Something I read a while ago that stuck with me - ‘When you are looking for a new opportunity, you are really just looking for a person.’
This reframing totally changed how I look for new jobs, and what suprised me more was how willing people were to refer me, even if they had never met me.
Have you read the book Traction yet? It provides a very usable growth framework. More importantly, It also allows you to start thinking of marketing as a testable iterative process, and this simple change in mindset can do wonders for the engineer/hacker.
Slightly OT:
The biggest collective fiction today is probably this idea that as tech person, we can change the world, and as a result we should try to change the world. Anything less impactful feels like a waste of potential. The general society has bought into it - because we've been hearing this for years: Johnny - you are such a smart programmer, where is your world changing app ?
Among other things, this translates into working ridiculous hours in expensive cities and convincing a set of investors that they too can be part of this world changing process in exchange for a few shekels. Now these shekels will drive innovation, and they will push civilisation forward.
But the magic of the fiction is that poor Johnny will never feel like he did much to change the world, and so he will keep trying ad infinitum.
Selection bias is something worth avoiding in understanding health studies.
It’s quite likely that you know about these folks because they had the right genetics to be healthy outliers, and by extension, famous. It’s no different than saying I know x people who didn’t die of lung cancer due to smoking, which doesn’t change the implication that y% of smokers will always get lung cancer, we just haven’t figured out what fully constitutes your risk ( genetics etc)
This comment made me realize why I never remember summaries of self help books.
Using examples makes it easier to relate and remember, whereas summaries require an additional step of mapping an ongoing situation to a stored summary in your head, and this is very hard to do in realtime.
I'll agree on the debt side. The grade issue is infinitely worse in a lot of competitive cultures.
Even if you take the money factor away, Have non-US universities really figured out higher education? Most of them tend to either be a lot more rigid in structure, or they copy from the US system.
Even though this incident sounds more personal than idealistic, it keeps bringing back up the question of the purpose of universities.
I am okay with universities being a medium of education, where one can take any courses they want, and passing and failing is irrelevant (MOOCs?)
I am okay with universities being a place to enjoy four years of camaraderie and self exploration before committing to life or career goals.
I am okay with universities being a stamp of selection, i.e you were good enough to get into harvard so you must be smart.
However, universities try to be all three and fail miserably at all of them, while leaving students in a large debt that most are unable to reconcile with what they got out of it, along with a life-long 'average gpa' that barely reflects abilities.