Career
Congratulations! Accepting a new job offer can be extremely rewarding and demonstrates your perseverance. You can finally hand in your notice, make a fresh start, enjoy a new salary and explore new opportunities. Here are some tips on making your transition productive: 1) Get to know your new commute The first day of work will come sooner than you realize. Help minimize issues on your way to the office by getting to know your commute beforehand. [...]
I recently found myself negotiating new job terms. I’m fascinated by different negotiation processes, and so I’m going to break down how things went: What worked well for me during the negotiation: Mentioning a (relatively) high salary I had received in a previous job. This was powerful as I had taken a pay-cut to start this job (in order to learn new things). Describing that my priority still remained to grow and develop, but that my salary need [...]
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. DMX (Just kidding, it’s Confucius) It has now been exactly one month since I moved to Beijing. I’d visited China a few times before I decided to take the plunge and come to live here, but the culture shock has still been noteworthy. This post sticks to LLB principles, where nearly every post we write aims to give the reader something valuable. However, I will probably be a l [...]
Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional. This strategy has been outlined to me by someone with a great deal of experience managing people, but you should of course consult a legal professional before doing anything that might endanger your livelihood. If you work in the West, for a corporation much bigger than a fledgling start-up, you should not and do not have to take extreme shit. If you don’t live in the West, you do (sorry). This is not a [...]
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. - Benjamin Franklin I believe in serious interview preparation. I think it has made the difference for me many times. I have also been on the other side of the table and seen how a careless lack of research can cost people. In this post I will discuss how I prepare. On the face of it, these steps are aimed at preparing for traditional job interviews, but a mildly modified approach would work [...]
Goal setting is hard. It requires self-awareness, deep reflection, and a belief in yourself that you will succeed in the future. Many people have interests, desires and dreams, but find these hard to link together into actionable goals. I certainly find this hard. I have several projects that I want to work on, which compete for my time, motivation and effort. Recently I wrote about Paul Graham’s model of determination, and how this applies to su [...]
There’s a lot to be said for just taking a random day off work. One day, you’ll be on your death bed, and you won’t remember all those days at the office. They’ll have blurred into one long day where the same thing happened again and again. But you *will *remember those times when you did something different, something out of the ordinary. Routine is a funny thing. I believe that for most mere mortals it is essential for long-term productivity, [...]
The idea of a Mastermind group was popularised in Napoleon Hill’s iconic Think and Grow Rich. It is defined as: “a coordination of knowledge and effort [...] between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose”. I think the term itself is irritating and misleading: it puts up unnecessary boundaries. If you talk about being in a Mastermind group, it’s going to be tough not to come across as pompous. On the flip side, if you ask s [...]