Mission and Pursuit

Reframe your thinking ”what your career can do for you” into ”what can your career do for others.”

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

What do I do? Who do I do it for? And why do they need it?

If you want to be best at something, you have to say no to a lot of things.

You can do anything, but not everything.

If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.

Set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (external, partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (internal, complete control).

Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it?

Create value before asking something in return, e.g. when looking for a new job, or when asking for advice from someone.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.

Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them.

Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems.

If you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.

Aim for being in control of how you spend your time, not how much money you make.

When we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.

Set clear, tangible, and measurable deadlines, e.g. ”send five job applications” vs. ”send more job applications”. It’s easy to be intimidated by open-ended goals.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.

When all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is the maximizing strategy.

With remote work comes a lot of freedom. You can explore the world as long as you—for many jobs—have a laptop and an internet connection. Something that most people dream of, instead of staying at their current miserable place, where nothing exciting is going on.

But there’s only so much time you can spend lying on the beach before that gets boring too. Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling, which remote possibilities certainly can help with.

And if you’re stuck at a place that has no prospects of being either, you don’t need a remote position—you need a new job.

Nothing is worth doing pointlessly.

The journey is the destination.

Identify the reason why you’re doing certain things in life, so that you can focus on doing it in the most efficient way possible. This way you can become the very best at it.

If you’re writing blog posts, is it to make money? To document your thoughts? To interact with human beings?

Once you know your reason, you can eliminate all the things that doesn't help with fulfilling that. If writing blog posts to you isn’t about making money, don’t put ads on your blog. If it isn’t about human engagement, there’s no need for a comment section.