Becoming Irreplaceable
Software is eating the world. Services are eating software. How can you build for a long career in the 21st century?
Long gone are the days of taking a job out of high school and staying with the company until retirement. In Silicon Valley, engineers often change jobs every 1-2 years — sometimes sooner — often simply in pursuit of something that better fits their interests. Even for these lucky few, sought after by dozens of companies to the tune of six figure salaries and free Bulletproof coffee, the world often outpaces their ability to keep up. Just ask .NET engineers how easy it is to find a role these days in a startup in SF.
What on earth does an indispensable person look like today? This question — one of existential threat to every one of our livelihoods — is the motivation of “The Startup Life.” It’s a question that will require us to reimagine how we approach every facet of our professional lives. The modern world is cutthroat. Nothing is certain. The skills in vogue will be richly rewarded while the skills of last year are rendered useless.
I’m a serial entrepreneur that dropped out of Stanford to found my own company. I live and breathe startups. Build lean. Land and expand. Experiment and iterate fast. Validate your hypotheses. And grow. Startups are not great for everything (*cough cough* I’m looking at you, Quibi) but they are unbelievable at generating explosive growth and huge returns on investment. So I started thinking…
What if you applied the startup mindset to your personal life? I’ve done so with mine and guess what — it’s delivered explosive personal growth and huge returns on investment. Why? It’s scrappy, affordable and easy to try. (That’s the whole point of “building lean.”) It’s data-driven so you can trust the results. It’s super customizable, so it fits everyone and can change with you as you grow. What is this magical system?
Through this newsletter, I want to help you create that system. I’ll share with you the elaborate systems I’ve built over time, with templates to give you an easy start. I’ll share what other highly successful people use to optimize their lives. But most importantly, I’ll share all of the decisions and crossroads that I’ve faced building and growing my systems so that you can quickly modify my systems for your own life.
The world is changing fast. But with every great challenge comes great opportunity. Our challenge is to find and master timeless skills in an age where success is fleeting. How will you be the one to use it to your advantage? How will you stand out?
In this newsletter, we’ll touch on a few recurring themes to help guide your journey:
How can you maximize your productivity? You need to know the best tools to use to get the most out of your finite time.
How can you balance life, learning, and productive work? You need to know how to find homeostasis at every point in your development — constantly moving forward while also optimizing for the here and now.
What should you even be trying to learn? You need to know what’s worth your time and what you’ll get out of it.
How can you learn most effectively? Once you know what you want to learn, you need to know how to approach it for the maximum gain.
How can you separate yourself from others? There are 7B people in the world. You need to know how to stand out from the crowd.
And perhaps most importantly…
How can you do all of this while creating a happy and fulfilling life for you and your family?
These are hard questions and there are no easy answers that will work for everyone. My goal is to point you in the right direction with all the knowledge necessary to make good decisions for you.
Thank you for wanting to be better today than you were yesterday. Time to get started!