Training
Edgar Schein’s Anxiety & Assumptions: Powerful Ideas On Culture
Culture is a messy term. In 1952, two Academics, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, completed a comprehensive review of the term and found that by then there were over 134 definitions. As Kroeber and Kluckhohn explored the history of the word, they found all roads pointing to Germany, where the word was emerging as “cultur”: Kant, for ... Read more
Amazon, Corporate Welfare & The Illusion Of Jobs
New York City saved $1.5 billion in handouts it was going to give Amazon to set up a second headquarters in the city. In exchange, Amazon promised to bring to give Amazon for bringing 25,000 jobs to the city. Now the handouts are gone and those jobs are off the table. Right? Not according to ... Read more
Rest By Alex Pang: Summary & Key Quotes
Rest By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Rating: 10/10 Buy Book On Amazon Podcast Episode My Short Summary Alex Pang makes sense of the idea of “rest” through his own journey taking a sabbatical after leaving Academia and the corporate world. What he discovers is that we have lost connection with an ancient idea and broader conception ... Read more
The best career and life advice from Scott Adams, Debbie Millman, Hunter Thompson & Others
The most profound life and career advice I’ve ever come across was an obscure letter written by Hunter S. Thompson to a friend asking him for life advice. Career advice is tricky because many people give tactical advice on how to navigate the future. If you’ve never heard of Thompson, he was a famous writer ... Read more
Hunter S. Thompson’s Life Advice To A Friend Is Priceless
From the book Letters of Note, which has a number of famous essays and letters from people like Emily Dickinson, Galileo and Amelia Earhart. This is an essay from the writer Hunter S. Thompson to his friend Hume: April 22, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City Dear Hume, You ask advice: ah, what a ... Read more
Life Without A Map: Navigating The Pathless Path of Self-Employment
Over the past two and half years, I’ve been navigating unknown territory, grappling with the deep philosophical questions of how to live life, and wondering how my parent’s generation, the boomers, lived life as if they had a map. For most of my life, I pretended I had a map. It seemed that was what ... Read more
I’m not writing for you (who I write for)
I recently listened to a conversation between Seth Godin and Brian Koppelman. Seth was offering a story about when he knew that David Chang, the founder of the famous Momofuku restaurants, was “on his way.” Seth is a vegetarian and upon visiting Momofuku noodle bar several times in the past, was able to order a ... Read more
It’s Time We Bury The Idea Of A “Good Career Trajectory”
The idea of a good career path or a career trajectory is deeply embedded in our beliefs about how work should be. While it would be amazing if this was a reality that people could count on, I believe that it is a product of a unique moment in history. “This person has a good ... Read more
Reinvention Is The Most Important “Skill” You Need To Have In Today’s World
Early in his career, Ben had a lot of passion. However, he had picked a career that had a very set path. The “typical” path was to put in about nine years of steady, hard work, and then at that point, he was free to operate with a little more freedom. Deep down, he knew ... Read more
How To Find Your Purpose (and you might cry too)
A friend sent an exercise to me titled “How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes” which immediately activated every skeptical muscle in my body. Yet I committed to trying the exercise. It is an exercise to continue writing sentence after sentence until you find something that resonates with you… …and makes you cry. ... Read more