Welcome to the revamped Work From Form newsletter. Thank you for being a loyal subscriber to my (very) sporadic posts. That will change. Now, you can expect a weekly email from yours truly making sense of the complex (but oh-so-wonderful) intersection of work, learning, creativity, and tech.

This Week:

🤿 Quote: Krishnamurti on Knowing Ourselves

👨‍💼 News: The Consequences of Remote Work

💡 New Series: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Careers

🧠 Essay: Why “Follow Your Passion” is Bad Advice

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🤿 Quote

“To know ourselves. Surely that is the only foundation on which we can build. But, before we can build, before we can transform, before we can condemn or destroy, we must know that which we are. Because what we are, the world is. If we are petty, jealous, vain, greedy— that is what we create about us, that is the society in which we live.”

- J. Krishnamurti, (from the highly recommended!) The First and Last Freedom, 1954

👨‍💼 News

The Consequences of Remote Work

Great read about the invisible economy supported by white collar workers: from Starbucks to dry cleaners to airlines (business travel accounts for 60-70% of all airlines revenue!) Now, this hidden economy is crumbling due to COVID-led restrictions and the meteoric rise of remote work.

💡New Series

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Careers

Browse most articles and books around career advice and it seems the answers are clear: You either become rich or your work becomes your passion. Titles like Become a Millionaire by Following These Five Easy Steps, Hustle and Earn Millions, or Get Rich Now, advertise an easy way to make money fast. The titles on the passion side usually talk about freedom and authenticity. Things like Follow Your Dreams and Do What You Love, Ditch The Ladder and Become Free, Follow Your Passion.

The money advice is somewhat cringey, but they are the bestsellers. These are the guys and gals making real money. Ironically, they are the ones becoming rich quickly by selling you their advice.

Yet, the second advice seems to hit a deeper chord. Of course you want to live a more meaningful life! Of course you want to be free from the corporate ladder and embrace your passions! But the situation is more complex than that. What does it mean to follow your passions? How can you reconcile your interests with an income that allows you to live comfortably, to raise a family? How can you differentiate yourself in a crowded market of professionals? What about the coming AI dominance and automatization of jobs?

I am going to explore this complex topic in the coming weeks and offer my perspective on how to craft a meaningful and successful career. One that is relevant for today’s uncertain times of COVID and “software eating the world”.

This week, I’ll discuss how “Follow Your Passion” is bad advice.

🧠 Essay

Why “Follow Your Passion” is Bad Advice

Good intentions, bad outcomes

We are bombarded with advice telling us to be passionate about our work. That if you "love what you do, you won't have to work a day in your life". That you should "follow your passion and success will follow".

This advice— which sounds more like a mandate— is well-meaning, but misguided.

First of all, it gets the order all wrong. It presupposes that we all have a preexisting passion we can easily identify and follow. This is just not true for the majority of people.

It is also too simplistic. Apparently we just need to match our innate interest to a job and then we can live happily ever after. It doesn’t talk about developing skills or pursuing interests. It doesn't deal with the complexities of actually making money, achieving success, addressing current responsibilities, skills we have and want to cultivate, etc.

It has a paradoxical impact: the more the advice industry tells us to be passionate, the less passionate we will be. We’ll think there's something wrong with us. And what's worse we won't allow ourselves to explore other options because we’ll feel anxious, constantly second guessing our decisions.

Why?

Because everything feels like a break or make moment, like we are making the final decision to dedicate to one thing for the rest of our lives. The stakes feel absurdly high. If we choose correctly we’ll have a blissful life where we "won’t have to work for a day in your life", or it will be torture because we chose the wrong thing. These kind of thoughts place unnatural pressure and unrealistic expectations. Therefore, every new activity is met with anxiety, with an obsession to define if it as the one thing that we might truly love.

I remember feeling this when I had to decide a major for college. (Now, the fact that we have to choose majors at 18 without any real-world experience is a topic for a later post). Oh no, I thought when confronted with two majors I liked but would offer really different outcomes, this is it. My life will be determined by this decision. Either I will have a great career and be successful or I will become a resented loser.

The added problem is that we are not told how hard it is to develop actual skills. The focus is always on the decision. So we just assume that the hard part is over when we decide to pursue X. Imagine our surprise when things get tough, or boring, or whenever hardships arise (as they eventually will). We are not equipped to handle it. We would probably take our decision back. If activity X is this hard then that probably means it isn’t my passion.

What to do, then?

Here are some principles that have guided my thinking around this complex topic. The main idea is to establish a process for discovering and refining skills and interests by doing, more than deciding a priori.

