Digital Commute No. 20
Your Monday dose of knowledge, wisdom, and creativity.
Wishing you all a happy and mindful Monday. Let’s dive in.
Knowledge
Scalable Professions: In most jobs, time is money. Literally. You put in 40 hours a week for some amount of guaranteed compensation. Thomas Waschenfelder, creator of Wealest, recently published an article about why — and how — the rich don’t rent out their time the way everyone else does. It’s all about scalable professions. In a scalable profession, your time is disconnected from your earnings. Here’s what it takes to build a scalable profession:
Time Agnostic: The upside is not limited by the number of hours in the day. Your work is not comprised of repeated behaviors in new contexts (e.g. making slide decks for clients) but rather leveraged behaviors that work for a global context (e.g. filming a movie).
Buy One, Get Infinity: There is no marginal cost of reproduction. If it lives online, it’s probably free to make a copy. This newsletter, written once, goes to hundreds of people simultaneously.
Inequality at Scale: Scalable professions aren’t equal. They’re fiercely competitive and the top 20% of performers take home 80% of the earnings. At the same time, they’re egalitarian — anyone, anywhere can compete. Chances are, you have a skill that qualifies you for the top 20%.
Wisdom
Defining Wisdom: Today’s wisdom is meta: how do we define wisdom? Any good definition for an abstract concept has both qualitative and quantitative angles. One or the other will rarely do. The dictionary definition describes wisdom well: “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” But how do we measure it? One of the most succinct quantitative definitions of wisdom I’ve heard comes from @AscendantPower: wisdom is the delta between ego and success. The more wise you are, the more in check your ego and more successful you are. Of course, we can play definition games with success and ego as well — taken broadly, I find this model extremely compelling.
Inspiration
Look Around: There’s always beauty to be found, even in the cold, industrial, and mundane. (Check out Federico Italiano’s feed).
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Notes
The idea of Scalable Professions has many interesting ideological threads running through it, drawing from Naval Ravikant and Nassim Taleb among others.
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