[AKN #79] Do You Hate Your Job Or Do You Just Have No Hobbies?
LAUGH: The Meme That Really Got Me This Week, LOVE: Nuclear Power Regulation
Sup homies?
I recently bought out the lease on my car because I ended up on the right side of the semiconductor chip shortage.
But honestly, Tesla made me second guess my decision because they just started selling karaoke microphones which integrate with their car.
I feel I owe it to the world to buy a Tesla now…otherwise the new feature will only showcase that the cars are driverless and the passengers are talentless.
Our ears don’t deserve that and I really would love a car that just drove me around.
But I’m not sure I’m ready to hand the keys over to the machines.
Like I just don’t get how a computer is going to be able to handle the complexity of the same Map apps I deal with every day.
Feels like every year these Map apps somehow get worse and honestly at this point all the features they add make them worse.
Like Apple Maps recently erected a gigantic digital wall to hide Tim Cook's house.
How is a self-driving car gonna deal with that?
And what a stupid way to try and throw people off the scent of where Tim Cook lives.
You think if I’m a stalker and I’m going into the fucking street by street view of Palo Alto looking for a celebrity’s house a digital wall is going to stop me?
If anything it narrowed my search!
Hell, why did you stop with the wall? Let’s have the developers add some digital graffiti which says "Not Tim Cook's House." No way I check there now!
These apps are so whack.
Not saying I want to go back to tracing out my route with a pen on my fold up paper map, but I am saying that paper maps didn’t have some of the same issues we deal with now.
You never saw UFOs on paper maps.
You just felt stupid after you inevitably got lost. But at least now whenever you feel stupid, you can think about how even super intelligent beings from another planet forget where they parked their car.
But one area where I have to give the Map apps credit is their ability to find a store you don’t usually shop at.
Like you know those times when you need to find the nearest Walmart because they just dropped a huge announcement about how Little Debbie's Swiss Rolls Ice Cream is now available?
Lead me to the promise land, Google Maps!
You know, it’s actually a pretty fascinating story how Swiss Roll became an ice cream flavor.
So Little Debbie’s product line was full until about two months ago, but a space in the line opened up after Little Debbie's Creme Pies moved to OnlyFans.
Great to see the Creator Economy empowering people to make money doing their hobbies.
Which brings me to today’s topic.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Do You Hate Your Job Or Do You Just Have No Hobbies?
Allow me to tell you a common story from the depths of Silicon Valley engineering culture…
A young engineer starts at a job and promptly throws his entire life into it.
His personality merges with the company mission and culture.
He laps up the company Kool Aid — or more accurately the ginger berry kombucha — like a pitbull dying of thirst.
As a result, he moves up quickly and gains outsized responsibility for someone his age.
It makes sense. Of course a company wants someone who is ready to throw all their waking hours into something for reasons he can’t articulate!
Everything seems to be going well, but then a weird thing happens:
This all star putters out.
You watch as the life drains from his eyes. His spirit dies. He becomes hard to work with.
Then he quits and takes a 6-month sabbatical to ruminate about his "purpose" in the only place millennials can find meaning — Bali.
This whole cycle takes about 2-3 years to play out.
Then, our hero returns from his pilgrimage to privileged Mecca refreshed and reinvigorated by a sense of “purpose” which he is ready to turn into reality.
He heads over to LinkedIn and triumphantly announces:
As you know, my mission in life is to change the world so I am excited to announce my next play is...[EXACTLY THE SAME JOB I DID AT A COMPETITOR COMPANY]
Inevitably, the burnout cycle begins again.
Because — as Jon Kabat-Zinn says — wherever you go, there you are.
And so it goes.
The Problem With Working All The Time
The reason our caricature of a millennial trying to find his purpose continually sets himself up for failure is he doesn't address the real issue at hand.
His real problem is he has no sense of self.
He sacrificed all of the things which made him unique when he chose to merge his entire life with his work life and become a devotee of workaholism.
Gone are the hobbies.
No time for friends and family.
Who has time to work out?
"I have business to do!" he says, all the way up until that moment of clarity where he suddenly understands that where he works wholly defines who he is.
He reasons with himself that sure work blends into all hours of the morning and night, but it isn't all that bad when you weigh the rewards, right?
After all, he just received another 5 Mini Coopers worth of RSUs with surprisingly close vesting dates!
Plus, he likes being challenged mentally by working with smart people on hard problems.
