“Opting for a school that takes two to three hours of commute in a school bus is a choice. People need to be more cognisant of this and instead opt for a school much closer to home.”
Source: Deccan Herald
Thankfully, recognised the slide and handled it early. Starting with the reminder to self about “No Drama”. Announced to L that I’d need some time by myself. Spent 40 mins just reading the next chapter from the book - Bird by Bird. And I was back!
Often enough though, it’s not very clear on what’s throwing me off. Sometimes it’s internal, sometimes environmental. Often, a mix of both. The headlines these days do not help.
The world surely feels turbulent
When I am walking around with a heavy or anxious head, I like taking this brain-dump: just writing down the full list of each and every little thing that I have going through my head.
From that “call that I need to make in the evening” to “what the hell am I doing with my life” feeling. Doing this has a weirdly calming effect on me. Perhaps a sense of relief that it’s all out there on paper. And with that safety of not losing these thoughts, I stop thinking about them in a loop.
Over the last 3 years - and also reaching further back from my older writings - I’ve been paying closer attention to when I crash and what precedes it. That helps avoiding some of the familiar spirals. Ultimately, I believe this self-knowledge is the structural scaffolding that holds me from crashing down more often.
Some of it is simply knowing my triggers and building around them. Sensationalist headlines are one - like the ones from certain media houses. So are Whatsapp conversations before 10 in the morning, or too many social commitments. And so I work around these. Nothing dramatic - a physical newsletter instead of a feed, deliberately slow mornings, time for a daily-ish walk / run. Basically, a routine woven around what I know drains me and what brings me joy.
Like any habit, this followed the effort curve. It took some effort initially. But after a while, it’s just become a second nature - how I move through the day.
Personal experience. Your mileage may vary.
I kept the other kind of notes too - what actually helped, and when. An hour long walk on a non-routine path usually resets me. Sometimes just announcing my need for a bit of me-time. And then reading a book or creating some cartoons or writing. Or just watching birds and squirrels on the tree outside the window through my binoculars. And I am back!
Bulbul - adult and a chick. And .. sunbird?
This is a continuous exercise, mapping the failure modes and corresponding responses. But after a while, I have started to surprise myself less often. Patterns have become familiar.
Now I know, for instance, that not having written or built anything for a long stretch makes me irritable. But recognising it took a while.
Over time, this self-mapping habit has helped me create my own playbook of sorts, that I actually refer to.
- “Feeling un-moored? Maybe try finishing anything in next 15 minutes - how about cleaning the bathroom?”
- “Feeling frustrated? first of all, remember - No Drama”.
- “Getting overwhelmed by a sense of lack of control? Check if anything on the plate is a totally voluntary commitment.” And so on.
The system has been working for a while now. It’s not perfect. It’s also extremely boring. Structural scaffoldings usually are.
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Who doesn’t love a patronizing government infantilizing its adult citizens
]]>Till well after I completed my engineering, I was not aware that Life Coach is something you can be. As a professional, that is. Till yesterday I did not know about “wellness retreat operator”. And did you hear about the company which is trying to hire for the role of a professional AI bully? Apparently the role is supposed to be for stress testing new AI models.
How many roles like this are sitting outside your current frame, right now?
World's meanest employee - 2027.
Someone not clued into the existence of such roles would not even know to consider them as legitimate options. Ambition is bounded by awareness. And this awareness has traditionally been an accident of your network or your era. Mostly inherited from what your parents did. Or what your friends were trying to get into or what got offered at the college by the placement office. Chances are none of these would have had “Prompt Engineer” / “Influencer” / “Food blogger” on the catalogue. They just did not exist back when I was graduating. And some of these are still not offered as a formal career choice.
Your career awareness remains a reflection of your network’s career awareness. And that compounds.
First-gen professionals start with a narrower slice; and the gap only widens. A year into their career, while our first-gen “engineer” is still getting comfortable with the role, a peer whose uncle was a software engineer back in the day has already heard about product management over a family dinner, already knows people leave TCS for startups, already has someone in the family who can explain what a VC actually does
Sociologists call it the Matthew Effect.