1. SCRATCH YOUR OWN ITCH

You have to discover what you enjoy doing, don’t let other people tell you what you should do. Let your own curiosity be your guide. If that’s hard, just think of things you are already interested in and take small steps in that direction. If it is taking a coding class or start writing a short story or create a business plan for a business idea you've had for a while, do it. You won’t know until you start.

2. EXPERIMENT

The beauty of this approach is that it removes the anxiety of “finding the right thing”. Every skill you want to learn or topic you want to deep dive is a hypothesis you need to test out. You don’t need to commit to it for the rest of your life, or tie your identity to your experiments. If the experiment is not successful, don’t worry: it’s not a reflection of who you are.

3. LET FAILURES TEACH YOU

Don’t fear failure. Usually, when we fail, we give up. We assume that it’s not meant to be. It's hard to keep going. Yet, if we don't push forward, we won't find whatever that makes us tick. You know deep down that everything you do or don’t do is your responsibility and that is a lot of pressure. You are afraid you might fuck it up. It’s always easier to give up first. To stop the process and blame outside forces. Don’t. Use that failure to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, in order to refine your hypothesis.

4. STICK WITH WHAT WORKS

But you need to move forward. You need to stick to a skill long enough to actually become good at it. This is perhaps the most important point. Until you do something for a sustained period, you won't know if you actually like doing it. The truth is passion grows along with the skill. As you get better, you’ll become hooked to the new skill. So practice, practice, practice.

5. CONSISTENCY OVER PERFECTION

Consistency is key to develop expertise. It’s hard because you have to keep going even when you feel stupid and insecure. Embrace being an amateur. Share your work in progress. Learn in public. Remove the pressure from the start: you are no expert, don’t assume for a minute that you have to prove to be one. Yet, if you continue the process and you keep refining your skill, you eventually will become one.

6. CREATE THE PATH WHILE WALKING IT

You won’t know anything until you start doing it. For example, I had a clear idea for this essay, but only after wrestling with it for days I was able to flesh it out and simplify it into the somewhat coherent piece of writing you are reading now.

I know what you’re thinking. “Santi, stop being so meta.” But it’s true. The fact that you’re reading this is because I persevered (in a considerable small goal, but still...). I did twenty re-writes, changed the title, scrapped everything, made an outline, scrapped it again, and so on, in a chaotic process. And there was a point where I told myself, just drop it. It’s not worth it. It’s a stupid idea. You’re not a great writer anyway. By the by, do you know how many people will read this? But you know what. I kept at it because I enjoy writing about these ideas. I told my inner, insecure Santi to fuck off for a bit, and now, here’s this essay for everyone to read and get some value out of it.

And this is just a small example for a larger process we inevitably get into. We have some ideas that seem scary but are worth exploring: Should I apply for that job overseas? Should I take that design class? Should I publish that short story I’ve been tinkering with?

The ultimate question we must asking is: if we only have a short time here on this beautiful planet, are we spending our time doing what is important to us? What makes us tick? Why not pursue those seemingly crazy ideas and see where they lead us?

Thanks for reading!

See more of my work at Form, or email me if you want to craft a more meaningful career, or if you just want to nerd out.

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In my last post, I talked about why remote work is here to stay, and I got lots of comments about how I was being very optimistic— naive even. Many people seemed to equate remote work with the gig economy, which is not necessarily true. You can work remotely as an employee at a 9-to-5 job. But the fears around the gig economy were widespread. Mainly the fear of becoming a gig worker and losing all benefits from permanent employment and live in absolute precariousness. So I decided to explore further.

Now, I try not to do blanket statements in general. I don’t think the gig economy is all good or all bad. Discussing it in moral absolutes is not helpful nor interesting. However, the gig economy is here to stay. In 2018, Harvard Business Review estimated that 150 million people in North America and Western Europe were independent contractors. Only in China, there are over 110 million. And as I stated on my first post, I think the gig economy will be larger than the paycheck economy in the next 15 years, so let’s make sense of it.

The Cliché

One of the most prevalent depictions when reading about the gig economy is the “Taxi drivers are good, Uber is evil” cliché. This is simplistic and flat-out wrong.

To say that Uber has no redeeming value is to deny reality —and the combined $100 billion market cap for Uber, Lyft and DiDi. Taxis were expensive (thanks to an artificial cap on medallions), hard to get (remember when you had to hail a cab in the rain on rush hour?), unreliable (we were at the mercy of the meter, which could easily be tampered with), prone for abuse (I have dozens of stories of a taxi driver charging ridiculous amounts to get into the city from an airport), and unwilling to change (thanks to a service monopoly and strong unions).

