I was 32 and I hated my job. I hated it so much that I would drive to work in the mornings and wish that a bus would drive into me. Hard. I wanted to be injured seriously enough to end up in hospital for a few days but not so seriously that there’d be…
Tag: work
Overcome resistance
I struggle to write these posts each week. They take me around 6 hours to research, write and edit. And each week I try to convince myself that I can skip a post. After all, nobody is forcing me to write weekly articles about things that I thought were interesting or confusing. And nobody will…
If you want my time, I’m probably going to ignore you
In a week I usually receive between 50 and 100 unsolicited pitch emails, LinkedIn messages, connection requests and letters. Every single one of these makes a request of my time. People want to ‘jump on a call’ for me to explain to them what our strategy and pain points are, or they want to ‘pick…
On the strangeness of work
The idea of work is strange. We spend eight hours of our day with people we don’t know very well, doing tasks for other people who pay us. We label these tasks ‘work’. And anything that isn’t work is ‘leisure’ time, or just ‘life’. Most of us make a clear and rigid distinction between the…
Humans are ‘doing’ animals – lead a life of action not of labels
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. “If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day…
On finding fulfilling work
Fulfilling work is a relatively recent development. Fulfillment wasn’t something people really sought before the 17th century. The earliest known use of the word was in 1624. And we only started associating fulfillment with work towards the latter part of the industrial revolution. Work was something we did to keep a roof over our heads,…
Why we sabotage tomorrow through lack of sleep tonight
I discovered this week that there is a Chinese word, 報復性熬夜 (pronounced – Bàofù xìng áoyè). Translated, the word roughly means, revenge bedtime procrastination. The term describes people who feel they don’t have much control over their lives during the day, who avoid sleep and stay up late in an attempt to regain a semblance of…
Change or persist?
There’s a tension between two forces that dictate the evolution of culture. I find this true of society, the public sector and within businesses. The first force is driven by curiosity and a dissatisfaction with the present. People who buy into the first force believe the best is yet to come, and that there are…
Bullshit jobs and meaningless, busy work
John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that labor-saving technologies and automation would lead to a 15-hour workweek by the time his grandchildren came of age. Keynes never had children and thus never had grandchildren. However, if he’d had, they would not have seen a 15 hour workweek in their lifetime. What they would have experienced…
Is innovation dying?
We are living through the most innovative period known to human kind. Innovation in mobile phones have changed our lives, the Internet has become humanity’s repository of knowledge (and stupidity), we are making advances in artificial intelligence that help with everything from differentiating between muffins and dogs to diagnosing cancer. 3D printing will see us…