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Ha, author here -- I'm probably a member of this group myself. I bootstrapped my first company and then ran a small consultancy for awhile.

Spent some time at a fund, but we primarily bought and operated SaaS companies as cash flow businesses. It's been base hits all the way.

I think if you're happy with building a business that gives you freedom and work life balance, this can be a great life. Personally, I eventually got tired of consulting even though it was good money and lifestyle. There were other things I wanted to work on that I didn't have time for, and I wanted to create something of my own, rather than just working on other people's projects.

But that's just my experience--I think if you're happy in the freelance / agency life, it can be great, but you are still ultimately selling time for money. Maybe this is a 4th path, the career craftsman--working a job you enjoy with people you like, and not needing your work to be as aligned with a "passion" or some sort of calling.

Just my $0.02 -- appreciate the comment and will have to make my writing sound less like an AI in the future ^_^;;

Yep -- this is where I tend to see people end up after doing a sabbatical. That, or they alternate between periods of highly paid work and periods bumming skydiving, making art, etc.

Hey, author of the post here. My takeaway after trying all these strategies is that there's no one right answer. All paths can work but also have failure states.

If you want to talk, feel free to drop me a note - hi@nosmallplans.io. I spent 2 years doing consulting before shifting into other work, happy to share more specific thoughts / reflections offline.

What's the community?

South Park Commons is kind of like RC, but with more of a startup focus.

Ran something Recurse-y back in the day (recesslabs.com), but put it in the freezer after a few cohorts.

There was a german version for awhile (Hackership), but they shut down too.

RC is very cool, but to my knowledge there are not a ton of current variants!

Thinking of a new project, Zach? :P

This is on point! I’ve written about this a bunch here: humanmissives.com

And hosted a conference on it here: summit.opendiv.org

Just thought I’d share — may give you some additional academic perspective!

I hear you — taking some time off can definitely help.

The one other idea I’d offer is that the way you’re talking about drinking is a sort of “dead person goal.” In behavioral psych we define this as a goal that a dead person can accomplish better than an alive person.

A dead person will be really good at not drinking.

To turn it into an “alive person goal,” all you need to do is make it positive — ask yourself, what am I moving towards that I care about by not drinking?

Maybe this is a better relationship with work, connection to family, health, or even something like making space for healing. Whatever it is, the more you can focus on what you do want to move towards rather than what you want to move away from, the greater chance you’ll have at tapping into vitality and engagement in your day to day.

All that being said, this can be easier said than done. Especially if you’re burnt out, taking time off and getting back in touch with doing things for the intrinsic rewards can go a long way towards rekindling the spirit.

I quit drinking ~9 years ago. I tried to start several companies while drinking, built and exited a company after quitting. Now I work as an exec coach w/ a focus on recent applied research in behavioral psychology. All that to say, I’ve thought a lot about both healthy / unhealthy alcohol use and productivity. Here’s my $0.02.

I’m not of the mind that no one should drink, but if you’re noticing that it’s hard to work and be productive without alcohol, you might want to explore that more before going back to drinking.

It could be as simple as you’re using alcohol to get past the initial discomfort of starting a task / etc, or it could be that it’s a way of avoiding some deeper emotional issue (anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc).

Regardless, even if you continue drinking, it would be ideal if you could access vitality and excitement and productivity without needing alcohol, so you can freely choose when to drink and when not to. If you can’t be productive without drinking, on some level you’ve developed a dependence on it, and this is not typically a great place to be. Even if you never have major consequences, it just tends to make the joy of everything else a little duller.

The fact that you’ve quit for 6 months and still aren’t feeling more excited seems indicative that something else is going on, whether you’ve replaced alcohol with something else (caffeine, nicotine), you actually don’t enjoy your work, or you were drinking quite a bit and your brain is still recovering. It can take 6-24 months for people who were significantly alcohol dependent to get through “post acute withdrawal” and return to normal brain activity. If you drink during that period, it more or less resets.

Anyways, hope the above is helpful for some context. If you want to talk, drop me a note.

College degree is a requirement for most work visas. Otherwise, you can show significant work experience, but from what I remember last I checked (been a few years since I looked into this), it's a significantly higher hurdle in terms of # of years.

If anyone is interested, I'm currently starting a weekly ZK meetup on Zoom w/ a few founder friends who want to dive into the method.

Format is:

* 15 mins - check in on your workflow * 30 mins - work on your ZK (write notes, refactor, etc.) * 15 mins - set ZK goals for upcoming week and discuss tactics

If you're interested in joining, drop me a quick note to the email in my profile with a bit about yourself and experience in the method!

This feels like a great way to get data on how all these different e-commerce companies approach remarketing.

I work for a company that offers hosted Prometheus + Graphite + Grafana services. We're always looking for more good content.

