<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypar
Chris Rock: Job vs. Career. (via)
“Damn, I gotta come in early tomorrow and work on my project!” There ain’t enough time when you got a career. When you got a job, there’s too much time. You’re looking at your watch, like “Ah, shit. It’s 9:08.”
You can tell if it’s your own plan by how lost you feel. People who do their own plans feel lost most of the time. People who do other peoples’ plans feel on track most of the time.
Bike messenger, gallery assistant, office temp. I took these jobs to make money, but there was also an aspect of penance to them. I don’t know exactly for what sin I was repenting. Maybe the sin of having gone to graduate school for writing. On some level, I saw these jobs as a kind of Karma insurance. It was a way of testing myself: You want to be a writer? Can you handle this? How about this?
I am angry and curious. These two things propel me forward. I come from the minimum-wage working world. I have no illusions as to where I should have ended up. I have really nothing to lose, and so I go.
In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber–if you can find one–is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.
THE NEW YORKER: Barry Michels’s & Phil Stutz’ Therapy Drawings
See also: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” -Thomas Edison.
E-mail disclaimers are one of the minor nuisances of modern office life, along with fire drills, annual appraisals and colleagues who keep sneezing loudly.
Perfect timing, Economist. We had a fire drill yesterday, annual appraisals last month, and this morning *I* was the guy with the sneezing fit.
Legal disclaimers: Spare us the e-mail yada-yada | The Economist
You can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.
This is truth.
Getting a job decreases the amount of work it takes to live. That’s why jobs are good.
They get one letter from me every couple of years. And basically it says, run this business like it’s the only business that your family can own for the next 100 years. You can’t sell it. But every year don’t measure it by the earnings in the quarter that year. Measure it by whether the moat around that business, what gives it competitive advantage over time has widened or narrowed. If you keep doing that for 100 years, it’s going to work out very well. Then I tell them basically if the reason for doing something is everybody else is doing it, it’s not good enough. If you have to use that as a reason, forget it.
Warren Buffett’s thoughts on building a business work well on a personal scale, too. Build your moat, make it bigger. See also Douglas Adams’ career advice (via):
If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. […] Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.
I like that there’s a field of research called “terror management theory”.
I have to look them in the eye and decide whether they love the business or they love the money. It’s fine if they love the money, but they have to love the business more. Why do I come in at 7 every morning, can’t wait to get to work? It’s because I get to paint my own painting and I like applause.
We do not bring in compensation consultants and we don’t have a human resources department, legal department, etc. That makes life way too complicated, and people get vested in going to conferences.
You don’t have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich – just a bit better than average over a long period of time.
http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.1.swf
Coffee Break. A 1958 film about lost time in the workplace. From the Prelinger Archives.
The kids we surveyed show very little understanding about how much money different jobs actually pay. Younger children tend to grossly underestimate–on average, the 5-year-olds figure police officers make $29 annually, lawyers make $59, and dancers pull in a comparatively huge $165 a year.
Mark Larson 