Tag: Work

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Emotional Work

Day 344 and That Was Easy

I’ve been off my feet all week because of my ankle injury. That means no weightlifting, no long walks, no breaks to raise my heart rate once an hour. I’ve been in a state of rest and recovery. And my mind has never felt sharper.

My quantified self data suggests I’m more recovered than I’ve been the entire year. My resting heart rate is a full 40% better than average. I’ve added in a few new routines to facilitate healing including infrared sauna, applied hot and cold therapy, percussive massage and electro-stimulation. But I really think it’s all the extra rest I’ve been getting.

I can feel it in my desire to do frivolous things just for the joy of it. But I can also feel it in my skyrocketing motivation. Some long term projects are coming into fruition in ways that not only meet my goals but wildly exceed them. Like all of the power I’ve ever imagined having is completely reasonable. I don’t even feel like I need to suffer for it. It’s there because I have joyfully brought myself it it.

It’s quite possible the lesson I should take away from this is that constantly pushing myself for improvements through hard work and pain is completely the wrong approach to getting what I want. That real power comes from letting yourself live within the rhythms of your own life. Letting what you want flow through you means sometimes it will be easy. And that’s ok too. Let yourself succeed with the power of your own unique approach. It’s the most differentiated thing. And difference is always an edge.

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Emotional Work

Day 338 and Effort

The real world rewards talent. It largely doesn’t give a fuck about effort. Sure, we like it when someone with talent works hard at honing their gifts. But if you just work hard it is largely ignored. The end result still matters most. Talent more easily gets the desired outcome.

This is a sort of hard truth that isn’t particularly hard to grasp. Every bit of evidence you have from a young age indicates that we reward outcome. Even if you are in a school system without grades, like I was, we still know what a quality outcome looks like. But we spend all this time and effort lying to kids with this separate system of effort that suggests that working hard and putting in a lot of effort are the thing “good” kids do.

I’m not wild about praising effort and hard work on its own. Sure it matters, hard work honing your skills, even when you suck, has its own value. But not when it comes to what the world expects of us. We inculcate habits and emotional expectations that are basically cargo cults. No wonder kids, after being praised and rewarded for effort for a decade or two, are confused when they get their first job. I’d be fucking pissed if I were that kid. I’d slowly shaped my behavior around one set of expectations only to find it had no bearing on reality.

Why do we spend so much time cultivating the myth that effort matters as much as talent? Why do we praise effort so consistently among our youth when we know that at a job being told “well you work hard but…” is probably a prelude to being let go. You have to work hard and achieve the desire outcome. It’s enough to drive people nuts. It is literally crazy making to contradict reality with all these lessons on effort. We are gaslighting our youth.

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 330 and Vitamin Not Pill

I was reading a fellow investor’s thesis page and noticed one lens they use for investing is whether a product is a “vitamin or a pill” with the insinuation that pills are inherently better investments than vitamins, as one is a nice to have for a business and the other is a must have. Now I can’t speak to this as an investment thesis, though I largely agree, but I do disagree on a wellness basis.

Preventative medicine is just as necessary as interventional medicine. In some cases more so, as getting ahead of a disease’s inflection point should be the humane way we handle our medical needs. We are just often too focused on short term impacts to see the value of solutions that build over time. Think of it as the quarterly reports of healthcare. Why build for the future when the market judges by each 10K?

The nature of panic may make us inclined to spend heavily on something that has become acute. But that does not make it inherently more effective or worthwhile. It’s just the immediately necessary. It just means we need higher minimum effective doses to see a result.

What we often ignore is compounding effects of wellness interventions are far superior to the mitigation of a pharmaceutical over time. Most of us would prefer to not require the costly (both biologically and financially) medicines that keep us together. This is not to say that I am not deeply grateful for all the drugs I take. But rather that I have seen incredible value in what we deem “lifestyle interventions” and other “nice to have” vitamin style supplements and protocols.

