What happens when my “real value” is pegged to how I value learning? + Run away from Props Trading + 20 things I'm doing
6 weeks of updates, no big deal.
Hello there!
Happy Tuesday. I skipped the last What I’m Up To, so now I have to put here. This post is mostly that, as well as a previously unpublished thought.
Separately, at the very end, you’ll find a google doc link to a quick write-up I did on a very bizarre item - someone asked for funding. I was not pleased.
Eat a good meal for me!
Allen
Previous Thoughts:
What I’m Up To:
LOL for a minute. For the Spanish speakers out there - this short by understudiohub really encapsulates what act your wage and negotiating your wage means. It’s also hilarious and I look at it frequently.
NEW NEWSLETTER I FOLLOW! I often go through a cycle of:
subscribing to new newsletters,
never reading them,
feeling guilty that I didn’t read them because I leave them unread
rinse and repeat.
I’ve since purged many things that don’t need to be in my inbox and found myself realizing this:
It’s okay to change what is intellectually feeding you as your different interests change. It’s also okay to completely not subscribe to things not related to your “career”.
The short story is that I purged all newsletter and I’m now subscribed to a new newsletter on the block: International Intrigue, a newsletter providing country-level briefings from the persepective of diplomats. I can thank Davos2024 for my interest here. Most interesting read was on the Indonesia Elections.
Video Game - Helldivers 2: Spreading democracy across the galaxy in Helldivers 2 (PC / PS5), a game by Arrowhead Game Studios published via Sony Entertainment. The game has a very satirical narrative and has well designed coop mechanics.
The game is online-only, and was originally created with a server capacity 10k daily users with 50k extreme. The launch popularity had over 450k users trying to logon, with many people simply waiting for their chance to play. While waiting in the very long, and often unknown queues, I found my self playing another game while waiting - Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, a game whose category was made famous by Vampire Survivor, another game I 100% maxed on.
If you look closely at the online rhetoric on “just get more servers” to address the capacity, you’ll find out that people advocating for “more servers” have no idea what they are talking about.
Video Game - Baldurs Gate 3: Completed my 2nd playthrough & completion of Baldurs Gate 3, this time adopting a Drow Dark Urge (Apparently this is referred to as Tav Durge in the BG3 community).
TL;DR: I basically played a murderer who has intrusive thoughts and totally acted on each one of those thoughts. And then having amnesia. to it. Most memorable encounter was with Raphael at the House of Hope, which is best encompassed by the soundtrack - Raphael’s Final Act (for the musical nuts out there, this one is too good).
READ TO THE END! I did a quick weekend Due Diligence (dd) on a weird “opportunity” that ultimately was a “no” before the end of the call, and advanced to a “fuck no” within 1 hour after corroborating facts. You can read the end of this piece for that very same output.
GREEK FOOD: Christaski Greek Cuisine is a solid recommendation for Greek vibes in a small-home feel, complete with live acoustic guitar on Friday nights. Their portions are a bit ridiculous, and you’ll leave nice and comforted.
BAGELS: Located after a stress of commercial-properties-turned-churches, BOIL & BAKE is the most Los Angelen/Santa Monican bagel place to be if you’re a fan of spreads, smoked salmon, and bagel sandwiches. Come for the food, stay for the vibes. Leave in utter confusion as you noticed a lot of non-churchy looking churches.
UYGHUR FOOD: Dolan’s Uyghur Cuisine (in Rowland Heights, Alhambra, and Irvine) is an incredibly fun experience into what a Turkish-Chinese-Arabic world is. It absolutely hits on both spicy and sour flavor profiled combined with the charring you’d expect from a land where shish-kabobs and open fires are normal. Unfortunately, the home & people of the Uyghurs in Northwest China is currently experiencing persecution and human right’s abuse.
TIKI BAR: The Stowaway Tiki Bar in Tustin California is that one place in a strip mall where “no one would go”, and perhaps that’s the point. When you get in, you’ll be brought into a new world in the same way a speak-easy puts you somewhere else. All drinks are solid, but what’s more important is the spam fries.
JAPANESE SPEAK EASY: Oak & Coal makes its way on to my list of bougie Japanese speak-easy simple bites after a Friday night affair that exposed me to waves of small bites including Wagyu Beef Skewers, amazing drinks, and a conversation with one of the owners.
