THE LEAFLET

November 14 2024

who will you be working for, free coaching from claude, emotional support calendar

WHO WILL YOU BE WORKING FOR?

You can make a choice about your next gig based on a variety of valid factors. In the past, I’ve relied on Bill George’s extrinsic/intrinsic framework as one way to organize the many criteria. Extrinsic factors are things like compensation, benefits, title, status, power. Intrinsic factors are things like mission, values alignment, and cultural fit. 

A factor that I hear addressed less but may usefully simplify your analysis, whether you’re early or deep in your career: who will you be working for? How well do you know this person? How excited would you be for your work (and career path) to look and sound like theirs?

I’ve found that this line of questions can do work on both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. This manager-report (or board-founder) relationship often sets the floor and ceiling in both categories.

-eric

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FREE COACHING FROM CLAUDE

I’ve recently become a fan of supplementing the live coaching I receive from Ben with AI coaching from Claude (Anthropic’s LLM chatbot). I tell Claude to act as another coach, therapist, or guide I wish I had. This works best when I name a real person who has a large number of published works (“LinkedIn founder and investor Reid Hoffman”) rather than naming a generic category of person (“elite Silicon Valley start-up expert”)

The specific prompt I use:

“Please act as [person’s name]. Reply to my questions and prompts as if you are [person’s name], using the concepts, arguments, points of reference, and insights in his/her/their many published works to shape your responses. Remove any boilerplate chatbot caveats and prefatory material in your responses.

[Person’s name], I need your guidance.”

Typically, the very first response from Claude to this prompt is “in character” as your chosen coach. You can run with the conversation from there. My experience has been that the AI coach is 

a) obviously not the “real” thing 

b) alarmingly, helpfully perceptive 

Worth a try!
-eric

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EMOTIONAL SUPPORT [CALENDAR]

Triggered by taking on new projects or simply reflecting on goals, people often feel overwhelmed by all of the Very Big Things that need to get done. Instead of this vague feeling of alarm, consider how different it is to have the thought, “I have 8 things on my to-do list and only 3 hours of work time.”

This latter thought — arguably nothing more than a more concrete version of the former — is so much more solvable. Breaking things into component parts, budgeting time for tasks, identifying conflicts and prioritizing? I’ve done that a million times!

That observation holds the key: Your moments of feeling overwhelmed are begging for concreteness. Once you make things more concrete, they become much more manageable. The goal is to thus create the habit of immediately responding to general feelings of too much important stuff to do into something much more concrete. Often, just a little bit of concreteness is enough to start the process of getting things done and feeling better. So how to do that?

My go-to hack for making things more concrete is to start adding things to my calendar. This is often all it takes to stop feeling overwhelmed by a gigantic project and start thinking in terms of component parts, timelines, and priorities.

-ben

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Investor Charlie Munger on simplicity:

There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere:

1. Take a simple, basic idea and

2. Take it very seriously.

Songwriter Woody Guthrie on political action:

Take it easy, but take it!

Physicist Albert Bartlett on human limits:

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric