Hi Friends,
It’s getting colder and colder, although the summer was here just a couple of weeks ago, and so it is I — Adil — once again writing to you, kind subscriber to Caesura, this newsletter.
I collected this issue by random bits and pieces of thoughts, but once stopped writing, I kind of saw the common line between these three short pieces. In essence it is about: 1) your job does not define you; 2) you could and should invest into diversifying your intellectual capabilities beyond what you do at work; 3) there is a simple way to start. The theme is as old as hell, and yet the one I did not intend on zooming in — it just happened that short essays on intellectual diversity, quite quitting and learning new things talk to each other as old friends.
Let’s get to this.
🪫 Quite Quitting
I hear about quite quitting often recently. The idea, originated in China and became popular on Tiktok, does not imply leaving your job, but rather doing the bare minimum to fulfill your main functions and “quitting” going extra mile. The term mostly applies to people who have either experienced mental burnout at work or developed a toxic relationship with it, e.g. they measure their self-worth by their performance (or both):
Quiet quitting comes from the perspective of folks who have been selling not just their time, but their selves to their employer. So their experience feels like quitting.
As there are factors that prevent them leaving the job (family, money, debt — you name it), they focus on changing the only thing they can control — how they approach it. That is, not burning themselves up, not tying their identity and sense of self-worth to their jobs and keeping a balanced relationship.
NPR, in the article called “Economics behind “quite quitting” claims that the trend is caused by the current employee confidence in the job market that resulted from Great Resignation — another major trend, where people, mostly in the US and Western Europe started voluntarily leaving their jobs at massive scale during COVID-19:
“With layoffs and firings at a record low… people have unprecedented job security,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at the job-search website ZipRecruiter. “And so the risk of termination is lower. And that’s also why the incentive to work harder is reduced. The consequences of being found to shirk have become much smaller. One, because companies can’t afford to fire people. And two, because there are so many alternatives out there if you do lose your job.”
I do not quite agree that economic aspect is the key explanation here, although I do recognize it may play some role. Rather, I think it is just a general trend toward normalizing people’s relations with their jobs — not letting it define who you are and how you feel about yourself:
It’s being rational: not being irrational and burning yourself out, but it’s also not preventing yourself from being your best. It’s about prioritisation, not quitting.
🧠 Intellectual Diversity
Intellectual diversity, the way I define it (not as defined here), is a diversity of skills and expertises that lie outside of our immediate domains of (professional) operations. Having intellectual diversity means having a diverse portfolio of intellectual capabilities, e.g. skills, expertises, mindsets and ideas.
We need to spend more time and energy on developing such diversity. I almost consider this as a way to insure ourselves against ever changing world. As simple as it is, the world is complex. We witnessed and still witnessing global changes that are happening faster than ever before. I always like to say about Millennials that in one lifetime we lived through so many transformations that previously usually took generations to happen.
Having an intellectual diversity means acknowledging that change is an only constant and providing yourself with a room for error and re-adjustment. It means that we acknowledge that things may go unexpectedly, and we take that into account when we plan our careers (and lives). It means developing the breadth and depth of our intellectual capabilities, and when necessary, being able to readjust and refocus on other items in our diversified intellectual portfolio.
🚀 How to Start Learning Anything
I talked about diversifying our skillset and the first thing toward it is to start learning new things. But many do not feel confident or feel scared to start, which makes me think that the first step toward skillset diversification is actually having enough courage.
In my experience, I overcame lack of confidence and fear by planning my learning journey and setting my expectations. It may or may not be relevant for you, but these are the principles that help me to start learning anything new:
Start now. Whether it is a side project you always wanted to do or learning a new skill, just start today.
Keep it small. You do not learn Javascript or Excel in one day. Start by taking small steps. Watch one video, complete one exercise and move on with your life. No need to overburden your day with your learnings — this is a fast way toward hating it.
Aim for consistency. It does not matter if you spend 5 hours today learning how to code, if you will not able to sustain the same level of effort in the future. Skills and expertise are learned through experience and repetition. Coming back to learning everyday even only for 30 minutes is better than doing 5 hours a day and then forgetting about it for weeks. Making your learning effort easy and small means making your learning process repeatable and consistent over time. Always go for consistency over effort.
Play a long game. Do not aim to learn something within a week or month. You are competing against no one but your past self. Aim at continuous transformation and evolution over time. There is no point of learning something if once you get that course certificate (or however you define your “mastery”) you stop improving and practicing on it. The goal is to create this sustainable habit of learning that becomes part of your life — there is no measurable end goal, the goal is to continue doing it (that is, continue learning) as long as you can.
⭐️ My Favourite Things
📝 Article: The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled by Farnam Street. If you find the idea of diversifying your intellectual capabilities interesting, you may find even more interesting the debate of generalists versus specialists.
📕 Book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. If you want to dive deeper into that debate, this book is an awesome introduction. When I was reading it, each time I was thinking, “This is so me.”
📕 Book: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. If David Epstein argues for generalists, Malcolm Gladwell argues that people who have been very successful in their lifes are usually the ones who spent their entire ifetimes specializing at and improving on one thing only.
🎨 Skill: Drawing. I am learning to draw - digitally, and I am amazed how tech can help you to realize the wildest of your visual ideas. I do not have any visual ideas yet, I mostly just re-draw bits and pieces from pictures and then just personalize them to my taste. Still I can feel the freedom that mastering these digital tools gives me - and want to learn more. This newsletter gives me a good opportunity to share them — everything you see here is made by me.
✍️ Quote of the Week
The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.
From The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Remember that you can reply to this email to let me know what do you think (what you liked? what you disliked? what you want see more?) or just say hi. Also, if you do not already, follow me on Twitter or Insta.
See ya,
Adil.