In the past few weeks I have been passed on for two entry level jobs at a startup. These jobs were 18k a year customer facing roles. As a community pharmacist earning 70k plus a year in a customer facing role, I was prepared to lie about my wage to my family and girlfriend just so I could get a job at a startup. And they still passed me up.

My recent failures in these applications has made me realise with the help of my girlfriend that I in fact dodged a bullet. She stated, quite accurately that I wouldve hated those roles.

A job like that wouldn’t feel like play to me, just work. And I already have a career like that in pharmacy, why do I need to start another.

Finding work that feels like play is hard, it is closely related to specifc knowledge and one of three ways to retire.

I am now starting to view finding work that feels like play in terms of just following my curisoisties and passions and building a job or business around them. That way I benefit from the principle agent effect also.

At the moment writing, coding and deep work are what interests me most. I shall continue to follow my process and practice each day. I already have a half baked journal idea and instagram I can leverage.

How finding work that feels like play is a path to retirement?

Naval believes there are three ways to retire:

1. Have so much money that the interest on it covers your burn rate
2. Get your burn rate down to zero
3. You are doing something you love. You enjoy it so much that it’s not about the money.

Naval says as a young man I should take more time making big decisions, so far in my life I never gave big decisions much time, I just went to whatever uni I got, my friends just fell together and I have the best girlfriend which made me move to Birmingham. While I say I haven’t gave much time deciding. Everything has felt comfortable and natural so I feel like I made the best decisions. Going forward though, to maximise my progress especially in terms of career I need to be aware and spend the appropriate time deciding.

Naval talks about his hourly rate that he set for himself as being 5000 dollars an hour. He set this years before the market thought he was worth that much. He encourages this practice as it reenforces the fact that time is the most valuable asset we have and that no one will ever vale you more than you value yourself, so value yourself highly.

In the third week of a life of focus we explored workflows, how ultimately they are better than habits and how to being to optimise them.

I found the concept of workflows hard to grasp initially, especially as they relate to habits. Workflows are defined as:

A set or rules that tell you how efforts related to a particular type of work are identified, assigned, executed and reviewed.

This concept borrowed from manufacturing is distinct from habits. As instead of actually reducing or simplifying this work, habits just end to help you get through it.

Workflows address the root. They enable you to reduce and organise the work itself, not just help you through it.

We’ve established the importance of workflows, the next question is how do we optimise them.

Cal recommends starting by examining your outputs and working backwards. Your outputs are the types of work products or outcomes that you repeatedly produce?

A professional life made up of optimised workflows feels completely different than a haphazard working life. It’s calmer. You get more done in less time. It’s much more easily controllable.

In addition to the lessons, I have been reviews rule #2 in deep work. Rule #2 embrace boredom is essentially about different methods of increasing your ability to concentrate. Through means and rules such as dedicated screen time, and concentration intensity interval training.

In my third week of the deep work challenge I am starting to think I made my 15 hours a week too ambitious I am averaging out at around 12 each week. I also think that 90 minute deep working blocks are suiting me a lot better than my previous timings.

I had planned to focus on my deep working rituals this week. I have been able to settle on and practice a ritual to start deep work (deep work journal, coffee, eternal youth song, 10 deep breathes), however I am yet to confirm and practice an end of work one. Perhaps what is slowing me down is do I need two, one for the end of a 90 minute block and one for the end of the day.

Judgment- especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountibility and a clear track record- is critical.

Naval’s definition of Judgment is wisdom applied to external events, knowing the long-term consequences of your decisions and acting accordingly.

Judgment in the the age of infinite leverage is crucial, as one right decision can win everything.

Judgment requires experience however can be built faster with foundational knowledge. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is how Elon Musk founded two new industries commerical electric vechicles and commerical space travel. He built these with no prior experience in the respective industries but used his foundational knowledge of physics and mathematics with first principal thinking.

This is an extreme example but it works around the eperience requirement well.

Building foundational knowledge is something I have been thinking about trying to improve. I have a good foundation in sciences and used to like mathematics in school. Naval recommends reading the basics in those disciplines and while I havent started doing that, I have recently started using Brillant an online tool that teaches courses in logic, maths, physics and computer science. My plan is to do 15 minutes per day every day to try to improve my baseline foundational understanding. I came across Brilliant watching Ali Abdall. I will have to see how good it actually is as he was sponsored by them so I have to aware that our incentives may be different.