VIETNAMESE: Little Sister adds two new items to the menu that you can’t sleep on - Vietnamese seafood curry and fried sea bass - and if you want to venture beyond your usual “pho” or “charbroil food”, this is the right addition.
FAVORITE FOOD SPOTS: I struck Anjin JBBQ in Costa Mesa twice and the Parlor in Tustin 3 times in the span of 15 days, and I can safely say - I won’t be returning for a while. Good food, great company, good times. You’ll find me next at Sei-Ko-Ken in Torrance.
PASADENA JAPANESE: Mills Alley, which I was able to enjoy thanks to a friend and credited inspiration of my venture into Blockchain MS, is quite the Japanese experience that focuses on sets and presentation. At the time of my experience, it was their soft opening, and I can tell you - it’s an easily repeatable place to be if you’re local.
PASADENA CHEESE & GRILL: Agnes in Pasadena is a terrific not-a-coffee-house-but-not-a-restaurant-but-its-also-a-restaurant place to lounge between…meals. Don’t judge, just relax.
FITNESS: As a way to refreshen the end of winter and the pending arrival of spring, I’ve added MB360 to my Tuesday or Thursday rotation, a class I impulsively signed up for and attended in the summer of 2023 when it was first being introduce. Turns out, it truly was being introduced as the creator of the class, Jessie Syfko, was teaching a class that was 90% trainers & future coaches of the class. Fun fact, Lifetime fitness acquired Jessie Syfko’s boutique gyms, and with it, the MB360 programming. I get wrecked by the amount of weights and calisthenic driven movement and have not sweated as much as I have in that class - and I sprint on Sundays.
MORE FITNESS: Speaking of sprints, I discovered through pushing myself in “Ultrafit” that I can do 14 MPH sprint for 15 seconds, but I can’t do 15 MPH for even 10 seconds. Goals, perhap?
FITNESS GOAL?: And speaking of fitness, I’ve signed up for the OC Half Marathon first weekend of May 2024. I guess I should start training for it!
TELEVISION: I found myself rivetted by the visual effects and insanity that is Masters of the Air (Apple tV), another story brought to you by the folks behind Band of Brothers (HBO Max & Netflix) (reminder for you to do your once in a while rewatch of it) and the Pacific (HBO Max & Netflix). Unfortunately, the tragedy of Masters of the Air only works if you know a bit of timeline history of WW2 which is the pilots are flying over Europe 1 year before the 1944 D-Day, and 6 months before P51 Fighter Escorts were even a thing. That means they are basically alone.
READING: I picked up the book “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know bout Global Politics”. This book came as a recommendation with a Law Partner (Michael!) I met in Davos - and I’m quite fascinated by it already. I’m definitely a kind of person who can’t see a person directly, but I can see an environment and see how it shaped the person.
UPCOMING EVENT: Lastly, for those in Los Angeles, I’ll be attending the Ascend Los Angeles LNY Celebration at NeueHouse Hollywood this week on Friday. It’s rare that I attend an Ascend event as I don’t have an overtly positive relationship with the organization, however this event pushes the traditional norms I expected from Ascend - The exploration of cultural traditions & mental wellness. They have folks from Anise Health & Yellow Collective driving discussions.
What happens when my “real value” is pegged to how I value learning?
This fun little brain experiment made me re-examine my relationship to “on the job” learning. There are three ways I value my learning in context to a pay check.
I pay to learn.
I'll do it for free.
I’m paid to learn.
I Pay To Learn
TL;DR: Paying to be educated.
This is where I started.
It’s feels like the default starting place of almost all students, professionals, and for good chunk of my life, this was used by yours truly. Perhaps its driven by our U.S. societal collective relationship with learning: College & Debt. You incur debt (you pay), and you learn (a degree & major).
When I was in this learning plane, I found myself devaluing what I did know, and trying to scrounge and justify what “was marketable”.
Except I wasn’t a marketer, didn’t know how to see my own cumulative experiences as value, and found myself shooting my foot as I presented myself to employers circa 2012-2013. I would come back to this again when I was looking for “pivots” out of the day job, taking random certifications to pad resume or participating in extracurricular education programs through my employer thinking it’d make me more useful (eh, debatable in terms of it being useful.
I found you can pay to learn in currency, or time - though the time bit is opportunity cost driven (i.e. I could have earned or broke even, as opposed to incurring more cost).