Initial advantages compound. Rapidly.
This blind-spot in the map of possibilities costs time. Sometimes even decades.
A close friend of mine - engineer by training - spent the better part of a decade finding her way to qualitative research. Not because she lacked ability. She just did not know the field existed. She had recently created communication material for an NGO working with impoverished communities - a story format she developed after pestering them to embed her in their field visits. That work eventually became a YouTube video with over 11 million views. But even that experience didn’t show her what she could become. Qualitative research simply wasn’t a field in her orbit. She didn’t know anyone who did it. Instead, she saw her work as proof that she was “good at writing”. So she started writing for an online recipe content farm. Then moved to a newspaper through a connection from a friend’s mother. Then Content Manager. Then a marketing agency. Then a journalism course to improve her prospects, finally working her way to Qualitative Research a couple years later. Each step reasonable. And each step a guess; at best informed by the limited visibility of branches from where she found herself at the moment.
The entire journey took years to arrive somewhere she could have found much earlier, had a map existed. Or if someone in her orbit showed her the options.
The discovery gap doesn’t mean people can’t forge new paths. Some do. But “stumble into it over years” is not the best system to rely on. Stuck in a cookie-cutter role mass-manufactured, people start to chafe. They start “looking out”, unsure of the direction. At best, they know ‘not this’. Which puts them in the explore mode. And exploration is not something the typical career-navigation tools are built for.
Job boards need you to already know what you are looking for. You type a title into a search bar. If you do not know the title exists, the search bar is useless. It is a tool for the ladder-climber.
LinkedIn shows you what people like you already do. Which is perpetuating the same problem: reflecting your existing network’s career awareness back at you. If your network does not contain a single “Red Teamer” or “Somatic Therapist”, neither will your feed.
Placement offices bring whoever comes to campus. Which is itself a filter. Only certain kinds of companies, with certain kinds of roles, with certain kinds of hiring volumes bother to show up. The rest of the landscape simply does not exist in that room.
Knowing a role exists is one thing. Knowing someone who does it - someone who can say “this is real, here’s how I got here” - is different. That is what I have been calling the “Network Capital”,1. It doesn’t just open doors. It makes doors visible as doors.
This access-gap is partly responsible for the discovery-gap but it is a whole different problem on its own. Did you think just because I happened to know about “Farm-to-Table” entrepreneur”, I could simply become one? Does not work that way. Usually you need to know someone who knows someone who can open these doors for you. Just to let you have a real glimpse of what is it like on the other side. And should you want to go through, show you the ropes. But this uneven distribution of network-capital is a different problem for a different post.
Most career interventions - mentorship, internships, introductions - address the access gap. Almost nothing addresses the discovery gap, which comes earlier and matters more. And this gap has always been hard to close from the outside.
AI is disrupting entire industries faster than awareness of new roles can travel through normal networks. And in the process, making the discovery problem all the more acute. From both the supply-side with the fast changing landscape, as well as on the demand side - with a lot of people forced to navigate this changing landscape.
Careers which did not exist five years back would be all the rage, only to fade away just as suddenly. Remember “Prompt Engineering”? Now we have “Red Teamer”, “Head of personality alignment”, “AI bully” and more.
I spent good part of a week inside a dataset of over 600,000 professional profiles from a global community platform - extracting job titles, skill tags, career bios - trying to map this landscape. The dataset had 85,872 unique job titles across 604,000 records. Even after filtering down to a sample of just 38,000 most detailed records from the dataset, the clustering produced 343 distinct role identities. This was after normalising self-described role descriptions and designations across orgs. These were roles most people have never heard of. Roles that didn’t exist when a lot of us were sitting for placement interviews at college. In fact, a lot of these are still not part of the career-discussions. And this was just one platform, skewed toward the creative and indie economy.
The rate of the role creation or role change has far outpaced the rate of role visibility. And the people with the fullest map are not necessarily the smartest. They just started in a room with more doors visible to them.
CareerMap is one attempt at the discovery layer - Think of it like Google Maps, but for careers.
