Hello from the Himalayas,
All the new subscribers in the last two weeks— welcome to Daybrew’s Note.
With my new superior kitchen, I have gained more optionality on my diet. I’m excited to experiment in my cooking more often and level up from my current survival-level cooking skills.
Personal Tips for Struggling LIFAs
Since some new subscribers have joined us in the last couple of weeks, I thought today I will share personal tips from my experience as a LIFA for about 3 years. If you’re a struggling LIFA(location-independent free-agent) or someone aspiring to be one, I hope at least one of these is directly helpful to you.
CRAFT YOUR UNIQUE PUBLIC IDENTITY-- Think Sherlock Holmes-style unique offering of high-stake, non-generic solutions that leverage your specific mix of multiple skills along with your ability to communicate well. Think cross-disciplinarily. The best-case scenario is to invent your own unique job-profile, but that’s usually more of an ideal to aspire to.
PLUG-IN THE NETWORK - to leverage its vast scope. Start engaging in a rippling fashion from who you know, who you engage with, and who you have previously worked with. Use your definition of your aspirational identity as a compass to traverse with a sense of direction into the network.
GIVE FIRST as a generative trigger - for initiating the universal reciprocity in social networks. There are things you’re seeking and there are things you can offer. Find those who are offering what you are seeking. Reach out via whatever is the least-hassle mode of communication, and start giving out your gifts. Some will take you up on the offer. Many will appreciate your proactive-ness.
A recent successful example of this -- last month, I offered to co-build a new exciting tool with someone (who I didn’t even know) after seeing their tweet describing what they wanted. That offer was politely declined due to schedule issues but due to my proactive outreach and a public profile, I got offered the opportunity to collaborate on an adjacent business project.
DIVERSIFY YOUR VALIDATION SOURCES - Similar to diversifying your income sources to have leverage in the negotiations and maintaining sufficient income security in the case of unexpectedly losing one source, you want to avoid getting too much of your external validation from a single source. Particularly if that single source is a person who knows you well, you might feel emotionally prisoned and your decision-making autonomy is vulnerable to being hijacked by your validation needs. Avoid this like hell. Find multiple people--or much better--a diverse mix of people, things, places, ideas, and concepts to distribute your validation-sourcing across.
UNCERTAINTY IS GOOD - An indispensable factor in the LIFA lifestyle is being okay with having a healthy amount of uncertainty. It will keep you on your feet, moving. It can be a paralyzing force if you give in to the fear of worst possible scenarios. It can be the momentum generating force if you embrace it and leverage the sense of urgency it gives you to ship fast. There is no alternative to prolific creation that will push you forward.
TAKE IT EASY - This probably sounds contradictory to what I said above, but it is not. It’s okay to have some level of stress on things you control and can change but for the rest, take it easy. This vague, cliche advice will keep you sane when things outside your immediate control are not in your favor.
Interesting Finds of the Week
GPT-3 is writing poetry as well as code and is ready to be used as a knowledge-engine API. If you want to get some context on this, I wrote an essay last summer on how far we are from a Truly Creative Machine. Also, here’s an interesting take by Patrick Mckenzie on the inclusion of GPT-3 in the writer’s stack of production tools.
The InterIntellect talk with Maggie Appleton and Aaron Lewis - on interesting ideas on narrative time and anthropology of internet culture.
The Nature article on the possibility of reversing biological age.
An opportunity to participate in the 2020 version of Life-in-a-Day documentary. Ridley Scott made an experimental film to document a day on July 24th, 2010 using crowdsourced footage from people across the world. It’s one of my favorite documentaries and he’s making another one this month by documenting the day of July 25th, 2020. Visit the link to learn more and participate. I recommend watching the original 2010 one here.
This is it for today’s note. Thanks for reading.
Until Next Week,
Vinay
Things to Note
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