300 karma · joined December 22, 2011
This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier. And one day the switch will happen, they will look up to you as the knowledgeable consultant instead of looking down on you as the 'shitty business guy' with nothing of value to offer.
What you've noted is the beginning of the secular decline in consumptive/material living standards for at least the next 60-80 years after which earths population would have declined to 5-6 billion and the population pyramid is more balanced and all the current 'humps' in it have died off.
That's where journaling becomes powerful. It lets you hold yourself accountable, lets you measure your current self against your past self. It lets you document those little life victories, those turning points to judge whether a past decision was good or not. Life is a combinatorially explosive decision tree (borrowed from John Vervaeke), journaling helps you to better guess the best future path and keep you on it.
If MCB is so interested in those things, then he should do the right thing which is to retire from Atlassian and go whole-heartedly after those noble causes.
Much like there are some people in this society/world that we will have personality clashes with regardless I believe there are cities in this world that we will have the same personality clashes with. It grates, it wears you down and after a while you have to leave. I often feel affinity or antipathy within minutes of leaving the airport of a particular city. The SFBA was a 'wtf have I done by moving here, ok I'll give it a couple of years to warm to it' and although there was lots to love I never connected on a deep level. It's a subjective personal thing for which there is no wherefore.
There's a hack for this which I find works, just go to sleep at 8pm or 8:30pm instead right after the kids. Wake up at 4pm-4:30pm (yes I need a full 8 hours every night, not negotiable), you'll have much more willpower to tackle your side project in the morning before your kids wake up.
Given the choice between reddit and side project, reddit will win. Given the choice between reddit and sleep...it's much easier to pick sleep even if reddit is more tempting.
In the morning you have 2 choices, reddit vs side project but you just invested effort in waking up at 4:30am, side project it is...
Edit: I actually see sleep as a precondition of productivity so sleeping is a 'productive activity' for me.
Poor people in the traditional sense would be able to pursue internships without pay to gain skills because they are underpinned by UB. An option not available today. As an employer I could take on more 'apprentices' on UBI, the contract being that I give them training, give them guidance whilst they work 'for free' until a certain point it becomes worthwhile to pay them above and beyond UBI because they're worth it.
All those 'menial chores' are actually become interesting because you're 'not just doing the grocery shopping anymore'. You're taking you kids shopping so they can explore the supermarket with them. They'll ask questions about what you buy and why you buy it. Of course they'll nag you to buy something for them as well.
Kids will nag you to go out to the park, to the museum or whatever other local attraction there is and along the way you'll get social interaction which helps balance things out.
Deleted my FB account but copped a hiding from the silent majority for being 'hard to get in touch with' and feel a bit guilty about this but overall life is better without FB or any other form of social media.
True experientialism is being there in the moment, not standing outside carefully curating the moment for others to gawk at.
Edit: *experientialism not experimentalism
You need to do a huge volume of transactions to be able to live off 2.6% + 30c, close to two million a month to support a startup with 5 fully loaded employees including the founders.
Working with a lot of Ecommerce sites I know a well established one (attached to 3 bricks and mortar stores) does on average $16k a month. Say on average an Online store is doing 10k/month you're looking at 200 clients to keep the payment processor afloat. Doable but you'd want them to have some runway otherwise people are gonna go with Stripe to know they've got a payment gateway that's not gonna disappear