The Connection Newsletter 49 - Between YOLO and FIRE

The Connection Newsletter 49 - Between YOLO and FIRE

April 01, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #49 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends. Thank you for reading!

This week I was surprisingly moved by the first article highlighted below, by Khe Hy of RadReads.

It’s funny how you can hear certain ideas all the time and you don’t so much as look up from scrolling on your phone. Then, one random day the same idea catches you at just the right 

time

, just the right

angle

, and it just pops, like sunlight hitting a prism.

Mr. Hy’s message (“work towards a fulfilling life instead of an arbitrary net worth number”) is not revolutionary. I can find a thousand Medium articles with the same message in a quick troll.

But the message caught me at an inflection point in life when questions I’ve never thought about before are now sneaking into my consciousness on the regular. Questions like:

“What kind of father am I?”

when I choose work over spending time with my son

and...

“How much more time do I have with the people closest to me?”

as I watch family members slowly lose this war of attrition against Father Time.

The adjustment feels foreign, like clothes tailored for someone else. As anyone who grew up in an immigrant family can tell you, the immigrant mentality (“save everything, spend nothing, because hard times are just around the corner”) is difficult to shake. But I’m trying.

The point isn’t to go full-on YOLO. But to keep in mind that you can’t take it with you.

Hope you have a terrific week. Onto the articles below.

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Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

. Working until you hit an arbitrary “net worth number” is not a good strategy, since there are too many variables to calculate a number with confidence. Instead of looking to hit a number, Khe Hy says, focus on being the DJ of your life. No one controls when the music stops, but you can dial the knobs on time with family, time on your career, and how you invest your money. The goal is to work on things you’re passionate about throughout life, not wait until you’re done with your career.

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If you know how to use Python, Artificial Intelligence and Instagram. Chris Buetti automated posting to Instagram, following/unfollowing other accounts, and DM’ing businesses to negotiate discounts, so now he eats for free. This piece isn’t exactly a how-to, but it’s an inspiration to become more technical.

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. An update on how Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield in Sorkin’s 2010 film) is doing.

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. Tynan has a great framework for batching high-impact projects into compressed intervals. You can’t always take this compressed approach (for example, he scopes a project, pushes everything else to the side for a month, and just focuses on that) but when you can, it’s bound to be more effective than trying to chip away at a project for years. It’d be difficult for me to block off a month at a time, but I plan to test this with a few three-day springs.

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Welcome to renting in San Francisco.

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Thanks for reading!

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