Sunday July 17, 2022

What I learned this week | Wisdom

Here’s what I learned this week, including thoughts on remote work and pay, wealth creation through ownership, and wisdom through feeling.

My feed this week

• Carta published its 1H22 compensation report, and Miami tech workers are making way above the standard BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) baseline pay adjustment.

• I started reading The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis. Power to the builders.

• Lewis Howes's podcast featured Dr. Joe Dispenza on its July 4th episode, and I listened last week (twice). This episode is on financial abundance. Joe's work is groundbreaking, IMO.

What I learned this week

• Companies care less and less about the BLS pay adjustment. They want great people who can get work done from anywhere. This is great for economic growth in smaller cities.

• Through ownership, Silicon Valley became the greatest concentration of wealth in any one place. A "power to the builders" movement where small teams of computer engineers rebelled against 9-to-5 work and chose to make new things instead. I think the next wave of wealth creation is artists, creatives, and freelancers.

• "A memory without an emotional charge is called wisdom." This is my favorite quote from the podcast above, and it goes hand-in-hand with everything I learned reading Bending Reality. Wisdom comes from having complete experiences, including feelings. When we resist emotions, they get trapped in our bodies as pain, stress, and even disease. My biggest lessons recently come directly from letting myself feel shit, especially old memories I wouldn't have looked at before. We can become healthier and gain wisdom through feeling.

Try this on

• Try asking an open-ended question before responding in conversation this week. Open-ended questions are curious inquiries that don't require a binary yes or no response. Two easy examples of open-ended questions are "tell me more about that" and "what was that like?"