What if work was a feature, not a bug

There is a common misapprehension that work is somehow the enemy. The entire FIRE (financial independence, retire early) community is based off this idea. The goal should be to get done as quickly as possible.

First off, if you get to the Retire Early piece - life is long What are you going to do with the rest of your time? And moreover, if your time is entirely your own, how do you avoid becoming entirely self-absorbed?

Instead, what if we considered work as part of the wiring. An airplane wants to be in the air, that’s what it was designed to do. We should treat work accordingly.

If that’s the approach, here are 5 ideas that follow as a result.

Take each day, one day at a time. There are good days and bad days. But you shouldn’t render a verdict about your life’s path after a single day. I enjoy speaking with new college grads a lot, and one thing I consistently emphasize is how long it takes to know if you are on the right path. It may take a year to know what you are supposed to do in your job. And it may take a couple of years to get good at it. Don’t be too quick to quit.

Work hard to show one thing each day moving towards things you care most about. Have something you are proud of doing each day. 1 thing a day is 5 things are week, 20 things a month or 240 things a year. You can go quite far if you have taken 240 steps.

The people matter a lot. To this point, I’ve spent almost half of my career self-employed, with a big chunk as a solo-entrepreneur sitting in an office alone. And straight up, while people can be incredibly frustrating, work is a lot more fun when you get to do it with people. That doesn’t mean they have to be your best friends, but being on a team with people you respect and enjoy is great. And that’s why I stopped working for myself and did what few entrepreneurs do and went back to work for a bigger company.

Margin, margin, margin - give yourself margin. Give yourself the financial breathing space so that when your career does not move linearly up and to the right, it doesn’t wreck your life. Nearly all of the things you want in life will still be there if it takes a bit longer. Using debt to pull spending from your future into your present trades momentary and fleeting pleasure for future hardship.

Find the good waves. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said that you should treat your career like you are surfing. Go where the big waves are. It’s less important to pick the precisely correct wave. What this means to me is pick to be a part of things that are growing. Sure, you could have stayed a the horse-drawn carriage company when the automobile was coming around. But it is harder and harder to find opportunity on a melting ice cube.