Many people turn to procrastination or ignoring the task—but that only postpones the inevitable. You can try to talk your way out of the assignment, and maybe your manager will support you, but at some point the work needs to get done. If you want to be successful, then it serves you better to rise to the occasion no matter what. That means learning how to push through challenges and deliver valuable results.
Everyone travels in different ways, and I think every experienced wanderer balances the idea of home and travel on his or her own terms. But one amazing thing that travel teaches you is that coming home — or finding home — after a long trip doesn’t spell the end to your wandering; it just deepens your relationship to the adventures yet to come.
Reports from the International Labor Organization and the JPMorgan Chase Institute describe the plight of different kinds of gig-economy workers who struggle to make even their countries’ minimum wage toiling for giant tech platforms.
I’m a software engineer in the bay area and have been thinking about moving somewhere cheaper (in USA or aboard) where I can live cheaply and focus on my own intellectual pursuits. I’d love to be in a place where the living costs are low and where there exists a thriving intellectual community (I’ve noticed cities near top academic institutions tend to create that sort of atmosphere but not necessarily).
After feeling belittled, I journey into the heart of bragging and discover 17 modes of showing off.
When most of us picture our commute into work, we see the back of another car, or perhaps recall the sordid scents of the subway. But when Craig Taylor, Data Visualization Design Manager at Ito World, pictures a commute, he sees something vastly different. He sees ocean corals in all colors of the rainbow.
In studies of children and historical figures, IQ falls short as a measure of success.
An interesting question to pose, if I have now accepted that distributed teams are a possibility and there is a movement towards them in the future, the question becomes: What is different when you are not in an office together and what tools do you need to stay on track? Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto has the answer in an episode of The Boost VC podcast I interviewed her in: Don’t underestimate how important culture is.
I want to talk about being a “known person”, i.e. a person who publicly shares their knowledge, experience, and personality in articles, videos, social, etc. Big audience, small audience, it doesn’t matter. If you’re sharing, someone knows something about you and you are a known person.
Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur.
I never ever work in co-working spaces or cafés during my 2 years of nomading. I rent nice Airbnbs for a reason, to have a good place, a comfy sofa or desk to relax and work at undistracted. When I’m hungry or want some coffee I will relax in a café for a while and think of anything but work. Thank you.
Working on your own can have its rewards, such as being able to set your own hours. But being self-employed also brings with it the headache of handling taxes — something a traditional employer normally does.
So when you ask yourself whether to stick with a task or goal, or to let it go, weigh the potential to continue learning and developing incrementally against the costs, dangers, and myopia which can come with stubborn perseverance.
Humans can sleep on very different schedules, with little difference in wakeful competence. International sleep researchers have trialled a number of different sleep schedules: sleep for 20 minutes every hour; one hour sleep every three hours; ten hours sleep every 28 hours. Participants survive easily on all these schedules despite their impracticality in our 24-hour world.
The office doesn’t need to be your bar or your gym or your go-to dinner spot, and not because cocktails or office gyms or catered dinners are inherently bad. It’s that work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.
What I’ve slowly but increasingly come to believe is that there is much more opportunity outside career ladders than within them, and by including those opportunities you’ll make and feel more progress. Better yet, you’ll find far more opportunities to partner with your peers, no longer competing for limited promotion slots.
For me it was a series of things that lead to my epiphany that a DN life fit me. I struggled after the 2008 crash…I realized being a DN meant I could stop struggling financially and finally start living again. It wasn’t always easy but I know circumstances wouldn’t have been better if I hadn’t become a DN.
Perhaps the aim of admiring biographies and articles is to prompt their readers to emulate the work ethic of such leaders. But they will not reach the top of an S&P 500 firm if they do.
All the resources on NODESK are presented freely. If you appreciate what I do here and you’d like to support the project, simply share NODESK with your friends and on social media. You can also support me by buying a cup of coffee. Thanks for supporting!
We all want other people to “get us” and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a “real me”. But how do we actually know who we are?
