Tangential Tuesdays #43
Deep Laziness, Ode to managers, Regulating Emotions: The most important skill no one bothered to teach you
Hi team, I hope your week is off to a good start!
Work has been a bit of a grind lately, some I’m excited to take a much needed vacation (starting tomorrow 😃). Spending some time with my fam back in NH.
As a result, there won’t be a newsletter next week. Trying to take advantage of the tail end as much as possible.
What I’m listening to
🧠 Deep Laziness
As complex as life seems, a typical human’s behavioral repertoire is made up of a small number of behaviors. These few behaviors make up life; they determine feeling and meaning, moment to moment, day to day. While these few behaviors are intricately connected with each other, resisting legible top-down plans, the system is small enough that it’s tractable.
If you ever meet me in person and want to put me at ease, ask me about running or knitting. These are two of my behaviors, my behavioral centers, and one indication of that is how much I like talking about them specifically. I do feel that there is something special about them, and that they connect to my nature on a fundamental level. In my heart, I think everyone should do mountain running and knitting, because they are the best things.
😃 Regulating Emotions: The most important skill no one talks about
For the bast 6 weeks, I’ve been going to therapy for 1 hour every Monday.
I’ve told almost no one (until now 😊). For whatever reason, I’m at least slightly embarrassed.
Why?
I have problems, like all humans
I have always hated the idea of therapy but been unable to articulate why. Whenever this happens, I take it as a signal that I should try whatever thing I’m questioning
I get 6 weeks of free therapy through my job!
👷♂️An ode to managers.
Corporate managers don’t get enough respect. Their image in the popular culture is still based on the one from the 1950s: A conformist drone doing life-draining work, the man in the grey flannel suit—even if he’s a woman and/or gets to dress down on Friday.
To take the most unpleasant example, have you ever fired someone? In Washington there are people who have fired rockets—and many who have written articles urging others to fire rockets—but have never fired a human being. The natural tendency is to think, “I’m much too nice a person to do that sort of thing”—and to feel superior to anyone without such scruples. Yet in an organization of any size there are going to be people who need or actually deserve to be fired. It is hardly the nicest solution to leave that job to someone nasty enough to enjoy it.
👨💻 The rise of “No Code”
I’ve been thinking about the recent flurry of “No code” tools. Tools that allow people to create things on the internet without writing code.
There’s bubble, webflow, zapier, airtable, shopify, voiceflow, boundless, and so many more.
I want to love these tools. They lower the barrier to becoming a maker!
But count me as a skeptic. No doubt at least part of my skepticism is some cognitive dissonance due to the fact that some amount of my self worth is tied up in knowing how to code, a skill that no code tools could eventually make significantly less valuable.
For this reason, I’m hoping to dive into the space in the coming weeks to explore if there’s any truth behind my skepticism. I’ll definitely share my much less fabricated opinions with the newsletter once I’ve actually built a few things 😅.
That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading.
See you in 2 weeks 😘
- Taylor