An Investment Mindset for Career and Hiring Decisions & Who We spend time with
CC#36 - Whats going on in Shanghai, Null Island & Plain Language
 |
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🪟 Shanghai’s stunning fall from grace
Shocking account of whats happening in Shanghai right now.
You could say a lot of things about the political environment but people seemed incredibly hard-working, optimistic, and GDP in China had grown incredibly hard for forty years straight. And Shanghai was the shining example of that.
That Shanghai disappeared slowly, then all at once — the way some people fall in or out of love. We’re now on the ninth day of our lockdown, having only left the house for a few minutes for four PCR tests. (…) The ninth day, but we’re lucky — some people have been inside for over a month now. We cannot freely choose our recipes because food delivery is really difficult, but we’re lucky — some people are really down to just instant noodles or are lacking medicine. (…) I do not fear covid, but I do fear a positive test and the subsequent inhuman quarantine places, sharing a toilet with hundreds of others, no shower, and no privacy for two weeks.
Staying in a specific job for long(er) allows career captial to compound. Especially during a time that has already been labelled the ‘great resignation’ it might be worth to think twice before quitting a job.
Don’t switch fields, don’t look for a new job, don’t move on.
There’s a decent chance your motivation for leaving is driven by two things: The grass-is-greener fallacy of wrongly assuming the alternative is better, or denying the fact that great opportunities occasionally require annoyance and sacrifice.
Of course it’s not universal advice. Some careers and jobs are dreadful, and the economy only works when people are willing and able to find better opportunities. Stay put is good advice maybe a third of the time when you’re young and perhaps half the time when you’re older. But when it’s good advice, it can be staggeringly good advice.
⚖️ Talent as leverage
Startups often claim that they only hire the best of the best. While this might be a promising growth strategy, one should keep in mind that it is also a risky strategy.
Reflexivity is at work in talent markets as well. Say that you manage to convince a few A players that your startup is extremely promising. Now, you can go to investors and say, “I’ve got the beginnings of an amazing startup - look at this awesome team I’m putting together.” And now you can hire even more 10x engineers by telling them, “Hey, we just raised our seed round on a 50 million dollar valuation. How can you not join this rocketship?”(…) Leveraging your company with talent increases your volatility - either you orchestrate a revolution, or you implode. (…) The leverage you get from hiring really talented people is a huge risk during rough times, because these people have lots of other options and the ambition to pursue them.
Food for Thought.
🔁When interpreting data we often fall prey to the fallacy that we are unbiased and neutral towards the data we work with. This paper is yet another indicator that in reality its extremely hard, if not impossible to be truly impartial.
If anyone is interested to learn more - I am currently reading ‘The Scout Mindset’ which deals with approaches on how to become less prone ‘to only see what we want to see’. Just started reading, but so far I can recommend!
👨👩👧👦Super interesting. Given this, my guess would be that we generally underestimate the importance of having colleagues whom we truly enjoy hanging out with.
👀 I know, I am a bit late to the party but maybe some of you are too - anyways, if you haven’t seen the capabilities of the newest DALLE 2 AI version, go ahead and take a look, I am pretty sure you will be astonished…
Random Stuff.
📬 Why not? This kind of sounds like the type of Social Media I would actually like to use. Curious to see if it can take off…?
🤔 I never knew that there was a systematic approach to writing simple texts - I guess society would benefit quite a lot from having all us people in jargon-heavy professions take a course in plain writing.
Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice. But from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.
🌐 Despite it not existing, there are lots of things going on ‘Null Island’- according to digital records, there are people selling houses there or reporting that they have done their afterwork run at (0,0). Scientists now made an effort to collect data and insights about this curious anomaly in our digital representation of space.
Personal Update.
Had some good time in Lisbon - a lot of walking, some time to think & reflect, a couple of good working sessions with Allied for Startups and a decent amount of Pasteis de Nata. 🥧
Got to watch the Danish Documentary ‘Tsumu’. A film about dealing with grief and coming of age in Eastern Greenland. Raw, impressive and thought provoking. 10/10 would recommend. Also this related article.
Now back to work - excited to see a couple of research projects finally starting off and getting to do some more hands-on data work!
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.