Jonathan from MyMoneyBlog discusses the question of full-retirement or semi-retirement by asking the question:
Which would you rather do:
A) Work 40 hours/week for 15 years, and then not work at all for the next 15 years, or
B) Work 20 hours/week for 30 years?
Last Sunday, I had a similar conversation with a guy as we discussed the idea of Free Agency
Daniel Pink lays out a compelling case in Free Agent Nation
There are complications, of course, Jonathan raises a big one, how do you pay for your own health care in your later years. But it’s a wonderful and timely thought in this job market, what would my career look like if I weren’t depending on my regular job?
One of the books I have on-call at the library is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. The books explores the myth of the “self-made man”, asserting instead that “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”
Charlie Rose interviewed Malcolm Gladwell recently. He has a great quote at 26:00 into the interview.
Gladwell: Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…
If you are convinced that the work you are doing is meaningful, then curiosity, there’s no cost to it. If you think there’s always got to be a connection between what you put in and what you get out, then of course you’ll run off with a great excitement after an idea that catches your idea.
Rose: People often ask me to define leadership and I say to them what you just said all the time. You have to communicate what the mission is all the time — and how meaningful someone’s contribution is to the mission.
There are some people that you can meet just once and they make an impression on you. Dr. W. Scott Nobles or “Dr. Nobles” and was reverently referred to, was such a person. A great man. A great mind.
Achieving emptiness with “Bit Literacy” - (37signals)
Maintaining a healthy media diet requires vigilance about what you’re consuming. Thus it’s important to constantly ask the question, “Is this worth my time?” at every level: the source (“Is this source worth my time?”), a particular issue of the source, an article, even down to the paragraph or section of an article you’re in. If the answer is “no” to any of these, skip it. Move to the next article, or trash the entire issue; and if it happens too often with one source, consider removing it from the lineup altogether.
Small steps towards those simple dreams are more rewarding in the long run than jumping the rungs on the corporate ladder any day. In my opinion, a VC is just a creditor, and should never be what you dream of obtaining one day. … Profitable small businesses exist in every city, owned by people who love what they do.
Create Your Own Free Virtual Assistant
Let’s say you’re on your mobile phone and a colleague tells you about a meeting you have to attend tomorrow at 3pm. You’re walking quickly and don’t want to slow down, so you call Jott’s toll-free number and have this conversation: …
I’ve become convinced lately that the most cost-efficient food in our kitchen is beans, and it’s a food that people often overlook. Beans are loaded with protein and are quite flavorful, particularly as a substitute for meats in a vegetarian diet.
Last year, when our home briefly went without Microsoft Windows in our unsuccessful Mac experiment, one of the applications I had the most difficult time replacing was Microsoft Money. I had been using it for 3+ years to track our net worth and experiment a little with budgeting. I tried using Quicken for the Mac, which came installed with our MacBook, but it was a big step backwards. It was far more tedious than MS Money. I wanted to make my life easier and spending 50% more time balancing our accounts and tracking expenses was not the direction I wanted to go.
Enter Wesabe.
I was an early adopter for Wesabe, but hadn’t really used my account since I had first signed up. When I took my second go at it, the user community was much larger, and thus the benefits of social collaboration were more apparent. For example, entering data was a snap because over half of my merchant ids — which I see on my transactions — had already been cleaned up.
Last week, they made another step forward in building value on top of their user data: better merchant reviews. Tying transaction amounts to reviews ties together two data points in a unique mix that vastly improves their recommendation engine.
I have not done much rating on Wesabe until now, but I will start to contribute now that I see the value I can get out of this community tool.
I love seeing companies trying unconventional ways to motivate their employees to keep them healthy, happy, and more productive.
The folks at 37 Signals have always been pushing this envelope. They have a small office in Chicago, but less than half of their (dozen or so) employees work there with the rest are spread out around the globe. They build software that enables collaboration online, so I suppose this work model is dogfooding for them.
Their latest experiment, over the last year, was to switch to a four day workweek. It started as a summertime experiment — something that was common in my days in academia — but worked so well that they kept it going year-round. After almost a year, the results are in, and they are getting things done!
At the core of this adoption is a philosophy that emphasizes planning and strategy over reactivity. How often have you stretched yourself to get something done only to find out your colleague or client didn’t even glance at your product until days (or months!) later?
One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.
This is a simple way to switch your group from working in tactical to strategic mode: raise the bar on what you consider an emergency. If you need to make a case for this, then take notes on each emergency you fix, and then report to your supervisor what the result of that emergency fix was. How long did it take for your “fix” to be consumed downstream? What strategic goals were put on hold in the time you spent?
Tags: Workplace
I might need to come up with more material to blog about so that this doesn’t become a list of articles that somebody else if feeding me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octMaIKiSUA
Tags: thought train