You can explore the landscape to see what’s out there, including the roles you’ve never heard of. Eventually, it will also show you the different paths to reach a particular point - say, Quantum Mechanics YouTuber from wherever you currently are, say HR at a SaaS company. The system would show different routes: through reading, through certifications, through degrees. Routes will have different milestones displayed. Also rough time-estimates per path.
Right now, I have only started on the first part: mapping the landscape. The v2 and v3 will tackle the paths.
It is not a job board. Click a role, see what it actually involves, find what sits adjacent to it. Or let it auto-scan to give you a tour of all that’s out there. It starts with the indie and micro-economy space because that is where the gap felt most urgent and least served.
Career Clusters in the indie space. An interactive demo with path-details coming soon.
It still does not solve the network problem. It does not fix access. It just tries to make more doors visible.
1: Network Capital is not something I coined. I am just using it in a crude manner in the sense I mentioned here. ↩
]]>If the discovery-gap or network-gap in career exploration resonates with you, I’d love to hear your story, thoughts and ideas on how to best address these. DM me or reply here.
Gave me my new maxim - “Don’t be scared. Fuck around a bit.” :D
]]>And it’s only getting worse, with machines joining the act now, pushing out content. And some are getting quite good beyond that generic LLM slop we have all come to hate. “warranty-void-if-regenerated” - for example by @scottwerner
Recently got back a suitcase full of old comics and books we had got for my younger siblings...they have outgrown these now. Me, I am not sure.
But even before the machine-generated abundance of content, I was finding my reading habit getting a bit out of hand. More like an eating disorder, only for reading. I suppose we are all familiar with that consumption disorder - for some content or another: No portion control, often triggered by stress. Or other triggers. Opening news.google.com or news.ycombinator.com for the fourth time in the day, when I had just opened the PPT I was supposed to be working on. And in that sense, reading - like any other consumption habit - was becoming a blocker for me. An escape mechanism from the real stuff I needed to get done, the moment things got a little tough.
I was consuming mindlessly.
Reading mindlessly is, in fact, more insidious than mindless food consumption. Because here I often felt like I was consuming good content - staying on top of the news, reading detailed articles, learning about new technologies, or even reading good books. All stuff that was enriching me somehow.
And maybe so. But at the cost of preventing progress on my very real goals.
I have been working on reading better. But I still keep falling back into that pattern for weeks before getting myself out of the loop. It used to be longer, so in that sense I have improved.
What were my go-to materials? In no particular order:
Tech and AI newsletters: about five, some of them daily, each with links to 10-15 articles. That’s 25-30 articles per day potentially. I wouldn’t go through all of them, but still at least 10-12.
Hacker News: Top 30, plus common threads on all of those. About 4-5 from that list.
Google News: I try not to go beyond the front page, but I still refresh 3-4 times a day and read one or two pieces.
Rabbit holes: every piece I read would often lead somewhere else. A search here, a new tool there, and off I went on a short deep detour. Sometimes I’d spend significant time playing with a new piece of software I stumbled upon.
The current book: I usually have one going. Currently it’s Influence by Cialdini, which I just started.
Substack: about 10 feeds I subscribe to, but I don’t really read them all. Three or four I try to keep current with; the rest, whenever I can, or when I want to deep-dive. Unlike the rest, there are actual people on the other end of these - writers who might respond if you engage. Which makes “ignoring the feed” feel different.
These streams aren’t all equal, and I haven’t treated them as such; which brings me to how I consume all of this now.
@henrikkarlsson draws a distinction between two modes of reading - searching and chasing - and goes into the latter at length in How he reads. Most of my reading is aimless wandering instead of active chasing. The chasing percentage has started picking up fairly recently over last couple of years.
Something that surprised me on what a “small” fraction of the books he starts, he actually finishes. Which echoes Naval Ravikant’s philosophy as well. Somehow, I have always struggled at leaving a book unfinished. But then, I do not pick as many books either. Which, I suppose, does reduce the discovery surface for new ideas that I engage with.