Looking back, I found this to be a very dangerous mental habit to form and be the default as I was actively coming up with “Solutions” to make myself look better in the form of (certifications, educations, things no one asked for) but not really identifying what the “problems” are, or talking to the “buyers” of said “solutions” if there were any.
Pay to save me, perhaps?
I’ll do it for Free
TL;DR: I end up volunteering for more work and reducing my hourly wage for the sake of brownie points that don’t pay the health bill.
Volunteering to be educated.
This one is sensible and both unemployed and employed individuals do this. The long term mental model formed is a slippery slope and the precedent it sets with your employer (or client) is also dangerous. The idea behind this is “I contribute free labor in exchange for experience”. In many ways, the experience is something I can claim and pad to the resume or corporate street cred.
Why do I think it’s a dangerous mental model?
Because this takes on so many different forms, and they all result in unpaid labor, or unrealized gains,. And I’m not in the business for unrealized gains.
Consider these various forms:
Form 1: I know nothing, please teach me.
I know nothing, and I’m willing to give free (or severely discounted) time in the hopes of being able to be a “sponge” and “absorb” from everyone around me that I perceive “knows it”.In exchange for the “perceived value” I think I’ll get, I’ll surrender my very real time & energy (and in many ways, your own real value as you happily didn’t present it) on top of the existing job I was hired to do.
The other way I look at this is “please let me burden you”.
Form 2: I know nothing, and I’m just happy to be taught.
In this form, my relationship to my job places the job in a savior pedestal, where I hope all the opportunities I learn on the job will be good for me because that’s the job.To this, I say equal the playing field and don’t mentally give an employer “leverage”. Yes they are giving you an opportunity. And yes, they clearly need bodies to do the work because no one is doing the work.
It’s all unpaid labor, basically.
If you’re an employee, this basically became a vicious cycle of me constantly saying yes to those “learning opportunities” and “volunteer opportunities”.
And never seeing the upside.
I could give you a 5% raise for the great new work you’re doing, even though your work responsibilities expanded 50%, and you’ll feel “content enough to stay”.
If you are trying to run a business, you are trading very real short-term cash flow for the hope that you’ll get “more future cash flow” indirectly through the “goodwill” you provide.
You don’t have such luxury when you are starting. You are constantly trying to add more days of survival to the business, and the strategy itself can’t work if you employ others.
The problem with “I’ll do it for Free” is that I think I’m building relationships with the person asking by discounting my own labor & energy.
It’s very dangerous to discount your own labor and energy and have that be a strategy. That’s basically asking for a discount on your own confidence. When it comes to discount, in my opinion, you’ve racing toward the bottom.
Unless you are actively parading how far field this unexpected chore task you’ve never done but are expected to now do on top of your job is, the perceived gain you are expecting won’t be realized.
In fact, quite the opposite.
I’m just opening myself up to being taken advantage of because the person I’m doing it “for free” will learn that the value of their problem is “free, easy, and off their plate” in exchange for you doing it for free. When doing pricing work, I often find the number “that hurts” but “they’ll say yes to”, that way, the relationship is perceived to be something great, perception being 90% of the journey in any business relationship.
This is made worst if its a culture (or grading system) that promotes doing extra roles for free. Usually it’s old roles with like 25% new, where if you do 75% of the things you don’t want to do, you can do the 25% you do want to do.
I’m not a huge fan of doing things for free.
Pay me to Learn
TL;DR: I am not paid for the knowledge I have, I am paid to figure it out using my knowledge, relationships, and time.
I’m at the point in my career where I don’t like doing things, and things are perceived as great effort and opportunity cost to me. To get me “to do something”, I have to effectively be rewarded before I do it.
I’m being paid to go figure the answer, even though I don’t know the exact answer today. I will by the time I’m done with it.
This is in reinforced by my own confidence in my own capabilities, and the relationships I can go to for support. In many ways, “Pay me to learn” is the same as “paid to figure it out” because who else would do it that they trust?
I also like to call this Pay for Pain, as in you’ll pay me enough for me to endure the pain of something I don’t want to do on my free time.
What the Hell Is “Props Trading”?
TL;DR: If you hear anything about Props Trading, run for the fucking hills.
You can read my DD write up on it here via a google doc link. Shout out to all the people who help me corroborate the madness.