To succeed in an above average way in today's world requires an ability to hack through complexity, policies, rules, and gatekeepers. This is grueling work and probably fuels some of what people describe as burnout.
Utopia of rules as david graeber said.
I'm not only talking about running a business, I'm talking about just day to day stuff. We've added a tech stack to an already complex layer of actions in the world and the failure potential has just increased.
Graeber called this the age of “total bureaucratization" and said humans are always fighting this:
"Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating."
Almost every aspect of my life has required some hacking just to stay afloat. This includes payment processing, billing mistakes, multiple frauds I had to fight to get refunded, a multi-layer helpless US healthcare beauracracy, software crashes, hidden fees, locked accounts, etc
The only people that can avoid this are in the cash economy and arguably have more peaceful lives.
This is why you can never be free even as a digital nomad, solopreneur, etc.. You are reliant on systems which will attempt to undermine your creative energy all the time.
The full-time job stack used to be a nice way to avoid this, especially with a pension. Now an average FT worker has to deal with healthcare nonsense, planning retirement, navigating healthcare, using apps to order stuff, not to mention the normal human stuff we do.
But we are trained into this mode and don't expect life to be any other way.
"Almost every endeavor that used to be considered an art now requires formal professional training and a certificate of completion" - Graeber
this is me in despair trying to fix a failed attempt to get our PCR test at home
1/ Meant to get around to a review of @AliAbdaal's course which I took in November. I know it was the first cohort so I'm sure the next iteration will be even better.
2/ Funny enough I found out about Ali an hour before him and his brother interviewed me for Not Overthinking. I had been chatting with @taimurabdaal for a while but when I googled and was like "wtf almost 1M YouTube subscribers?" who is this dude.
3/ Anyway on to the course. I signed up because my StrategyU YouTube channel blew up in 2020 going from 500 subscribers to ~9,000 but the time of this tweet. I made about $2,000 but honestly had no idea what I was doing.
1/ A thread of some of my the ideas that I keep coming back to. Will likely add to this over time. Trying to make sense of some of the things I keep coming back to.
2/ Beware of the default path
Blindly following the default paths in today's world in both life and work will lead many people down a road of guaranteed misery. You need to be able to do a bit of tinkering and build the courage to blow it up if needed
3/ Accidental meaning
A period from 1945-2000s coincided with economic growth in many places around the world that aligned with a certain way of living life that happened to work for many. Now people mistake full-time jobs for the reason why that happened and end up lost
I'm going to give you a short intro of why I care then I'll just throw out 1-opinion / 1-like style takes. I imagine this will get a little unhinged towards the end.
2/ A little background. I studied org change, complexity, systems dynamics, supply chain, leadership & other fun stuff in 10+ years working in consulting and a MS/MBA ops program at MIT.
I left my job to my job to make sense of an increasingly confusing world of work.
3/ After I went back into consulting after MBA I started to noticed that almost no one cared how organizations worked. The people that studied organizations had fancy frameworks but they were rarely predictive. They mostly made people feel good.
2/ In about 1971 developing a meaningful philosophy of life fell dramatically from 1st to 5th/6th, replaced by "being very well off financially"
Likely many reasons for this and I won't go into them
3/ What is notable is that while we talk a lot about how money is too important to people, the other top priorities are pretty widespread noble values for most:
1. being good at what you do 2. having a family 3. helping others
1/ 🧵This is the story of how I became an accidental course creator and it starts in 2015 with a course named "Crushing Your Resume"
This is the story of many different attempts at online courses and all the fun along the way 👇
2/ By 2015, I had helped hundreds of people with resumes and was very good at it. Yet after helping a friend during an intense 3 hour session, I realized I was just repeating myself over and over. I wanted to retire from resume help but still wanted to be able to help people.
3/ I decided I would create an online course. I was pretty excited by the opportunity to put this on Udemy and see what would happen. I initially put it up as a paid course (and gave free coupons to anyone that asked).