Marvelous book. Brilliant in its simplicity, but with lots of immediately actionable insights. I'm three-fourths through right now (it's a short read, maybe two hours?), and tremendously enjoying it.

It's using the term economics in the classical sense to mean household management, going through points about the nature of wealth, using assets wisely, using time well, living well, and so on. It's primarily a recollection of a dialog between Socrates and Critoboulus.

I'm reading this translation, which is free on Kindle and totally decent, though the spacing/layout of footnotes is a little messy. 

It's short enough that I'd say just jump in -- the pacing starts a little slow, but there's actionable insights in there. Recommended.

When I started in contracting, I used to brand our company and work with "we have the very best service in the world, we'll do whatever you need to get things right."

Eventually, I got away from that. While I liked solving client challenges and working really hard to get a great ROI for clients, it didn't ring correctly to me. Something about how we said it, and how we did it, made things not quite right.

We always liked going the extra mile, and we offered a 100% guarantee on our work (sometimes even 100%+) to take the risk away from the client. We priced our services aggressively below market and looked to demonstrate results, in order to get repeat business. And indeed, we did -- it was just a few clients that provided the huge bulk of our revenue by coming back to us with orders for 5x and 10x larger than their original, and eventually getting to a trusted point where they'd ask for work over email and say "just bill me whatever, you guys have always been fair." That's a nice feeling.

Date: 4/6/2013

Time: 11am-2pm

Location: Yoyogi Park

Cost: Free

Thanks, C. Dense email here, lots of things going on. A few thoughts --

1. You're not underpaid because you don't have a degree; you're underpaid because you've either (1) been unable to show others tangibly your ability to perform highly, (2) don't have the relevant contacts, connections, and/or hustle to look for a higher paid position (which is much easier with connections, but connections can be replaced with just hustling more, which generates connections), and/or (3) you're not good at negotiating.

I won't take one of those extreme positions and say degrees don't matter; they do. But companies don't care about their people's credentials anywhere near as much as they care about results. Even if 90% of companies in the particular space you wanted to work were very credential focused (and in programming, it's much lower than that at the best companies to work), you'd still be able to get a great position by just contacting enough people. 

So, ask yourself: how's your Github look? Do you write publicly? Do you have documented work you did a good job on? Do you regularly go out and meet people, and talk about the space you work in? Those are what get you paid more highly, not a piece of paper.

If you're snowboarding, towards the end of the day when your legs start to give out, it can become a nightmare. If you're traveling and you hit a bunch of logistical snags that throw off your timetable, it can be intensely stressful if you're trying to coordinate for a group. If you're putting together new sales presentations, it can be nerve-wracking trying to put together all the creative materials and prep you need to do a good job, meanwhile facing the uncertainty.

Take a look what all these have in common.

Give this one some thought cycles, turn it over in your head 2 or 3 times. It's worth it --

"The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way." --Miyamoto Musashi 

Prioritizing?

Here's a good one. "Will this resolve itself on its own satisfactorily if I don't do anything?"

Some things explicitly won't -- and require preparation, nurturing, followup, and quick action.

Some things do.

And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. But with experience, you figure out what can sit for a few days (or weeks) and what can't.

One of the things that took me a long time to figure out is that often, flying through 2-3 different cities on a single ticket often costs very similar to a one-way flight.

So, going "New York to Berlin on May 25th" might not be cheaper than going "New York to London on April 28th,  London to Munich on May 22nd, Munich to Berlin on May 25th" -- strange but true.

It's especially easy to stop in hub cities for up to a month, so swinging through Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other regional hubs is easy. It's fun to stop in New York for 2-3 days when you're on your way elsewhere if you've got the time.

The thing is, it can be tricky to plan these routings. That's where Matrix comes in --

matrix.itasoftware.com

One good way to get into action is to start with something small and simple. If you have an insurmountable task ahead of you, you start by chipping away it.

So I think it's somewhat dangerous to take time to clear the decks of every little thing. You deny yourself an easy kickstart.

The other tricky part is -- and this isn't a contradiction -- is there's a near infinite amount of not-really-important work to do. That might sound like you'd thus never run out of easy work, but you then hit a different problem -- all of the easy work you could do is slightly more pointless if you've done the things that actually really need to be done, and yet you still don't have the decks fully cleared.

I think it was Stephen Covey who said, "Your things-to-do list won't be clear when you die."

So that's two problems right there -- by clearing off the must-do easy work first, you run out of must-do easy work as a momentum kickstarter. But, you never run out of low-hanging work to do, so the decks rarely truly get cleared.

Question from a reader -- 

Off the bat I wanted to say you have a very useful website. Thank you for that. 

I want to change my life for the better, and I have put effort into it, and still am. My problem is I take on to much at once, and with all that clutter and confusion I feel I am back where I started. I could make a list of 1,000 things I want to learn, and 100 habits I want to have. But when it comes down to it, if its not an external change [Habits like flossing I've built] then I lose track. Confidence, better control of fear, productivity, knowing what I want, are all things that don't seem to build. 

I'm a bit off track. There's a lot I want to ask but I'll ask this. 

Being a huge hip-hop fan, what I love is being able to portray your mind, feelings, and topics onto a page with words, and too, words that rhyme. What advice do you have to help me with doing this? I know you're not a rapper, but when I do write, I look back at disgust or thing 'There's no way that came out right'.