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Jargon, Advice, Working Smarter & Modern Experiments

ByGraham Mann

I hope you all had a great week.

I realized last week that the The top 10 job skills of tomorrow link may not have been loading. This one should work.

For all of you that have today as a holiday, I hope you get some rest!

In this week’s newsletter:

Have a wonderful week!

Graham

Blog Post: Why I Hate Jargon

Using jargon—big words, domain-specific words, acronyms—makes us feel good. It makes us feel like experts.

But I've become increasingly convinced that it does more harm than good, and is one of the most frequent causes of communication breakdowns.

We should avoid it in all but a couple cases.

Article: Advice - Patrick Collison

Re-reading this classic article from Patrick Collison, one of the founders of Stripe. Advice applicable across your life, with things like:

  • Make things
  • Practice coming up with your own worldview
  • To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do.
  • Make friends over the internet

Article: Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work

Talent doesn't win, focus and effectiveness does.

The more time I've spent learning about productivity tools and hacks, the more I've realized those aren't the key to elite output.

The people who really separate themselves get better at choosing what to work on, and how they approach it, rather than micro improvements in how much they can get done in a day.

Article: The year that Congress just gave people money

Universal basic income is a topic that comes up over and over.

But we're actually in the middle of the first large-scale experiment in the United States, with the relief packages provided by Congress during COVID-19.

How should that shape our policies moving forward?

Article: Off-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America's back country

#vanlife has been becoming more popular over the past few years, but some people have been doing it for years.

This is an interesting look at some of those people, often using it as a means of living on very little income, with links to more in-depth resources on living from a van.

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Graham Mann

Graham Mann

Builder, product person, and lifelong learner. Writing from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia about software, systems, and the slow work of figuring out how to live well.

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