He tells himself that work's slow creep into every nook and cranny of his life is the price he must pay to work on these problems with these people and get paid well.
Like sure, he hasn't played badminton in a few years now, but he has it gooddddd so isn't that a trade-off he should be OK making?
No.
Full stop.
No, it's not.
Why? Because it's not about badminton. It's about what not playing badminton represents.
The Life Changing Habit Of Making Time For Your Hobbies
Regularly indulging in hobbies can change your life.
I know because it changed mine after I spent a decade essentially being the character in our story above.
(Minus the trip to Bali because I'm not a MASSIVE chode who thinks traveling to some new age spiritual wonderland will solve my problems.)
Hobbies are great and I am going to tell you why.
However, let's come straight away and say it:
Continuing your dominance of the badminton court is not about transitioning to becoming an Olympic badminton player.
This isn't about getting your jersey raised to the rafters or being voted into the Hall of Golden (shuttle)Cocks.
Instead it's about learning the art of making time for the things which give you energy rather than take away energy.
You see, working requires more energy expended than it gives back, whereas hobbies return more energy back to you than you put into them.
In this way, hobbies are essentially a perpetual energy source for your energy supply.
Which is why incorporating them into your schedule can be a game changer for your energy levels and general excitement about life.
All you have to do is actually apply the advice of carving out the time to work on them….which is where we run into a problem.
But, You Don't Get It...I Can't
Most people don't make time for hobbies.
In The Power Of Full Engagement (PoFE), the authors reflect on this phenomenon when they say:
During the past decade, we have been surprised and dismayed to discover how infrequently most people undertake activities simply because they are enjoyable and emotionally nourishing.
Obviously, most people think "hobbies are optional."
I certainly thought that for the last 10 years.
That is, until I decided to give it a shot and “get back into this ole writing thing again.”
After indulging in my writing hobby, I noticed a profound shift in my energy levels.
Overnight, my general level of enthusiasm about waking up jumped through the roof. Day to day, I found myself excited to do something different than slide onto my work computer and talk about engineering into a screen.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love engineering.
But I’m going to make a bold claim: People are allowed to like multiple things.
In fact, indulging in multiple things you like makes you like all of those things more.
Why?
Because on the worst days at work, I find myself whistling dixie because I knew earlier that day I got some writing done. And for whatever reason writing rejuvenates my energy supply. I can’t explain why. It just does. It brings me joy.
So much joy that I find I HAVE to write to function normally now.
But I almost never got back into it because I had two major objections to getting into hobbies…
Objection 1: I Don't Have Time To Spend On Things Which Don't Make Money
Unfortunately, a chronic lack of time and the inability to make money while participating in hobbies meaningfully reduces people's participation in them.
The argument goes like this: "I don't have time to play children's games, I have to be making money!"
On the surface, this logic makes sense, however I would say this is a short sighted hot take.
Because while you might not get rewarded financially for participating in your hobby week over week, you are getting something else. Namely, you are rejuvenating your emotional energy supply.
In a world where you are participating in hobbies, you are running on a full tank of energy and when that is your state, you are likely to avoid burnout and emotional exhaustion from your regular money making job.
So what you are calling “playing children’s games” can in many ways be the difference between surviving a tough job sustainably for years versus quitting and going to find yourself.
Like seriously. The alternative is bleak.
Without hobbies, you allow yourself to run at an energy deficit.
Your life is slowly sucked out of you.
You become miserable over time and transition to a power plant of negative energy.
Then suddenly you quit the thing you depend on for income…
That doesn't seem like a very financially favorable outcome!
But even if we agree with that line of reasoning, it doesn’t really solve our time problem.
We are busy!
How can we make time to play croquet with the lads?
Again, the authors of PoFE have some thoughts:
The key, we have found, is making such activities priorities, and treating the time that you invest in them as sacrosanct.
In other words, you need to schedule your hobbies like you would schedule a work meeting then hold to that schedule.
This works. I promise.
Once I started scheduling my hobbies, magically I found the time to do them.
Additionally, once you figure out that all you needed to do was schedule it, you mysteriously begin realizing this relates to other parts of your life too.
More hang outs with friends.
More family vacations.
More visits to the Hall of Golden (shuttle)Cocks in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Again, this goes much deeper than just doing the things you love.
Making time for your hobbies is the gateway drug to being intentional with how you spend your time.