If you'd be interested in chatting about potentially doing some paid tutorial creation for us, shoot me an email: casey@metricfire.com

Open-ended, as opposed to a leading question (one where the solution is pre-supposed).

Have met Henrik a couple times -- super fascinating, very down to earth guy.

Interesting to get a peek at what goes on behind the curtain.

You can have uniting religion, ethnicity, or purpose and still have multiculturalism. You just have people deeply engaged with separate communities.

The real problem he’s talking about is disaffiliation —- people not feeling connected to any overarching group to which they experience a sense of belonging.

In a city like NYC, the only people you really see regularly are the people you live with, the people you work with, and the people you sleep with.

Finding good roommates is definitely one way to solve the problem, but if you’re not knee deep in a community with a strong sense of values and culture (like EA), finding matches can be challenging.

Also, as someone who has been in and around this space, several of the coliving companies you mentioned are not doing well financially.

Especially in NYC, all of the coliving spots (some of which have raised significant capital) have almost all their inventory in deep Brooklyn or Queens. It’s nearly impossible to find a good share in the city unless you stumble into it or create it with friends, which depends on having a wide network of people who have leases ending around the same time (or who are willing to break leases). Also, much of the good housing inventory is either taken or overpriced, so part of this also depends on either having wealthy friends or finding a way to finagle a deal on a place before it hits the market.

Last thing I’ll say is that one of the reasons why people only see roommates, coworkers, and partners regularly is because of lack of religious / school affiliation. It’s hard to get people to commit to something weekly, but if you can do it, it’s way easier to spin up than coordinating a group house.

The past few months I’ve been doing a weekly Monday breakfast with 2 friends —- it’s quickly become the highlight of all of our weeks.

Other than, I think the best choice is to find (or create) something that you’re willing to commit to at least 1x per week. Finding a spiritual institution (even an agnostic friendly one like humanist society or Unitarian church), picking up a martial art, or auditing a course at a local grad school (this is my recent fav) are all ways you can find more depth in city life.

+1 for the idea of community porn, though. 1-off events just aren’t the same.

I think it’s also possible that some people aren’t looking for altered states from their mindfulness practices.

I think this is actually the exact problem the article talks about.

It’s possible to engage with mindfulness practices without buying into the entire Buddhist belief system.

This comment reinforces the author’s (I believe mistaken) point, that mindfulness sneaks in a bunch of Buddhist ideology. In my experience, it’s been possible to benefit from the practices while deciding some of the more doctrinal Buddhist beliefs (like non-self / anatta) don’t resonate.

Great post Tim! Crazy to see how far things have come since the Venture Generation days :)

Do you remember the post? Trying to find.

In many ways, this was my story growing up until I got really into soccer.

I started playing late, but loved the game, so clawed my way up through practicing in much of my spare time, whether down by the field or in the street in front of my house.

Soccer pre-season conditioning also was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done, and left me in the best shape of my life. This instilled the feedback loop of effort = reward that was missing due to academics coming so easily.

If you have a gifted child, find a sport they enjoy and encourage the hell out of it.

Super curious to learn more about the lucrative furry art niche and how you came across it.

Surprised no one else has mentioned this part of the comment.

Nick Sibicky's lectures on how to play Go (well) made a huge difference when I started playing. I dont play as much nowadays, but I still think about some of his strategic concepts as they relate to startups.

I don't get the argument that giving data to Foursquare / Swarm is somehow better. It seems to be the same misaligned incentives as he argues exists with Facebook, they just haven't taken in as much data yet. For years people have been making the same argument about Facebook (the data makes the ads more relevant).

I run a curated community of tech people in transition here in NYC: recesslabs.com

Check us out, and if you're interested, feel free to shoot me an email with some info about your background! If it's a fit, I can invite you to some of our events. We typically look for people with some startup experience who are looking to play around with side projects.

You should check out Toptal / Gigster.

No one can guarantee a lifetime connection. Relationships take work, and people are complicated. They change over time. All one can do is put in the work and appreciate the time when it's going well.

If you're in or around NYC (or can get there), go see Kevin Paretti - Kinephys.com. I was in a similar boat, had surgery, saw 10+ PTs over 4 years. Within 6 months of seeing this guy I was back to full contact sports. Hands down 10x better than anyone else I saw.

If any of you are interested in working on side projects full time, we're starting a community in NYC of people doing just that.

Check us out if interested: recesslabs.com

For me, my last side project was a crypto-related joke site (sendcryptopeopletulips.com).

I think the next one will also be a humor + tech project. I'm really interested to explore tech as a medium for comedy.

Somewhat related: a friend and I created a service that sends your friends pictures of tulips when the crypto markets crash.

It started off as a joke over dinner, but now it's a fully functional product. More info here: sendcryotopeopletulips.com