But I feel I am generally okay with how I read books of any type. These days - on my ebook reader which allows me to take copious notes. I see myself adding notes showing exasperation, detailed rants, nodding-along and also adding emojis at times. All time-stamped and everything. After finishing, I go back to these notes and review these too. Maybe collect some thoughts for later, or flag action items for myself. I am usually thorough. And that needs work.
Besides material for later work, reviewing these highlights and notes right after finishing the book also reveals some interesting patterns.
Engaging this deeply with books do not burn me out though. Neither does checking HackerNews / Google News - sometimes for the fourth time in the day. Although that does waste a lot of my time. In fact, I think I’m getting better at being more mindful about which articles I read on HN, and I usually don’t go there more than once a day. For some long threads, I now throw them at AI to quickly summarize the thread — not the article. Google News also remains once or twice a day, but doesn’t consume more than 20 minutes at the higher end. Hacker News overall takes about 30–60 minutes, I suppose.
Those detours and rabbit-holes - they keep happening. Even though I’ve been trying to be more mindful. These days I’ve been saving interesting pieces I find on such detours to pursue later - as a note to myself on Signal or increasingly, using my own web-extension I built for this. This collected list has become yet another source I try to get on top of weekly.
That leaves tech newsletters and Substack. The pattern here keeps oscillating between daily skimming of all that is new across my feed and accumulated deep dives every week or two.
This newsletter and feed is what burns me out the most. I suppose, that’s because it is endless and aimless. I am not specifically chasing anything and there is no clear definition of done. That can get tiring.
These days, I’ve even been letting some old editions just fall away unread. I used to have a problem with that, like leaving an email unread. But I’m getting used to it, at least for newsletters.
Substack works the same way. The two or three I try to keep up with get treated like newsletters — either same-day or accumulated, then powered through in one sitting, depending on the phase. The others I want to engage with meaningfully, but I often don’t have the time or capacity, sometimes both. Occasionally I’ll binge-read through someone’s recent 10–12 posts in a single session, like I did a few days back with Same Here by @shrutisoumya .
But there’s this feeling that I am missing out interacting with a bunch of genuine people and their ideas that resonate a lot. Because by the end of it, I don’t have the energy to engage meaningfully; and before I know it, the next cycle of new posts has already begun the next day.
Tuğba Avci suggests following a ‘slow media’ approach - the idea that you can create more than you consume, by staying in genuine contact with what you’re reading. I recognize myself in it. I do create a lot: notes, drafts, articles, tools for organizing all of the above. The instinct is there. But I’ve also learned to watch that instinct, because building infrastructure around reading can become its own form of avoidance.
I found myself nodding along in familiarity to a lot of those suggestions Tuğba offers. When it truly works, the pattern for me has been: I’m reading toward something. A question, a project, a piece I’m already writing. The material has somewhere to go.
But absent that, it is just an endless hamster-wheel.
One of the purposes for reading well for me is to meet more interesting people to engage with. And that’s not been happening with the lack of energy to engage with that endless feed.
At the risk of falling down my familiar rabbit-hole of creating infrastructure instead of actually taking action, I wonder if there can be a system that would help me engage better with people and their ideas. It cannot be truly at scale if I want to still be myself, and not faking “engagement” via some sort of AI. The system would surface just the 3-4 pieces which would truly resonate with me. And it would need to be better than Substack’s feed which is endless and tends to get stuck in single tracks, over-fitting to my most recent engagements.
The payoff seems good enough to give it a try.
Current state: Cialdini getting 10-15 minutes a day. Not really chasing. Newsletters lapsing unread, which has started to feel okay rather than some sort of personal failure. The six streams are still running, but I dip in now and then instead of trying to dam it all up.
Tuğba’s “slow media” framing is appealing but designed for someone with one stream and time to be deliberate about all of it. I’m not that person right now. Although I still have noted her idea of trying to respond to one medium through another. The more useful question for me right now isn’t how to consume more slowly. It’s whether what I’m consuming is going anywhere. And whether I am engaging with just the content or also the people behind them.
Looking forward to see how it shapes up for me.
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