Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion

For myself, I wish I’d known the value of developing early expertise in interesting new skills around emerging technologies (rather than just iteratively pseudo-honing the 202-level skills I thought I “understood”). Alongside that, I wish I’d learned to embrace the non-douchier aspects of building awesome human relationships (as against “networking” in the service of landing some straight job that, as with most hungry young people, locked me into a carpeted prison of monkey work at the worst time possible).

Also how I wish I’d paid more attention to events, contexts, relationships, and change that were happening outside my immediate world —rather than becoming, say, the undisputed master of fretting about status, salary, and whether I was “a success” who had “arrived”. […]

Truly, pretty much anyone who feels they’ve “arrived” anyplace is about to learn a) how much more they could be doing outside the narrowness of an often superficial ambition and b) the surprising number of things they had to give away through the opportunity costs and trade-offs that lead up to every theoretical milestone. It’s a real goddamned thistle, and it’s more than a little depressing.