Retro Recomendo: Career

Recomendo - issue #496

Our subscriber base has grown so much since we first started nine years ago, that most of you have missed all our earliest recommendations. The best of these are still valid and useful, so we’re trying out something new — Retro Recomendo. Once every 6 weeks, we’ll send out a throwback issue of evergreen recommendations focused on one theme from the past 9 years.

How to do great work

Last year, Paul Graham, a renowned programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist known for co-founding Y Combinator, wrote an essay titled “How to Do Great Work.” He covered a wide range of topics, from choosing what to work on to cultivating originality. This week, I came across Peter Schroeder’s terrific visual representation that maps out the main ideas from Graham’s essay. It’s useful even if you don’t read the essay. — MF

Productive meetings

This 1-minute video by John Cleese is all you need to know about how to have productive (vs unproductive) meetings. One minute! Applies to zoom meetings, too. — KK

A guide for daily “professional” interactions

How to professionally say is a list of things you might feel like saying at work — along with a more professional alternative for how to express them. Example: Instead of saying “That sounds like a horrible idea,” you can say “Are we confident this is the best solution, or are we still exploring alternatives?” While some of the phrasing might not flow naturally for me, I’m inspired to adopt more neutrality and directness in my professional language. — CD

Good advice for applying for jobs

I am a big fan of YouTuber Ali Abdaal. In this video about Resumes he condenses a whole book of information presenting the best advice for applying for a job into 30 minutes. It’s the same advice I gave to my kids when they started working. Whether you are looking for a job, or hiring someone, this is worth your time. Forward it to a young person. — KK

A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup

This Two-Minute Burnout Checkup helped me understand the primary factors of chronic stress and burnout. I can sense physically when I am nearing burnout, but before this I didn't understand that it's more than just feeling exhausted. This checkup evaluates six sources of chronic stress: workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. You rate your level of stress from 0–10 for each one and add up the numbers to get a score out of 60. This could be especially helpful if you track your score over time. Here’s a link to the survey. — CD

Ryan Holiday’s career wisdom

Writer and entrepreneur Ryan Holiday has had a varied career, from Hollywood agent assistant to marketing director for American Apparel. He’s put together a list of 37 pieces of hard-fought career advice that’s useful for anyone who works. Examples:

• Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiency and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.

• Always say less than necessary. Saying less than necessary, not interjecting at every chance we get — this is actually the mark not just of a self-disciplined person, but also a very smart and wise person.

• Your creative output, your personal relationships, and your social life—balancing all three is impossible. You can excel in two if you say no to one. If you can’t, you’ll have none.

• When people compete, somebody loses. So go where you’re the only one. Do what only you can do. Run a race with yourself.

— MF

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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others. Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper and Book Freak.