Evergreen Links
Work
Vankatesh Rao, The Gervais Principle
The beginning of a set of essays that fundamentally shaped how I think about work and business, told through the lens of The Office. It is the perfect entry point to learn about the McLeod Hierarchy: Businesses are made up of laborers (the losers)(Stanley, Pam), middle management (the clueless)(Dwight, Andy) and owners (the sociopaths)(David Wallace). Understanding the motivations and interactions between these types helps you understand why organizations function the way they function.
Amy Hoy, Why blacksmiths are better at startups than you
Get the basics right. Show up every day. Deliver results. It's a masterclass in working empathy into your creative process, summed up with this quote:
Your driving questions will evolve from Does this make me sound smart? to Does this motivate a customer to buy? — from Gee, what do I feel like doing today? to How will I make my customers’ lives better today?
You’ll make things with your hands and your brain that will help people, people you get to meet, to talk to, to learn from. And you will feel rewarded.
Mike Monterio, Fuck you, pay me
Mike gives a presentation with his lawyer. Every aspiring freelancer should watch this, so they can learn how to protect themselves, and respect themselves.
Andreas Klinger, Joining hypergrowth startups
In 2022 I joined a company as hire #110 and in less than a year we hired employee #300. This guide explains what working at a startup at this stage is like: Instead of thinking in roles and teams, you think in problems and solutions. Working is putting out hundreds of tiny fires. Roles are transient. There isn't a lot of order, but there is opportunity to build it.
Patrick MacKenzie, Don't end the week with nothing
Prefer to work on things you can show. Prefer to work where people can see you. Prefer to work on things you can own. Spend some time building either human, social, or reputation capital.
William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass, Management Time: Who's got the monkey?
Ultimately, the employers have more control over the manager's time than vice versa, because they can pass on more monkeys, which will become his responsibility. Make sure your subordinates have the initiative to take on problems themselves, instead of passing everything up the chain. Also make sure they have everything they need to take action.
Creativity
Merlin Mann, Making the clackity noise
Take some time to tell your stories. You never know what's going to come out until you sit down and start typing. An example of prolific creation.
Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes. Your real life. Not just the canned version of life on which we slap adhesive labels like happy or sad, poor or rich, employed or unemployed, “eating lunch” or “hatin’ life”, “it’s complicated” or “serial entrepreneur,” “meh” or “whatever.”
Tear off your fucking labels.
Darius Kazemi, How i won the lottery (tiny subversions) (video)
Many parts of the great internet game are playing 'hitmaker' games. Take a lot of at bats, and hope you hit some home runs.
Productivity
Nate Soares, Half-Assing it with Everything You Got
It's irrational to give 100% effort to 100% of the things you do. Figure out how much you need to do to be effective, and no more. Give it your all, divided strategically.
Your preferences are not "move rightward on the quality line." Your preferences are to hit the quality target with minimum effort.
If you're trying to pass the class, then pass it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.
If you're trying to ace the class, then ace it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.
Tech
Sandy Metz, The wrong abstraction
I see this mistake in programming often: removing duplicate code just because it's a duplicate. People forget that the goal of code is not to remove duplication, but to remove complexity.
Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.
Adam Wathan, CSS utility classes and separation of concerns
A well-written treatise on solving a complex software engineering and code organization problem. TailwindCSS is a devisive tool. Even if you don't like using it, it's worth reading Adam's reasoning as to why it's built the way that it is.
4 kinds of documentation AKA The Documentation System
Tutorials, how-to guides, explanations, reference. Get started, solve a problem, know more about a system, grasp a concept. This will change the way you think about creating internal and external documentation.
Psychology
Stephanie, Tech brain
Most of software development is fighting against complexity. However, when engineers over-simply real-world models due to their allergy to complexity, that's "Tech Brain." It can lead to false binaries, overconfidence, and inaccessible or possibly dangerous software.
an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity.
Mykola Bilokonsky, Is this you? No really, is this you?
If you think there is any possibility have autism but were never diagnosed, give this article a read.
Jason Lengstorf, Stop Glossing Over the Good Stuff: How to Be More Positive
Our caveman brains are hard-wired to focus on the negative. Happiness is a choice, a learnable skill, and takes work. Here Jason spells out tactics we can use to appreciate the good things in life.
Adam Mastroianni, So you wanna de-bog yourself
It's tough to get out of "feeling stuck" becuase it's hard to define what "stuck" means. Adam names, categorizes, and break down various bogs, and how to take action against them.
Money
r/personalfinance prime directive
Up until a certain point, where to put your excess cash is a solved problem.
Nathan Barry, Ladders of Wealth Creation
The directive above attempts to answer the question "what should I do with my money?", this piece answers "what should I do with my work?" Examines entrepreneurship as a spectrum, not a binary.
Other
John Jeremiah Sullivan, You blow my mind hey Mickey!
John Jeremiah Sullivan is my favorite essayist, and this is his best piece. A pair of dads skulk around Disneyland trying to smoke weed. The seedy background activities during a wholesome family trip serve as a metaphor for Disney's sketchy business practices.
Fadeke Adegbuyi, LinkedIn's Alternate Universe
The story of how taking our rolodex online turned into a sea of recruiter spam and workfluencer content. Also includes several pieces of inspiration
@made_in_cosmos, "Adulting isn't hard"
We shouldn't treat real life like public school. No punishment for experiments. No reward for getting things exactly right. No grades. There is no success criteria. No teachers. No one is going to fix your problem. No one is going to tell you exactly what to do. Learn whatever you want.
adulting isn’t hard, you’re just trying to apply educational system’s criteria of success that any task must be completed on the first try in a way that meets some arbitrary perfection standards to the real world that’s kinda the opposite of school