And while it takes much longer to see their effects, the compounding positive effects often wildly outperform anything that might be dubbed a pill. The trouble probably boils down to switching costs and time to pay off. Which is why an investor would prefer a pill to a vitamin. But just because something has a longer lifecycle doesn’t make it inherently less sticky. Or less effective. Or crucially any less profitable. The only way we ever see the deeply positive effects of habitual practice and dedication is to do the work. That work is boring, repetitive and low payoff. Until, most times years in the making, you see how putting your future self over your present self is what is giving you the future you always dreamed would be yours.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 328 and Cultural Pause

I love America’s big holidays. Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Year’s are my favorite. But not because I am particularly attached to any festivities. Though I do love everything about Christmas. I love holidays because I feel like it’s finally ok to pause.

Having an moment where it feels culturally acceptable to be at rest is deeply comforting to me. I feel it slightly on the weekends. It’s like the ambient environment around me lifts the expectation of being “on” and everything I do is a bonus. I finally let myself relax. And more crucially I don’t beat myself up for feeling relaxed.

It’s a fairly profound feeling for me. Normally I have something in my gut that says I must be productive if other people are working. It’s hard for me to shake honestly. I struggled with vacations and I initially hated sick leave (even though I needed it badly) because I felt I should be accomplishing things along with everyone else.

I’m working on it and it is getting better as I do more emotional work on myself. But I still relish the feeling of rest that comes with a holiday.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 327 and Suffering Gives You Choices

I perceive suffering as a positive and even necessary thing. Discomfort is part of any growth process. Learning is often painful. Work is suffering. The act of enduring opens our lives. I believe suffering creates choice. Thanks Calvinism?

I’m not suggesting my belief that suffering is choice is a good belief. It’s quite likely a self limiting belief for me. I am a workaholic after all. I’m just noting that I believe in the benefits of suffering. I will punish myself even if I don’t always deserve it.

But if I continue in a black and white view of suffering I’m not living my live in freedom. Ironically I lack choice. I need to ask myself Can I get what I want in life if I do not suffer for it? I feel like I see a river in my life that I call choice. One bank is the border of suffering county and the other is easy land. I’d like to feel free to ferry across the river when it suits my needs. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a hard border. Maybe I can have a country in my mind of expansion and possibilities that sees the benefit of the occasionally painful process but also enjoys an aside life because of it.

What I am saying is it is ok to pull it back. Do less. I mindfuck myself into needing to suffer because I believe it will bring progress. But what if progress is possible when things are easy and joyful?. I need to see that choice is freedom. The freedom to choose what makes sense at the time.

Every time I feel like I have no choice I need to stop. Breathe. Say I’m trapped. And I can shift it. I can have choice without suffering. I can have choice without sacrifice. And you can too.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 326 and The Long Now

A culture lacking optimism is a culture without a future. Even before the pandemic, American youth had plenty of reasons to temper their optimism. Inequality, corporate dominance, rising debt particularly for school, unaffordable housing, lack of social support for family, the changing climate and the frequency of natural disasters all tend to weigh on you.

I’m a optimistic person so I always presumed I’d find a way around things. And I largely did. I got an education. I started my own company. I sold it. I found I had developed a valuable skill set. I met a man through one of my best friends and we got married. All was well in my American dream for many years.

But cracks had always been there. Little details that made me question common cultural, social and political assumptions. I discovered the limits of modern medicine with a chronic disease. I saw the disaster that financialization could wreck on families with a bankruptcy. I wasn’t naive about our systems and their inequalities.

But the knowledge that the future could be worse than today wears on you. Once you start living in a liminal state it gets worse. The pandemic made it harder for me to believe in the future because the present became a holding pattern. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory calls this The Long Now.

The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back. We put off doing things that would make our future better because it’s rational to do so. What if things get worse?

I’m tired of living in the long now. I’m investing in myself. I have been investing in my body and my health. And I’m ready to invest in a home. Not because I particularly want to own property but because I want to stop the long now and believe that my future is something I can build.

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Preparedness

Day 324 and Seneca

I was once asked by someone how I can act so quickly on major life decisions when they needed to mull a change over for months. I found the question confusing as I don’t think of myself as being particularly fast or even impulsive.

Well, that’s a lie, I’m impulsive about lots of shit but never anything of consequences. When it’s a major life decision I gather information for years so if the opportunity presents itself I’m prepared to act immediately. I take the bias towards action seriously.

