April 15th, 2022: Greetings from Austin! I reached 2,000 book sales this week across all different platforms which is simply mind-blowing. Thank you so much to all of you who keep sharing your reflections on the book and buying them for friends. If you haven’t grabbed it yet, what are you waiting for?
"alternative fixed points" are called "principles" for me: when people ask me what my goals are and I tell them that I'm not a goal-oriented guy they drown in disbelief.
When I left the path of working for a company as an employee 5 years ago I didn't have specific goals in mind: I just had a list of things I didn't want to do anymore.
Positive psychology is overrated: too many people get stuck because they can't aim toward positive and constructive goals from the get go.
Embracing what sucks about your current situation is as important (if not more) than having that inspirational outlook that everybody seems to be looking out for before doing "the jump".
It's like inspiration for artists: it's never going to magically hit you unless you do the work first.
Over time my "list of things I didn't want to do anymore" became a set of principles, neither positive or negative: so I went from "I don't wanna go to the office every day anymore" or "I don't wanna do project management work anymore" to finding ways to make it happen.
I didn't know that becoming an independent consultant could be a way of doing that: at first I struggled because I thought I just needed to be careful about which company I would end up working as an employee, because that was my mental model of how work should be done.
Given a solid set of principles, goals are of secondary importance and might shift over time, some might even be abandoned — that goes against a lot of advice and narrative that's out there and I realize that by the looks people give me any time I say to someone that I ended up doing what I do now "accidentally" and "without goals" (it's not false modesty, it's just that life is messy and a clean checklist of goals most likely won't help you).
"alternative fixed points" are called "principles" for me: when people ask me what my goals are and I tell them that I'm not a goal-oriented guy they drown in disbelief.
When I left the path of working for a company as an employee 5 years ago I didn't have specific goals in mind: I just had a list of things I didn't want to do anymore.
Positive psychology is overrated: too many people get stuck because they can't aim toward positive and constructive goals from the get go.
Embracing what sucks about your current situation is as important (if not more) than having that inspirational outlook that everybody seems to be looking out for before doing "the jump".
It's like inspiration for artists: it's never going to magically hit you unless you do the work first.
Over time my "list of things I didn't want to do anymore" became a set of principles, neither positive or negative: so I went from "I don't wanna go to the office every day anymore" or "I don't wanna do project management work anymore" to finding ways to make it happen.
I didn't know that becoming an independent consultant could be a way of doing that: at first I struggled because I thought I just needed to be careful about which company I would end up working as an employee, because that was my mental model of how work should be done.
Given a solid set of principles, goals are of secondary importance and might shift over time, some might even be abandoned — that goes against a lot of advice and narrative that's out there and I realize that by the looks people give me any time I say to someone that I ended up doing what I do now "accidentally" and "without goals" (it's not false modesty, it's just that life is messy and a clean checklist of goals most likely won't help you).