed at a vertical level - but the drag introduced should be carefully monitored.

Shared Code And Infrastructure: Vertical (weakened force)

Shared code at a whole of organisation level is limited to highly stable, highly useful things. Mostly these things are limited to libraries which can be distributed and versioned, and changed carefully.Shared infrastructure is similar - at an org-wide level, shared infrastructure must have very high value, and be well-encapsulated (“as a service”, self-service). It should very rarely need a core change in response to a need from a single team.

Shared Code And Infrastructure: Whole of Org (weak force)

<ul><li>Within a single domain - with high degrees of alignment in terms of practices and technology - it can be quite reasonable for teams to contribute code across team boundaries, with a type of collective code ownership extending to the whole domain.</li><li>Custodianship of each system should still be clearly understood, usually best kept within one team.</li><li>At a vertical level, it is common for code contribution to happen across systems, e.g. pull requests in source control - with only small amounts of delay and re-work required.</li></ul>

Code Contribution models: Domain Level

<ul><li>At the whole of org level, it is often quite difficult (and sometimes harmful) to effectively manage contributions that cross verticals.</li><li>This is particularly true where systems are complex in nature, highly critical or sensitive in terms of accuracy, performance, privacy and compliance.</li><li>When completely new system features are being established, it can work well to collaborate across verticals even doing pair-programming together.</li></ul>

Code Contribution models: Whole of Org (weak force)

<ul>
<li>Domain (strong force): Systems that are owned within a single domain are relatively easy to change in a closely coordinated way. </li>
<li>Vertical (weakened force): Changes that must be coordinated across multiple domains within a vertical should be rare, but can be managed when absolutely necessary. </li>
<li>Whole of org (weak force): The impact of highly-coupled integration (e.g. ETLs, database integration) is very high, and should be absolutely avoided.</li>
</ul>

Integration Patterns: Connecting Systems Together

Understanding the strong and weak forces of team architecture

teamwork

Teamwork

The strong and weak forces of architecture

By guaranteeing everyone has at the very least, the minimum amount of voice with which to speak in the marketplace for basic goods and services, we can make sure that the basics needs of life — those specific and universally important to all goods and services like food and shelter — are being created and distributed more efficiently.&nbsp;

Unconditional basic income (UBI)

“This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I’m telling you, it’s not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does... That’s actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn’t work, often doesn’t work, and often does harm.”

So what exactly would you do, if you were guaranteed $1,000 per month for the rest of your life? And yes, that’s around what the amount would most likely be here in the United States, at least at…

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

Culture shock is a common phenomenon and, though it may take months to develop, it often affects travelers and people living far from home in unexpected ways. Culture shock is more than simply being unfamiliar with social norms or experiencing new foods and it tends to impact travelers even after they’ve become familiar with and comfortable in new cultures.

Culture Shock

<ul><li>The Honeymoon Stage: travelers become infatuated with the language, people, and food in their new surroundings; the trip or move seems like the greatest decision ever made.</li><li>The Frustration Stage: the fatigue of not understanding gestures, signs, and the language sets in, and miscommunications may be happening frequently.&nbsp;</li><li>The Adjustment Stage: travelers begin to feel more familiar and comfortable with the cultures, people, food, and languages of new environments.</li><li>The Acceptance Stage: the realization that complete understanding isn’t necessary to function and thrive in the new surroundings.</li></ul>

The 4 Stages of Culture Shock

Living abroad can be an exhilarating experience that encourages new world views, increases cultural curiosity and supports a willingness to explore unfamiliar terrains. However, it may also invite a…

Modern polymaths:<ul><li>Follow the 5-hour rule and put at least 5 hours per week into learning.</li><li>Study widely in many different fields.</li><li>Understand deeper principles and mental models that connect those fields.</li><li>Apply those mental models to their core specialty.</li></ul>

Modern polymaths:

Learning across multiple fields provides several unappreciated and significant advantages:<ul><li>Creating an atypical combination of two or more skills that you’re merely competent can lead to a world-class skill set.</li><li>Gives you an information advantage(and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on just one field.</li><li>It future-proofs Your career.</li><li>It helps you stand out and compete in the global economy.</li></ul>

Jack of all trades. Master of none

Starting from his early teenage years, Musk would read through two books per day in various disciplines according to his brother. If you read one book a month, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you.Musk is also good at a very specific type of learning that most others aren’t even aware of — learning transfer. This means taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. It can be taking a kernel of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to the “real world.” It can also be taking what we learn in one industry and applying it to another.

Musk’s “learning transfer” superpower

Now, we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class modern polymath:<ul><li>He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader.</li><li>He read widely across different disciplines.</li><li>He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental principles and reconstructing them in new ways.</li></ul>

It’s not magic. It’s just the right learning process

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.&nbsp;

How is it even possible that Elon Musk could build four multibillion companies by his mid-40s — in four separate fields (software, energy, transportation, and aerospace)? To explain Musk’s success…

education

Learning & Education

How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better Than Everyone Else

<ul><li>Busyness as signaling. Complaints about busyness are like complaints about paying too much in taxes—something that allows you to subtly communicate your status.</li><li>Busyness as dodging commitment. Claiming busyness is a socially acceptable way to decline social obligations. </li><li>Busyness as self-deception. When you work on things, your goal is always to move toward a state of having less stuff left to do. Since less outstanding tasks is better within the context of your goal, you may incorrectly extend that to assume that having no outstanding tasks in life is ideal.</li></ul>

Reasons for Our Collective Busyness

Busyness exists on a spectrum. We may abhor idleness, but being too busy stresses us out. There’s a sweet spot in the middle that suits us, and fine-tuning that amount is tricky.There seem to be two different settings in the busyness-happiness calculation: first, what your ideal set point is, and second, whether your temporary situation is above or below this optimal set point.

Finding the Busyness Sweet Spot

Finding a good project to keep yourself busy can be tricky. Just wanting to fill time doesn’t seem to be a good enough excuse.Goal-setting and planning are vital because they’re the tools we use to find motivating activities. Making concrete improvements to your life may be secondary to the well-being boost of having a reason to be optimally busy.

Good Reasons to Be Busy

Strictly speaking, we all have the same amount of time each day. Nobody has more or less. <ul><li>What feels like a lack of time is, more accurately, a conflict between priorities.</li><li>One problematic form of busyness occurs when your activity has low intrinsic enjoyment. </li><li>Expectations are another issue. If you intend to work full-time, stay in shape, spend quality time with your kids, and keep up with friends and hobbies, you may find there’s not enough time to do all of those to your desired standard.</li></ul>

Do You Really Have Too Little Time?

<ul><li>Expecting too much from yourself (or too little) is a recipe for stress. Sometimes the key is to take a step back and ask yourself what’s actually realistic.</li><li>If you spend a lot of time doing things that don’t satisfy you psychologically, you can feel like you have too little time. Perhaps the problem isn’t a lack of time but a lack of activities that actually meet your needs.</li><li>Temporarily feeling too busy or bored is often a problem of balancing new opportunities and existing commitments. Better managing this flow can solve some of the busyness problem.</li></ul>

Optimizing Busyness

Everyone has a “busyness setpoint” where they seem to be most happy, and most of us struggle to hit that target.

The 'Busy' Trap

Should You Choose Your Passion Over a Paycheck?

The Principles of Generous Leadership

The strong and weak forces of architecture

Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

Justin Fernandez