This massive disruption was possible in large part because the consumer got a better, more convenient deal from Uber and other ride-hailing platforms. And this is true for the majority of the players in the gig economy, from Doordash to Instacart to Taskrabbit to Rappi (in LATAM) to Grab (in Southeast Asia) to Ele.me (in China). They are transforming the way we order food, handle tasks, and get stuff delivered. And they are doing it better than the incumbents.

My problem with the coverage of the gig economy is the simplistic “It’s evil” narrative. I've read essay after essay only focusing on all that is wrong with the gig economy without considering the reasons for its success.

The gig platforms, however, represent only one side of the gig economy coin. Let’s talk about the other side: the gig worker.

The Gig Worker

For most people, gig workers are synonymous with Uber drivers and Instacart delivery people. However, it also includes millions of freelancers and independent contractors with wide-ranging skills, servicing individuals and companies big and small.

I did a 2x2 to explain.

The first distinction is the type of skills: doing physical or knowledge (mental) work. This is pretty straightforward. The job might require you to use physical skills like driving, delivering, going shopping, or it might require knowledge ones like writing, planning, strategizing, etc.

The second distinction adds more nuance: the market value of the skill. If the skill is easy to do, it will become commoditized as other people can do it too. If the skill is more technical or is part of a niche, then it will be more valuable. This variable is important because it shows the complexity of the gig economy. As more knowledge jobs are distributed online, the competitive ground becomes larger. You are not only competing with other people in the US, or Canada, but with the entire world. So creating a logo or a website which might’ve been a good-paying gig, is now driven to a much lower cost because you have competitors in India and Bangladesh who charge one tenth of what you charge, and they do a pretty good job. I’ve experienced this firsthand when scouring knowledge-based gig platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.

Now, if you see you job in one quadrant, that doesn’t mean that it cannot expand to other quadrants higher up. If you are a graphic designer with more experience, who also dabbles in some programming, and who usually integrates a design process into a higher-level strategy, then you probably are in the specialist quadrant.

The Risks

For me, there are two major risks that are not caused only by the gig economy, but exacerbated by it.

The first one is inequality. This has been an ever-present issue in society, but it’s one we are seeing grow more and more recently. The problem is the enormous difference between the ones that own capital and the ones that don’t. This has been aggravated by the tech industry as they have enormous network effects and huge profit margins.

The gig economy will intensify the inequality because the growth in the gig economy will primarily come from the commoditized quadrants. The drivers and delivery workers and handymen whose work will not increase in value because there is an almost unlimited supply of people willing to do it.

The second problem is the more existential idea that our lives will be governed by algorithms. In his eye-opening essay, Venkatesh Rao defines subsets of the new society as lying above or below the API.

What this means is that some jobs depend on an API to function. There is no human intervention. An Uber driver depends on the Uber algorithm to actually get clients. The same as a delivery worker from Instacart or Amazon Flex. They have little agency in the type of clients they will get. The API decides who to sort and how to sort them, and workers are often at the mercy of the algorithm.

Let’s apply the API idea to the 2x2 I made.

The API line is mostly in the commoditized qudrants. It’s slanted because for gig knowledge workers it is still harder to be dominated by an algorithm, but more and more instances of the job process are now dominated by a platform (like FlexJobs or Freelancer).

The more you move up towards the higher quadrants, the less you depend on an algorithm or platform to determine your clients and the type of work you do. This is because the job description is more complex or more important to the clients. People in these quadrants have more agency and flexibility and can command higher prices because of this.

Venkatesh Rao sums up the feeling most people on the lower rungs of society are feeling with our technology-dominated world:

What do you do when you find yourself coming of age in a radically unequal society, where the rent is too damn high, success is a serendipitous function of mysterious Internet trends your parents assume you’ve magically mastered in the cradle, and the only skill of unquestionable value — programming computers well — is relatively hard to acquire and ideally suited only to a minority neurotype?

The Paradox

The paradox is that as the gig economy eats a big chunk of the paycheck economy, the two opposing quadrants will grow the most: the traditional gig workers and the specialists.

The traditional gig workers will be an essential part of the economy (as we are realizing now with COVID-19) but one that is commoditized and dominated by APIs, with little autonomy and differentiation.

The specialists gig workers will flourish. They will have true flexibility and agency in determining what type of work they want to do by offering niche services and products to companies all around the world. They will be able to travel and work remotely. They will have projects that are challenging and well paid. They might not grow so much in numbers, but in clout.

