My life was changed by four sentences in four books

The four sentences:

- in our culture it’s healthy to switch jobs every two years, ideally to something the opposite of what you’ve been doing

- there’s an organization - the National Association of Campus Activities - that pays $1000 to $5000 per gig at universities

- to keep learning we need to be surprised. Read books about subjects you know nothing about. Move to a place very unlike home, so that you’ll be surprised every day.

- rich guy said that decades of pursuing more only made him miserable and he would rather have stopped at $30 million then switch to planting trees and writing poetry.

This is Derek Sivers of CD Baby, right? I think he is unusually high-agency in a way I could not imagine myself being. Definitely not one of those people who I look at and say "I could have done that. Why didn't I?"

For instance, I could simply never see myself voluntary relinquishing American citizenship: https://sive.rs/xus

Getting booted out, yes. But giving it up, no chance.

Given that his behaviour is so far from what I would do, I think there are too few shared fundamentals for me to mimic him. So I think I'm not going to do the things he did.

This whole article is just one big humblebrag.

There’s a huge gap and missing inspirational book sentence between “doing music and nothing else”, the proceeds of which bought a house, and selling a tech company for tens of millions.

The real cliffhanger was the part where he almost fell into successful serial entrepreneurial pursuits, but a book purchased as a joke warned him he’d better not.

Derek has a great post about "having a database": https://sive.rs/dbt

(it's a quick read but essentially he suggests having a sort of minimalist CRM for people you know. Or, as our parents might say: "have a rolodex")

I took this advice to heart and did the following:

- exported all of my LinkedIn connections (about 800 at the time)

- start tagging each one in www.pinboard.in with the "linkedin" tag

- I would add other tags e.g. role_sre, nyc, <companyname>, awesome etc

- I wrote a script to do 30 a day

- Create a custom bookmark that would auto insert the "linkedin" and "role_" tags when I "pinned" a user profile page to save me some typing

- Spent the next couple months tagging each of my connections

I basically had that list for a few months and then one day at work, my manager asks "Do you know any good recruiters in NYC?". A couple clicks in pinboard and I had a list of great NYC recruiters.

I recommended one, they got hired and I got the $10K referral fee.

I then write a custom firefox extension that would highlight in green anyone who was already in my "database". That way if I was looking at the People tag of a company I worked at, it was trivial to see who I should add.

Hmm I don't see the sentences.

Just dont be poor

Seems a bit hyperbolic.

He is just crazy

I was disappointed that he couldn't find anything life-changing in a book of fiction.