Hello from the Himalayas,
Before I dive into today’s note about looking beyond remote work — I’m happy to announce another successful product of my experimental cooking — Butter Lime Omelette. Somehow, I ended up adding the extra lemon lying around in my kitchen to my regular omelette along with a big load of butter, and it turned to be deliciously tangy-buttery. If you want to try, drop a dollop of butter before you sauté the onions and another dollop after adding the eggs, along with a squeeze of half a lemon. It’s lip-smackin’ good!
netWORK: a new career option for the 2020s
My belief in the network economy has grown significantly in the last 6-12 months after experiencing the new ways of doing work that my professional network has enabled. For free-agents, remote work is old news. Let’s look beyond it to the exciting emergence of a new carrier option: netWORK.
What is netWORK?
To reach a definition, let me list the common attributes of this practice.
You are working inside the network of your professional relationships—that often means serving the network by building things that your side of the network wants. Not just finding clients through your network, it also means getting access to mentorship, establishing partnerships with your true peers, and learning together. This work done professionally for the network is what I am calling netWORK. Today’s note is about netWORK as a full-time career for high-skill free-agents of the 2020s.
Diversified Clientele & Asymmetric Experimentation are essential elements of netWORK.
Reputation in the network earned via your past track record is the primary credentialing instrument.
Experimentation in Work— Kevin Kelly wrote in his illuminating essay in 2013 that as more automation starts overtaking the labor-efficiency demanding jobs, we will value more the labor-inefficient work that humans are exclusively good at. I see his prescient prediction coming true as I look at the horizon. Experimenting in science and art, playing and exploring will be common themes core to the newly high-paid professions that will be generated once the mundane parts of a desk-job are substantially automated by AI technology like GPT-3 (released recently by OpenAI).
Beyond Freelance-Marketplaces — Two-way marketplaces have proven themselves to be really effective for selling and buying an item made for a specific need but they suck at matching humans for poorly-defined work. LinkedIn and Upwork are two big examples of failed attempts of applying the eBay model to humans — particularly for high-skill work with a significant experimentation element that is hard to pre-define and scope.
In the 2020s, a freelance-marketplace gig and a 9-5 corporate ladder job will not be the only two choices for high-skill professionals to work in applied-knowledge domains. Indie-consulting, as practiced by Venkatesh Rao— is an early example of professional netWORK. Another example is the career model of ‘passion economy’ indie artists. The big storm of netWORKers is on the horizon —we are going to see a lot more professionals across many lucrative domains — UX designers, financial advisors, and system-architects to epistemologists, chefs, choreographers, and ethnographers.
Quest-ion
(this is a recurring monthly feature of Daybrew’s Note where I list generative questions relevant to LIFAs )
Will the incoming netWORK opportunity be only accessible to knowledge workers? Could vocational-trade workers be able to leverage a network as well?
For example— one of my close friends is an itinerant maintenance engineer and is an expert in the functional maintenance of industrial machines like a luggage-sorting machine used in an airport or a letter-sorting machine used by postal delivery organizations. I’m curious to know how a netWORK career for someone like him would manifest?
Which domain is already producing free-agents who professionally netWORK?
How pricing of your experimentation/exploration work would be decided when efficiency and productivity are not the primary proxy metrics for valuing the output?
When the travel restrictions get relaxed, will we see extreme reactions on both sides of the traveling spectrum — people choosing to either restrict themselves within their neighborhood or travel to extremely remote places to immerse themselves in nature?
How close we are to ‘the blockchain internet’ becoming a viable option for running an internet-native business end-to-end?
What tools can be built today to enable the discovery of 100 true-peers for free-agents who want to netWORK?
Which new jobs will GPT-3 generate?
Interesting Finds of the Week
This is what metabolic pathways look like — to give you an idea of the sheer amount of complex interactions that your body incubates and facilitates.
To energize you about the future, here’s a compilation thread of exciting GPT-3 applications popping up. Examples include taking natural language text instructions to design a web-page automatically or to write your email for you.
This paper by online game-designer Richard Bartle on the participant types and dynamics of virtual social-space design:
Glass Mosaic Art from City Palace of Udaipur (India).
That’s it for today’s note. Thanks for reading.
Until Next Week,
Vinay
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