The Future

It's sad to say it but the idea of a blue-collar worker in the USA who had lifelong job security, was able to afford a house and a car, send their kids to university, and travel once or twice a year is mostly gone. Not because it was a bad thing— it was a beautiful thing— but because the structure of the economy has changed. Globalization happened. Decentralized supply chains happened. The internet happened. China happened. Digital technologies happened. The financialization of the world economy happened.

We are now living in an age of transition: from private companies employing millions of people in permanent contracts, to a decentralized job market where platforms and the internet are only distributors of work opportunities, not employers. Most people will become self-employed.

I know I offered a somewhat bleak picture. But this doesn’t mean that we need to give up. But we must think about how to adapt to our current techno-economic paradigm (see Carlota Perez), not to one from a bygone era that is not coming back.

The age of mass production is gone and with it its archetypal worker: the blue collar worker. Gone are the innovation principles that governed it: deep hierarchies, horizontal integrations, and standardization of products.

We are now in the age of information and its archetypal worker might as well be the gig worker. It is about networks, and knowledge as capital, about segmentation of markets, and niche products. Let’s think of improvements for this type of era.

My take on this is: Go ahead, bring the automation. Bring the robots and AI and drones and driverless cars. Let’s remove people from repetitive, monotonous work. Instead of converting the traditional gig workers into blue collar workers, let them get the skills to become niche or knowledge workers.

The gig economy levels the playing field. It allows for precariousness, yes, but it also provides the opportunity for driven, creative people to learn and leverage their skills online for a marginal cost. I’m not saying that it is easy, of course, but it is possible.

As always, let me know what you think by replying or commenting.

Thanks for reading,

Santi

If you are interested in redefining your work to fit your interests and skills, visit Form Consulting or reply to this email to schedule a free consultation with me.

Visit Form Consulting

Forced Experiment

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a majority of us to work from home, whether we wanted or were ready... Not everyone, of course, as millions of people have lost their jobs and or have been forced to put their livelihoods on hold. For those that are working from home, however, it is a steep learning curve. Not because of the tech tools— those are easy to handle— but because of the stressful quarantine context. It is work from home, mixed with online schooling for kids, in the middle of a pandemic in which we can’t go out freely. Tensions and anxieties are high, and we have to deal with them in very closed quarters.

Yet, we are turning to online tools with a renewed need for connection. Now we actually want to hang out with our friends and family online, we want to talk with co-workers and get our work done as efficiently as possible. We are embracing technology as it allows us to communicate with others.

The same will happen with remote work. We will embrace it eventually as a way in which we can maintain a healthier, more flexible balance between our work life and our (real) life.

Here’s why I think remote work will become huge after the quarantine is over.

1. IT’S SO CONVENIENT

This is obvious, but worth stating. Working online removes most frictions. There’s no commute (and that in itself is a deal changer for most people); no waiting in empty conferences rooms; no eating lunch in your office. Working remotely enables a kind of flexibility that was never before possible. You can take meetings while your child is next to you doing her homework; you can choose to work from your garden or balcony; and if really stressed, you can review that presentation with a glass of wine. This type of flexibility will convince millions of people to push for a remote policy at their jobs when the COVID-19 crisis is over.

2. IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT MEETINGS

Working online is not only about videoconferencing. It’s now possible for teams to be entirely distributed and work with the same ease as if they were sharing an office. Most importantly, there are now a myriad tools that enable open-ended collaboration between teams. Think of Google Docs, Slack, Asana, Notion— even Microsoft Office now has a Live feature. With these tools you can create and edit documents, manage projects, assign responsibilities to team members, and keep everyone collaborating. All online and in real time.

3. PROVIDES ACCESS TO THE BEST

We've all had a favorite teacher or instructor who quickly filled out his classes. Now, we don't have to fret about making the cut. We can learn from, or work with, world-class instructors from every industry from the comfort of our home.

This will be huge for adjacent industries like fitness, education, coaching and even psychotherapy. Why have 20 average teachers, when you can have a true expert explaining his or her area of expertise. This is already happening in China. Additionally, the rise of online services like telehealth and distance learning, will provide access to workers with a particular expertise to people in rural or remote communities where it’s difficult to get.

4. THE TECHNOLOGY IS IMPROVING

Zoom, now a household name, had its daily active users jump from 10 million to 200 million in just three months. Houseparty— an app that allows for spontaneous video calls— has had 50 million downloads just last month. This kind of growth is unprecedented. And tech companies are realizing the size of the opportunity (in times of COVID-19, and after).