Objection 2: I Used To Do More Hobbies But They Started To Bring Less And Less Joy
This is a common trap I fall into. I call it turning my hobby into my jobby.
Allow me to explain.
If this hasn't become clear to you over the previous 78 editions of this newsletter, I LOVE competition and "getting better" at whatever it is I'm doing.
I can't turn this off.
I desire to win and get better. This can be healthy. It’s good to strive for growth.
However, I can take it to another level when I actively push myself to the limit to get better at something which I purely do for leisure.
Like I’m such an ass hat that I seriously injured myself playing Whiffle Ball at a Bachelor Party because I am a competition enthusiast committed to trying to go yard when someone throws me a hanging breaking ball.
(So maybe you shouldn’t be taking advice from me…)
I commonly start doing something for fun and then have that thing I once loved slowly become another thing which drains energy rather than rejuvenates.
It turns into another task I must do rather than get to do because I fixate on getting better at it rather than just doing it cause it’s fun.
In my obviously scientific and exhaustive studies looking into this, I found the only way to avoid this fate is to be intentional.
I watch how my feelings towards the thing I am doing changes as I begin to do it more and more.
For instance, I actively fight this urge for this very newsletter!
Like I used to list the number of subscribers to this newsletter and celebrate the ones I added week over week.
But soon I found myself with this belly full of anxiety.
Where am I going to find another new 10 people? I need to find more people to read this.
I could feel writing become a task on my to do list as I became laser focused on "growth" and how many people I could reach with "my message."
It took journaling on it to finally ponder aloud to myself: “why the fuck am I wasting my time doing that?”
I do this because I love it and sharing it with people is a bonus.
Plus I don't care about the quantity of those people as much as I care about the quality.
I would rather develop a deep relationship with 6 people who religiously read my work than receive half glances from 6,000 people after I "growth hack" my way into their inbox.
Or to make an analogy, I would rather have 6 people who call me on my birthday than 6,000 who like my birthday post on Facebook and send a generic: "Happy birthday, Kevin! Rgds".
So I slowed down.
I revisited the reasons I liked doing this and I removed the subscriber counter.
I refused to turn writing into a jobby.
Because some things don’t need to be quantifiably improved.
Reclaim Your Hobbies
So let’s turn the lens on to you, my reader friend. My homie, if you will.
Do you have hobbies?
Maybe you enjoy singing, gardening, or critiquing Baroque art (or some other weird shit you don’t tell people you like).
Whatever they are, how many hours a week do you devote to them?
If the answer is zero, can you make 30-min this week to work on just one?
Doesn’t matter if you think it’s silly. Just schedule it on your calendar!
Once you do that, hit reply to this email and tell me what you’re going to do.
Because you deserve to be doing fun shit again!
Seriously. I hope you take having more fun seriously.
Even if it feels silly to pencil in a dance break after your 3p 1:1 with your manager.
Because, to quote the Philosopher Queen Lee Ann Womack, my hope for you is that:
When you get the choice to sit it out or dance.
LAUGH: The Meme That Really Got Me This Week
LOVE: Nuclear Power Regulation
The way out of the energy crisis is harnessing nuclear power.
(Here is a slide deck that goes over the key points about why that is true.)
So I was wondering the other day “why are no big name entrepreneurs working on getting nuclear up and running?”
The answer?
Regulation.
And let me tell you, it is something to marvel at.
For example, here are two startling facts:
In the year 1975, the US created the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC).
Since then, ZERO new nuclear power plants in the US have ever reached operation.
[new meaning entities whose initial application for a construction permit / operating license (or a combined license) was filed with the NRC, h/t Patrick Collison]
Marcelo puts this astonishing statistic into perspective below:
Eli Dourado @elidourado
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. In the entire history of the agency, no license initially submitted to the NRC has yet begun operations. 🤯The statistics become even more bonkers when you consider how there have been 100+ nuclear power plants built for the Navy’s nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers in this same time period.
How did they get around the NRC?
The NRC doesn’t regulate military reactors!
The NRC approved one design for a small modular nuclear reactor.
In total, it:
Took 42 months to approve
Required a 12,000 page application along with 2 MILLION pages of "additional documents."
Cost at least $100 million to put together the application.
We are not going to get where we need to go with the consistent political road blocks which stand in the way of nuclear power plant construction.
This should be a much a bigger deal than it is.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
K.Rapp
Do you have any advice for someone who should have a hobby but appears to not have any interests whatsoever?