The Unprofessional Boy #9

Series, sets, and subversions.

The Beatles had their eight days a week; They Might Be Giants, in their contrarian fashion, chose instead, to sing a song of seven. Hence, on Tuesday, we stay at home.

That exuberance, I think —the willingness to defy obligations and work on something needless— is appealing, and it’s something that I’ve never really fully been able to lean into. The figurative home I would come back to, to extend the metaphor, is the same treading-water that I do otherwise. I’ve heard people complain about work-life balance, but I don’t think that weighting the scales correctly is the issue that plagues me (that may be the cause of these flare-ups) is that I don’t have either a differentiated work or life. It’s all slush, and when you can’t extricate moments from the hourglass, you can’t see each turn as worthwhile; imprecision is difficult to imbue with meaning.

I bring this up —and, yes, this is Personal News, I guess— because I feel that it’s important for me to write it out instead of detailing the minutiae of my mediocre crew team for the umpteenth time. Crew is easy to make sense of, it makes sense, because it derives from one central principle: everyone is here to make a boat go as fast as possible; the rest is all downstream. I think that I might have less emotional turbulence, perhaps, if I was more able to derive such a central purpose to my existence.

One thing that comes to mind, in squaring the inevitability of impermanence, is the avoidance of pain for myself, and for others; on a smaller scale, even, than existential malaise or physical torment— that’s why it’s unbearable for me to sit in a lecture section, or go through the motions in a lab, where no one is learning and no one cares. It’s unproductive, I know, to think like this —as short as life is, there at present are necessary pitfalls within it— but it hurts, and sometimes that reminder just makes things worse. It’s easy, at times, for that to spiral— for the thoughts to become about the thoughts themselves, and for everything to compound in exactly the wrong way.

I don’t mean to paint a bleak and grim picture —on the contrary, I aim for balance, for feeling, thought, and theorizing in their natural proportions— and so I feel obliged to mention that I feel certain flywheels are turning correctly. Crew is one; this newsletter is another —certainly I have sources of positive emotion that reinforce themselves, and work to create progressively more useful change— and yet I would be remiss not to note that sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes, it feels like it has before, or worse, and that’s scary. It’s terrifying. But there’s nothing we can do but carve out a home to return to when work doesn’t work, and try our best to recognize that we have to take a Tuesday.

For this week’s picture, let’s again take a brief respite from the crew team; instead, here’s an action shot of me playing a slightly more intense sport.

I’ve written less this week with a defined topic other than my own self-reflection; for this I apologize. It comes about for two reasons: firstly, I’ve begun work on next week’s newsletter, in which I aim to propose a hypothetical idea for education, and I expect this to run rather long. Secondly, I’ve read a lot of good pieces which are informing my thought in the Links section; in fact, I’ve run across a slight backlog. This post, I expect, will bring down the word-count running average; have a nice week.

Work

I managed to write a book chapter, firstly,

and I’ve written a script for a hypothetical webseries, developmentally titled Teasearcher; I wrote the first draft of it in August, then bricked my laptop (though, thankfully, I printed a copy to mark up,) which caused a little delay. Case in point, I wanted to have it done last week, and that was supposed to kick my butt into revising something for once. It’s a get-over-the-line prototype for an idea I’ve had, just a “finished first draft,” but here’s Teasearcher: Episode 1.

Links

I’ve ruminated before on Marc Andreessen’s career advice, as well as Scott Adams’ and Paul Graham’s; this short collection of some of their key insights (and others’) is a great summary.

[Earmark] Discussing the various merits and drawbacks of higher education, Byrne Hobart comes to a somewhat startling conclusion: Ballmer scored higher than Gates on the Putnam? Also, Y Combinator, Not Lambda School, Is Unbundling Education.

[Earmark] Trevor McKendrick, in his great newsletter How It Actually Works, examines a core, far-reaching question of our society: Why Is Everyone Like Their Parents? Really, it’s a short treatise on the importance of the people around us.

[Earmark] In thinking about networks, another of Hobart’s pieces Where Do Business Mafias Come From? sheds some light on a very particular kind: the close-knit flywheel, for example, that rose out of PayPal’s dismantling.

In building these connections, we first need to optimize ourselves; in the same email, McKendrick links two further articles I find at the intersection of interest and relevancy:

1. [Earmark] Firstly, David Perell’s How to Maximize Serendipity, which I find a compelling list of things that I somehow just keep meaning to do; it’s a reminder that consistent practice in these habits is important, even if it isn’t easy.

2. [Earmark] Secondly, Daniel Gross’s Setting Personal KPIs extends “what gets measured gets managed” in thought-provoking fashion, detailing the indicators he monitors. Again, as someone who’s interested in personal metrics but hasn’t had much success sticking with it, an external perspective such as this is a fascinating case study.

Top Ten: Podcasts

• The Anthropocene Reviewed

• Reply All

• 99% Invisible

• My Brother, My Brother and Me

• Startup School

• The Portal

• Business Casual

• North Star

• VORW International

• The Knowledge Project

[Bonus!] Top Ten: “Businesses I Would Like to Run at Some Point”

• Venture Capital

• Food

• Education

• Movies

• Music

• Writing/Media

• Happy Robots

• Fashion

• Publishing

• Games

Tweet, email, or write a Letter with feedback— or with any topic. Again, have a nice week.

All the best,

Orion Lehoczky Escobar