Study Hacks Blog

Madison Fischer, a professional sport climber, recently pointed me toward an insightful essay she published on her blog about her battle with social media.

Early in her climbing career, Madison was exposed to Instagram. At first she posted pictures of her cat; then pictures of competitions; then her training; then she had a professional account where she could carefully track the demographics of her viewers, optimizing when she posted, and synchronizing her online behavior with a carefully-calibrated content calendar.

This sudden influencer status was impossibly appealing:

“I wanted the congratulations. I wanted admiration. I wanted my follower count to grow. I wanted everyone to envy my life and achievements. I wanted, no, needed people to tell me I was going places…But you can’t blame me. It’s so easy, so stimulating. It’s not even a statement that you have Instagram, it’s assumed. Everyone’s doing it.”

But something didn’t feel quite right about the increasingly artificial life she was constructing online. Beyond the “obvious egotism” issues, she began to lose touch with her true self: “I started believing this narrative of a girl…living the dream,” she writes, “traveling around the world to compete while finding the time for school, work, and a relationship.”

Read more

In Episode 4 of my Deep Questions podcast (posted Monday), a reader named Jessica asked my opinion about the future of social media. I have a lot of thoughts on this issue, but in my response I focused on one point in particular that I’ve been toying with recently: Facebook may have accidentally developed a fatal flaw.

To understand this claim, we have to rewind to the early days of this social platform. The original pitch for Facebook was that it made it easier to connect online with people you knew. The content model was simple: you setup a profile, people you knew setup profiles, and everyone could then check each others’ vacation pictures and relationship statuses.

For this model to be valuable, the people you knew had to also use the service. This is why Mark Zuckerberg focused at first on college campuses. These were closed communities in which it was easy to build up enough critical user mass to make Facebook fun.

Once Facebook moved into the range of hundreds of millions of users, competition became difficult. The value of a network with a hundred million users was exponentially larger than one with a million, as the former was much more likely to connect you with the people you cared about. It was on the strength of this model that Facebook emerged as a powerful social internet monopoly.

The problem, however, was that they weren’t making enough money.

Read more

In 2012, I published a book titled So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It argued that “follow your passion” was bad career advice. I didn’t claim that passion was a problem, but instead argued that it was too simplistic to assume that the key to career satisfaction was as easy as matching your job to a pre-existing inclination. For many people, this slogan might actually impede their progress down the more complicated path that leads to true satisfaction.

One of the interesting things I uncovered in my research was that the term “follow your passion” didn’t really emerge in the context of career advice until the 1980s. Where did it come from? I argued that two critical trends converged during this period.

First, the unionized industrial work that characterized mid-century American economic growth gave way to a less rooted knowledge sector. Workers who might have previously taken a job at whatever factory happened to be located in their hometown might now be forced to travel cross-country in search of a suitable office position.

For the first time, the question of what you wanted to do for a living became pervasive — a shift captured well by the emergence in the early 1970s of Richard Bolles’ seminal career guide, What Color is Your Parachute: one of the original books to help readers identify which professions suit their personality and interests. It’s important to remember that this was a radical notion. “[At the time,] the idea of doing a lot of pen-and-paper exercises in order to take control of your career was regarded as a dilettante’s exercise,” Bolles later explained.

The second force at play was Joseph Campbell, the polymath literature professor who was heavily influenced by Carl Jung, and popularized the hero’s journey as a foundational mythology that emerges in many cultures. In 1988, PBS aired a multi-part interview with Campbell hosted by Bill Moyers. This wildly popular series introduced the concept of following your bliss, which Campbell, who read Sanskrit,  had adapted from the ancient Hindu notion of ananda, or rapture.

Combine these two forces — a sudden need to figure out what you wanted to do for a living with Campbell’s mantra — and a strange, secularized, bastardized hybrid emerges: the key to career happiness, we decided as the 80s gave way to the 90s, was to follow your passion.

Read more

I was recently browsing the archives of the MIT Sloan Management Review (as one does), when I came across a fascinating article from the Fall 2018 issue titled “Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work.”

The piece starts with a blunt observation: “If you work in an organization, you know what it’s like to have too much to do and not enough resources to do it.”

This is not accidental:

“…many leaders continue to believe that their organizations thrive when overloaded, often both creating pressure and rewarding those who deliver under duress. It’s a popular but pathological approach to management.”

The knowledge sector, it turns out, wasn’t the first to deal with a misguided commitment to overload.

“U.S. manufacturers suffered mightily under this approach for decades,” the article’s authors write, “until many found a better way.”

Read more

Earlier today, I published my latest article for the New Yorker. It’s titled: Can Remote Work Be Fixed?

In this semi-epic long-form essay, I dive into the history of the remote work movement, documenting why, after decades of excitement, it ended up falling short of its potential.

I then tackle the big question on a lot of peoples’ mind at the moment: Now that all knowledge workers are forced to work remotely, will we manage to fix these issues? Now that it’s urgent, in other words, can we make remote work actually work?

Read more

Chris Anderson opens his 2012 book, Makers, with a story about his maternal grandfather, Fred Hauser. Anderson recalls a childhood experience spending a summer with his grandfather at his bungalow in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“He announced that we would be making a four-stroke gasoline engine and that he had ordered a kit we could build together,” Anderson writes. Familiar with constructing models, Anderson assumed that the box containing the kit would be filled with numerous numbered parts and assembly instructions. “Instead, there were three big blocks of metal and a crudely cast engine casting. And a large blue-print, a single sheet folded many times.”

As Anderson recalls, his grandfather deployed the standard hobby machinist equipment kept in his garage — “a drill press, a band saw, a jig saw, grinders, and, most important, a full-size metal lathe” — to slowly extract and polish from the blocks the many pieces that ultimately fit together into a functioning engine. “We had conjured a precision machine from a lump of metal. We were a mini-factory, and we could make anything.”

There’s great fulfillment in applying skill to slowly create something useful that didn’t previously exist — a reaction that’s likely embedded in our genes as a lost nudge toward survival-enhancing paleolithic productivity. Matt Crawford perhaps summarizes this reality best in Shop Class as Soulcraft, when he writes: “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.”

And then we consider our current moment.

Read more