But I only make a move when I believe I’ve crossed a threshold of information where the benefits of action clearly outweigh the benefits of inaction. I’ll make a move when I think I’ve got a better chance of winning than losing. Or when it’s clear that if I don’t act at all I’ll have a losing hand. But I generally only needs the odds to be tilted to a plurality of probability. Especially if it’s an action I can undo later. It’s not always easy to know if you can win. Sometimes the best you can do is recognize that inaction is weakening your position.

Part of my comfort in my process for taking action is I am a researcher by nature. If I’m interested in a topic I’ll begin with exposure right away. I’ll do the light skimming research the internet has enabled through articles and videos. I’ll dive deeper and purchase books. I’ll find experts in the field and begin following them. If I have questions I’ve got a habit of emailing the source. And then I’ll start doing what I can to implement my research with small scale experiments.

Chances are if you see me making a major move it’s because I’ve been considering the possibility of action for years. I like to be prepared to act immediately if an opportunity presents itself. If a situation presents itself I want to be ready. That way I’m positioned for luck. Seneca had it right. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. But you can only have luck if you are willing to do the work of preparing and be ready to take action if opportunities present themselves.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 323 and Fantasyland

I’m very open about being a prepper. I think it is a moral imperative to be resilient if you have the means to do so. When disaster strikes, which it inevitably does, being able to support yourself and your neighbors frees up first responders to care for the genuinely needy.

Because of this belief I’ve been investigating homesteading seriously for the past two years now. I’ve got concerns about the typical issues someone with exposure to finance has; worries about inflation, the social impact of labor being a poor store of value with currency debasement, & widening inequality. I am also deeply concerned about the rise in populism and the predatory graft of the far right. Add in supply chain worries and the effect of the pandemic on living standards and you can see how I’d prefer to have more control over my own basic needs.

But my plans to go off grid has always had a bit of a fantasyland element to them. While I would love to move to northern Montana and invest in a large property I didn’t expect I’d be able to do that immediately. I needed to get to know the towns, watch an illiquid market over months if not years, and also remain proximate to civilization as I still plan to maintain a career in startups and finance.

But yesterday my husband and I came across a property outside of Boulder Colorado that met many of our criteria for more prepared living. An unobtrusive property on an acre just outside of town that I jokingly called greyman as you’d never guess it was built out for resilience. It has 100% solar with insulation & a wood burning stove for backup, there is a working well that irrigates the garden & orchard, its got a hothouse & a chicken coop, it’s on a reservoir, it has a workshop & an artist studio, and well I could go on. Now I’ve got no idea if it will pass muster on an inspection but as you can see I’m already dreaming of the possibility. It’s not something I’ve absolutely got to do so we can very much walk away from a deal but I’m interested. Enough that I’m looking at mortgages and bringing in a contractor to take a look.

Now I don’t need all of those things right now. The reality of maintaining a vegetable garden and making it through a canning and preservation season isn’t lost on me. Actually building the muscles for true resilience is something that happens over years. But that’s also why I want to start now before it becomes a must have. Learning how to feed yourself when you’ve got no choice isn’t a situation I’d recommend.

We underestimate the work that goes into maintain a healthy, comfortable, warm and well fed life. Mostly because capitalism breeds specialized labor. Which is good in my book. We’ve achieved so much with it. But any complex system is less resilient. So you’ve got to acknowledge that the tail risks are there and real. So if I’ve got a chance to begin on 70% of my ideal preparation while still keeping within my budget and also staying within civilization for the time being then I’m going to consider it. It’s time to move out of fantasyland.

Categories
Chronicle Internet Culture Startups

Day 321 and Distracted

I was so excited for today. For the first day in weeks I didn’t have a single appointment on my calendar. I had finally run the gauntlet of bullshit obligations that has been chopping up my focus and my days.

I went to bed last night sure that’s I’d finally send out all the emails to folks I wanted as limited partners in my fund, follow up with a bunch of founders, and organize all the various materials and research just waiting to be published. I was going to make progress! I was going to pull the future forward with my own willpower.