In terms of reading widely I have restarted a system to get my reading back up to where it was when I was a teenager. I am doing 25 minutes per day of fiction at the minute but with plans to move back onto non-fiction.

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.

Definition: use (something) to maximum advantage.

Leverage in this context can be classified into two types: permissioned and permissionless

Leverage that requires permission to use are captial and labour. Capital is a great form of leverage as it scales very well, wheres labour as leverage is very messy. Labour is the oldest form of leverage and will impress your parents (e.g. if you have a 1000 employees) but it is far from ideal.

The newest forms of leverage are permissionless you don’t need anyone else to get them. The best description of them is products with no marginal cost of replication e.g. intellectual property, code and media. Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.

Build digital leverage. pic.twitter.com/vdzjoTWW3o

— Jack Butcher (@jackbutcher) April 21, 2020

Permissionless leverage is the great equalizer. It can enable you to move past barriers and ceilings that previously stood in the way.

The internet goes hand in hand with infinite leverage and permissionless leverage. It can be argued that the internet is also the great equaliser.

Examples of people operating with maximum leverage.

-Ali Abdaal using his youtube, instagram and twitter to lauch an online course.

-Tim Ferriss using his personal brand and platform to aid psychadelic research

-David McWilliams leveraging his book and economic festivals and his twitter profile to launch a podcast and find guests.

Leverage is the most important concept in the income equation.

Levers are force multipliers.

This is how some people can accomplish 10, 100x, or 1,000,000x what others can.

Leverage can multiply outcomes from your effort, your skill, and your judgement.

— Eric Jorgenson 🛠🏔 (@EricJorgenson) November 12, 2020

The second week of the life of focus course consisted of digesting the science of attention, expanding your frustration threshold and not relying on inspiration.

The science of attention is never something I had paid much attention to in the past. Scott summarized and highlighted the most important take aways from the research around it. The most important being that multitasking is a myth and the big cost of it and distractions is the attention residue they cause.

After diving deeper into the components of working memory we explored ways to increase our frustration threshold. Frustration threshold is the amount of frustration you are able to endure when trying to solve a hard problem or difficult task before giving up. Not suprisingly Richard Feynman came up again as someone with an exceptional frustration threshold.

The final lesson this week came from Cal and about dispelling some of the myths around deep work. Namely that it will be hard and a slog in a deliberate practice sense. Most people myself included imagine deep work in a romantic sense. Locked away in a cabin having the muse guide us through my work. All the while being in a flow state. Cal explains while sometimes that is the case in reality it is much more like deliberate practice. Slow hard won gains over time.

In addition to this weeks lessons I have been rereading and digesting Deep Work, especially the rules for deep work section. I am just finished rule one: work deeply.

Studying the book in tandem with the course helps give me more context and examples to illustrate the concepts.

This week my target of 15 hours seem out of reach. I was called in as a pharmacist on Monday and Tuesday so was immediately down 6 hours of work. I had good days Wednesday through Friday getting a solid 9 hours. Saturday I found myself tired, hungover and not able to concentrate, but still managed 1.5 hours.

I am finding doing 90 minute periods of deep work of certain work much better then Pomodoro cycles. There is some truth in Cal’s recommendation of 90 minutes as it does take some time to get into the swing of the work.

I need to start to iron out my rituals around deep work and that will be my focus this week.

Embrace accountibility and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

Accountibility = Personal Brand + Personal Platform + Risk taking?

Rewards of Accountibility = Responsibility + Equity + Leverage

This formula is fairly straightforward and it is easy to find examples to support it. Just yesterday I was listening to Ali Abdaal describe his formula for building a personal brand and platform it consisted of having a website with your own name and writing a blog post or newletter or whatever each week for two years.

I first came to think about personal branding when researching journals for Tús Maith, one journal I found called ‘My Life Journal’ was really cool and neiche. However the most intersting thing about it was that the personal brand of the creator or it Ana Juma was so strong that she was driving sales of this by herself.

