Corporate Culture

Do We Really Want Happiness? Lessons from Socrates, Kahneman & Maslow

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work on how the brain functions. Earlier in his career, he started studying happiness but ultimately decided to abandon it and work on something else. He felt that “people don’t want to be happy the way I’ve defined the term – what I experience here and now.”  ... Read more

Designing Your Own Infinite Game In The Creator Economy

Once you’ve found success building and selling something on the internet, no matter how small, the incentives of the internet machine will nudge you to think that the most important thing is to optimize, scale, and grow. That may be the right path for you but I want to convince you that there might be ... Read more

“Ambition Is Frozen Desire” – Excerpt From David Whyte’s Consolations

David Whyte has become one of my favorite authors and Poets. His book, The Three Marriages, inspired me to embrace the “Pathless Path” and lean into the uncertainty of self-employment and solopreneurship. One of my favorite books of his is Consolations, which is a book of everyday words. In it, he describes what those words ... Read more

The Ultimate Guide & Reasons To Take A Sabbatical

After I quit my job in 2017 I spent 5 weeks in Europe. It was the longest break from the “real world” I had ever taken and in the second week, I started to feel extremely guilty. I became hyper-aware of the script in my head that said I should be working or that at ... Read more

My Five-Year Journey Creating, Launching, Failing & Succeeding With Online Courses

I created my first online course because I didn’t want to help any more people with resumes. I called this course “Crushing Your Resume.” Little did I know that this small act of creation might lead me down a path where I might not need a resume for the rest of my life. A Bit ... Read more

Accidental Meaning: How The Baby Boomers Misled Us About What Leads To A Happy Life

There was a state of affairs in many places across the world that enabled many to build meaningful lives by following a standard script. Go to school, get a job, have a family, and devote yourself to work and you will be a successful person. In the US we call this the “American Dream” and ... Read more

How I Think About Money & Retirement While Self Employed

The most common question I get from people who are not self-employed is about my level of worry when it comes to money. People wonder if I’m worried about the future. Worried about having “enough” for things like a house, college, and retirement. People are often surprised at two things that emerge from a deeper ... Read more

How Obsession With Work Killed Our Connection With Leisure

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a letter to his friend Paulinus, urging against a certain type of rest: I do not summon you to slothful or idle inaction, or to drown all your native energy in slumbers and the pleasures that are dear to the crowd. That is ... Read more

The Inevitable Decline Of The Elite Full-Time MBA

I want to explore the changing dynamics of how people earn prestige, the new dynamics of credentials and status, and what this might mean for how people navigate work and their careers in the future. I am going to look at this through the lens of the full-time MBA, something I did from 2010 to ... Read more

The Battle For The Soul Of The Creator Economy

The “future of work” is dead or maybe it finally arrived in the form of what we are now calling the “creator economy.” This week Twitter announced that it was going to enable monetization through “super followers” on its platform. It appears to be taking some of the features of Substack, Patreon, and others and ... Read more