But what did I do instead today? I sat in on DAO governance calls in Discord. I accepted an invite to a new working group for a stateless crypto project that is being rebooted for its second round. I listened to token and ecosystem rooms on Twitter for projects I’m invested in. I watched some bitcoin maxis fight against some side chain projects. And I read a bunch of newsletters and financial papers. Which all sounds productive but is basically me just fucking off.

The future arrives whether I pull it in on my force or will or not. Distraction probably has no meaning. But I did finally find a house in Colorado that I could see myself buying. So the only appointment on the calendar tomorrow is visiting the property. So perhaps that’s as much progress as was necessary.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 319 and Chaotic Labor Markets

If you follow me on other social media you may have noticed that I recently launched and am fundraising seed stage venture capital rolling fund we’ve named chaotic.capital. Since this is a blog for my friends if you are an accredited investor I’d love for you wander on over to take a looksy. Or feel free to send me a DM on Twitter or slide into my email inbox which is just julie AT chaotic dot capital.

The TL:DR on the fund is that the world is getting exponentially more complex and that is making living life chaotic as fuck. Humans don’t like chaotic. We like predictable. So we invest in seed stage technology startups that help individuals, families, organizations, and even whole communities, adapt to living with chaos.

I’ll be talking about all the areas we invest I’m sure but today’s post is about about how we might adapt to a more chaotic labor market and what kinds of companies we’d like to see in the space to capitalize on the chaos of the future of work.

The pandemic has accelerated a lot in the labor markets. Hiring in developed economies has been getting harder. The great resignation has a large chunk of the skilled workforce in movement. But student debt is making it less appealing to pursue traditional credentials like a four year college degree. Skilled workers have at once never been more competitive in the labor market but it’s also never been more expensive to pursue those skills. Where there is tension there is opportunity.

So how do we get more people skilled and let those with existing skills deploy their labor more effectively? I think that web3, or if you prefer the decentralized web, presents a unique opportunity to decouple skills & compensation from identity and corporations. Flexibility drives innovation. Web3 let’s us step clear of concepts like one full time job per person.

Workers are seeking replacements for the centralized stores of skills & proof, socializing, and networking we’ve used in the past. The hodge podge of self reported credentials and certificates we put up on LinkedIn or a personal website is a mess and only allows us one centralized identity. That sucks for privacy and also for people with a diverse set of skills. Recruiters see what we present but that’s never the whole picture.

Some would argue that political polarization will require we either prove identity and in-group or lead us to pseudonyms (identity on/off switch) that let us be judged by work product and proof of skills rather than in group approvals and social validation. Regardless, regulatory capture and special interest groups are now being viewed negatively as younger workers see them as expensive obstacles to career progression. If Kim Kardashian can take the bar without ever going to law school why should you go to law school?

One reason that chaotic is particularly interested in is stores of identity, proof of skills and proof of work capacity is that Web3 and decentralization will pick up the slack in labor markets for younger people.

We won’t want to polish our entire lives in order to get one job with a single employer when we know corporations shows us little loyalty. We’d rather find ways to optimize for our preferred compensation package. That could be flexible contracts and hours, remote first work arrangements, healthcare subsidies, or maximum pay; whatever we chose there should be a recruiter that can find us a job and a workplace that will leverage our skills. If you want inspiration on how this might work I’ve got a list of crypto science fiction to read.

In order to avoid falling into low level service jobs we will need to pick up proof of work and proof of skill jobs. Automation is less of a threat than low level service jobs and dead end work for most young people. Finding ways to get get paid for learning is going to make the jump from play to earn video games to play to learn universities one day.

Portable and “fractional” identities will be required in a future where one person with one job isn’t the norm. So how do we build different identities that keep us safe from context collapse while still giving flexibility and portability on our achievements and documented skills?

All of the above is food for thought. If these problems interest you hit me up. I’ve got a request for startups below. If you want to talk about any of them find me on @AlmostMedia on Twitter.

Request for Startups

  • Skills repository Github for provable disciplines beyond coding
  • Web3 LinkedIn where we can turn on and off elements of our credentials
  • An identity wallet
  • A social capital wallet
  • Influence & social capital graphing & portability
  • Fractional identity platforms