The problem I have with personal branding is that I am scared to put my name out there and promote my work on my own personal socials. I am afraid of what my friends will think. I know that those fears are stupid and will hinder me in the long run but they are still holding me back.

None the less, my main focus at the moment is to build my blog and start a newsletter. I have no problem shouting into the void.

When reviewing the formula I was reminded of a concept I read in Rework by DHH and Jason Fried. They would often pick fights on twitter as part of their risk taking. Now this isn’t meant to personally attack people just ideas and concepts. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited. And that’s a good way to get people to take notice.

After recent set backs in getting a job in startups I have taken a step back and enrolled in another course.. A Life of Focus is a course created by Cal Newport and Scot Young. I am a big fan of both of their work and was drawn to the course as it offered a guided path to deepening my own work and life.

My aim in completing this course is to strengthen my deep working strategies and practices helping me to become a perpetual learner.

The course is split into three months, each month focusing on a different aspect of a focused life. The first month is about focued work, the second is focused life and the final month is a focused mind.

The design of the course is intentionally drawn out to allow students to take monthly challenges with three weekly lessons.

I have just completed the first week of the course and completed the first three lessons. The challenge for the month is to hit your deep-to-shallow work ratio or number deep work hours each week.

I set my daily challenge to be 3 hours a day, with a target of 15 hours a week. I am really torn over whether to add the weekends as deep working days. I should be able to use them but I don’t want to let a bad weekend or two derail my plan completely.

After two days of tracking my hours I am already behind target. I surpirsed myself as I only actually do 2.5 hours a day even though I am ‘working’ from like 9 til 3 each day (6 hours) and sometimes longer.

I also want to be able to enhance this course with concepts of Scott’s and Cal’s books so I can finish the three months as an extremely adept worker and perpetual learner. Extra work I will be doing is reading and digesting daily their books as well as other books on the topics like Josh Waitzkin’s and more.

Day	Hours of Deep Work	Comment
Monday	2.5
Tuesday	0	Day Drinking
Wednesday	2.5
Thursday	2.5
Friday	2.5
Saturday	3	Switched from Pomadoro technique to 90 minute blocks
Sunday

Total 13 hours

Weekly Target 15 hours

All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Most people inlcuding myself, only consider compound interest in terms of finance. I had never thought it could be applied to other areas. We are often told of the benefits of consistency which is essentially compounding. After reading this sections I have been trying to identify areas in my life to apply it to.

The first thing I changed was to stop trying to do marathon 2/3 hour python lessons, some days I would make it, other days I would not. I have now moved to doing just two 25 minute pomodoro sessions each day and I haven’t missed a day in weeks.

When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money.

Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks.

For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.

When I worked in pharmacy I was surrounded by two sets of people, those who loved the job and had a lot of respect for the rules and the profession and those that were there just to pay the bills having been dishearted and disillusioned with the profession. There certainly were some people that you could play long-term games with however there was little or no iteration. The job, teams and rules rarely changed decade to decade.

Partner with people of high intelligence, engery and most importanly integrity. Otherwise they are just smart crooks.

Pharmacy – High intelligence, high integrity, low energy

That is one of the reasons I have opted for moving to startups were iteration happens fast and often. Now it is just up to me to partner with the right people and go all in.

The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

I am grateful I am alive in this internet age, there is no longer a limited number of professions to try to squeeze myself into. You can do anything you like an be paid for it. This doesn’t mean it is easy though, you have to give more value to people then ever before. However if you give incredible value and be authentic you will be compensated hugely.

The internet has democratised consumption and consolidated production. That means the best in the world gets to do it for everyone.

To illustrate this point how many students taking maths or chemsitry attend classes or courses only to go home and actually learn it from YouTube or Khan Acedemy.

Anyone who has watched Ali Abdaal’s income breakdown videos on Youtube will be surprised to see that the money he makes as doctor from one of the most prestigous schools in the world is a drop in the ocean compared to the free videos he makes about study skills. He has genuine interest and passion around study skills, that is easy for any viewer to see.

One tactic I have to help me on my specific knowledge discovery journey is the book “Designing Your Life“. This book is based off a famous class in Stanford’s design school and contains simple exercises for determining your specific knowledge.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until that is true.