In defense of hustle culture?
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
This week has been going quite well! I just want to thank all of you again for all the love and support after I released my leaving Meta video! I am incredibly grateful and feel so fortunate to have such an amazing community. I don’t feel as scared anymore, knowing that you’re here. ❤️
I also had dinner with one of my ex-Meta coworkers. He said that seeing a video on Youtube has definitely been the most interesting way to find out someone left the company. 😂 As my friend, Seattle Data Guy says, I’ve joined the ex-Meta Funemployed crew now!
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
My Crunchyroll history has been very populated this week. It’s the only subscripion that I can 100% say I get my money’s worth.
Let’s talk about Mashiro no Oto (Those Snow White Notes)! It’s about this guy who runs away from his village after his grandfather, the legendary shamisen master dies.
After his grandfather dies, he could no longer hear the sound of the shamisen since he spent his entire life just trying to mimic his grandfather’s sound. This is the story of him finding his own unique sound.
This is a slice-of-life anime that has great character development and the music is hauntingly beautiful. I’d never been interested in the shamisen before but the sound of the music, the way that it’s described, and the accompanying imagery really make you feel ALL SORTS OF FEELS. 🥺
📖 Books
This week, I continued to read Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong by Eric Barker.
This is a book that scientifically evaluates the advice that we’re told about success and how to achieve it.
A chapter of the book talks about introversion vs. extroversion in relation to success.
Extroversion is clearly correlated with monetary success. This is even traceable to childhood. Research show that childhood extroversion predicts extrinsic success and moving from the bottom 5th popularity in their high school class to the top 5th correlates with a 10% boost in income.
BUT introversion is correlated with becoming an expert at something. For example, most athletes and musicians are introverts. This makes sense because they need to spend a lot of time honing their craft by themselves.
He also goes into a lot more detail about introversion vs. extroversion in other contexts and other definitions of success in the book. 😊
One reason why I love this book is that it explores the subtleties. Advice and claims about success are often contradictory. Some people say “oh you should be a people person to be successful!” While others say “you need to be obsessed with a thing and practice lots by yourself.” As is often the case, in reality, advice always has nuances and caveats, often stemming from the context in which it is given!
🌻 Learning & Productivity
So I’ve been thinking about hustle culture. It’s kind of weird because at some time in the past everybody was like YEAH HUSTLE HUSTLE HUSTLE and then it became HUSTLE CULTURE IS TOXIC.
I do question both these extremes because I’ve come to learn that most things in life are not black and white.
Fundamentally, [hustle culture] is about work dominating your time in such an unnatural way that we have no time to live our lives.
And from Kate Northrup the founder of The Origin Company and the author of Do Less: Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management:
Hustle culture carries this overarching belief that the more you do, the more valuable you are.
So what is the proposed solution? It seems to me - albeit I haven’t done too much research yet so dkm if I’m wrong - that you’re supposed to be more aware of what your overarching goals are, define your ideal day, get clear on your boundaries, and not let your career dominate your existence. Something like that?
On the surface, I would agree with these things. But the world isn’t just about you… I think if you want to achieve things that you want, then naturally you need to work towards them. If you don’t want to then that is fine too. But it does feel like this is a case of I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Going back to Kate Northrup’s point, well yes the more impact you have, then the more valuable you are? I am very aware, of course, that I am speaking from a position of extreme privilege. So it seems to me that we should be prioritizing freedom to choose then, which I think is not what the hustle culture is toxic camp is directly advocating for.
Then you throw in movements like #antiwork with its political undertones, which is even messier in relation to the whole story…I have to think more about this for sure.
Please do educate me if I’m misunderstanding something and let me know your thoughts in the comments!!
👨💻 What I’m Learning
My Vision: Be able to travel anywhere and do things that I find the most meaningful without having to worry about making ends meet.
🪟 Context
My personal finance study plan is based on a very simple formula:
Net Income = Revenue - Cost + Investments
My primary driving factors for each are:
💸 Revenue
business
💰 Cost
budgeting
hiring good accountants and lawyers
📈 Investments
precious metals (for when shit hits the fan)
stocks & bonds (majority of assets)
crypto (for the future)
🏃♀️ Progress
This week, I focused on business (the revenue arm). I re-read bits of The Millionaire Fastlane because there was just so much packed in there that I felt like I had to re-read and take notes to better absorb MJ’s mindset shift from traditional wealth-building advice.
A section that I paid more attention to is the “Millionaire Fastlane Commandments” for creating a business. MJ believes that the best way of making a large sum of money is by starting a business, but it can’t be just any business. There are lots of businesses out there that are actually jobs - but worse. A proper wealth-generating business follows the commandments of:
🎛️ Control
You should own the land that your business is built on. It cannot be soley based on other business’ platforms eg. Amazon, YouTube, Instagram etc. Or at the very least, don’t make it based on a single platform!
⛔ Entry
Your business should have a relatively high barrier to entry. If anybody on the streets can easily get into your line of work, then it’s not good enough!
Note: Say you have a Youtube channel that has a low barrier of entry, some ways of increasing it are addressing higher barrier topics and having unique product offerings.
😍 Need
You need to be solving a REAL problem, not something that you just want to do because you’re passionate about it.
⌛ Time
Your business and your time need to be disassociated. Otherwise, it’s a job, but worse. It’s more responsibility and you don’t even get the workplace benefits.
For example, running a hot dog stand is not disassociated from time. Some examples of businesses that are dissociated from time are software, intellectual property, and toys.
⚖️ Scale
Your business needs to be easily scalable or replicable. For example, if you run a hotdog stand by yourself, that is not scalable. But if you become a franchisor, then that becomes scalable.
As always, #notfinancialadvice. Don’t just do what I do pls. Do your own research and make your own plan!
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
🔗 A medium-level question to practice your joins!
Write a query to get the list of managers whose salary is less than twice the average salary of employees reporting to them. For these managers, output their ID, salary, and the average salary of employees reporting to them.
map_employee_hierarchy:
dim_employee:
Head on over here to answer the question!
*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️
PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)
-Tina
One of the things that people regret the most on their deathbed is that they wished they hadn’t worked so hard. I think it’s important to have a strong work ethic but there needs to be balance (which is easier said than done). It’s ok if people want to work hard to achieve a goal as long as they understand what they are giving up in the process. After all, we all have different priorities in life that we value. The other issue with hustle culture Is the erroneous belief that working long hours will lead to being rich. Increasing your workload will not make you wealthier if there are societal barriers which inherently disadvantage people to rise in classes. Hustle culture perpetuates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability and ability to make money.
I am team #antiwork not in the "I'm against working" sort of way but in the "people should have freedom to pursue their preferred education/trade/career path without risking their basic human needs like food water and shelter being taken away"
We live in a time where things are automated and far more efficient than anything we've seen in the past, but because people have to work 40 hours a week to even be able to survive, the individual's ability to better themselves in a skill or trade is severely inhibited, despite the fact that we are producing more than enough to take care of the needs of the people on this earth and throwing away whatever the general populace can't afford.