They are launching new, more specialized apps like Run the World (specifically designed for online events), Tandem (for language learning), Clubhouse (audio chat, invite only), or Loom (pre-recorded videos), that want to make communication easier online. And with coming technologies like AR or VR, our future online will be even more immersive and interactive.

What Happens Next

The rise (and stay) of remote work will happen because of a mindset change. People will realize that through robust online tools, they can work as efficiently from home (or from anywhere, really), while being able to plan their work around their life and not the other way around. This is a huge change in perspective.

The interesting part comes next. The reality is we’ve just scratched the surface of what’s possible to do online. What happens when technology enables a kind of work that cannot be done in a traditional office? How would that work look like?

Let’s think of some second or third order effects of remote work going mainstream:

• People will go back to suburbia and rural areas. As people become more comfortable working from their laptops, they might move to smaller cities or even go back to suburbia (gasp!) as they want more space, cheaper rent, or just be closer to their family.

• The 9-to-5 schedule will gradually disappear. People, in turn, will manage how and when they work throughout the day. Flexible schedules will be the norm: working moms might prefer to work really early in the morning to have the majority of the day with their children; night owls might decide to work at night, when they’re most most efficient, etc.

• Distributed teams will become the new normal. Like I stated in my previous post, access to new jobs will be based more on skill than credentials or geography. If companies can have a remote team, they will choose the best people for the job, not the ones from a 20 mile radius.

• New networks of people and interests will sprout. People from opposite corners of the world will start talking and collaborating now that geography is not a limiting factor. This is already happening with certain communities on Twitter.

• Some people will want to make a living through the internet. People might choose to migrate their business online. Industries like digital marketing, affiliate sales, content creation, online courses, etc. will become huge, and several new industries will pop up to service the online economy.

• Silicon Valley will become a mindset, more than a physical place. Y Combinator— the famous Silicon Valley incubator— just announced that their next cohort will be entirely remote. This is part of a growing trend of the decentralization of Sillicon Valley as companies, founders and VCs migrate to other cities, or decide to operate primarily online. The ideas are still now produced and read primarily online (on Twitter mostly) and will influence millions of people not living in Silicon Valley or even in the United States.

I’m probably missing a ton… What other consequences do you think remote work will bring?

As always, thanks for reading.

Santi

I’ve been a freelance consultant working remotely for the past three years, so I’ve already drank the remote work KoolAid. I do understand there are issues and learning curves with remote work, but am convinced the positives outweigh the negatives by a long shot.

If you want to level up your career, or redefine your work life, visit form.consulting and schedule a 30-min free consultation with me.

Welcome to the first edition of a brand-new newsletter focused on Work. Work as an economic activity, as craft, as a creative pursuit, as a tool, as a historical concept…

I’ll share weekly tidbits and insights about our sometimes troubling, mostly cordial, but oh-so-very-important relationship with work.

Tough Context

We are living in unprecedented times. The COVID-19 epidemic is altering the way we spend our time, interact with other people, and do business. Crises are coming: global economic depression at a magnitude we haven’t seen since the Great Depression; massive unemployment throughout the world; a more hostile, less globalized political order… A brave new world.

However, this great disruption will force us to reflect and act in ways that we wouldn’t have done a few months ago. Maybe you will find yourself out of a job you hated— a blessing in disguise, maybe you have a newly found appreciation for your job, or maybe this is the push you needed to start that side business you have been considering.

Whatever might happen, it’s clear that work is undergoing a massive transformation. All our beliefs about stability, money, risk and productivity are not so clear anymore.

Below are some ideas—sketches really— of what I think can happen. They are as much as wish list as a list of predictions. They describe a type of future I want to be a part of.

Work in 2030

1. Will reflect our agency and interests

• People will follow their interests and skills. From meditation teachers, to marketing experts, to AI researchers, to chefs.

• Most people will be owners of their time and labor.

• Your interests and values will determine the type of work you do, not the other way around.

2. More flexible and distributed

• There will be an explosion of independent workers that are self-employed, or have a small business, that work on a “gig” basis.

• The gig economy will eventually be bigger than the paycheck economy. (Yes, I said it.)

• There will be millions of people collaborating with businesses small and large across geographies and industries.

3. Mostly remote

• Offices will still exist, but more people will opt for remote-first or at least remote-friendly jobs.

• We will see new types of work deals: work from home (WFH) a couple of days a week, or office hours during the morning and WFH in the afternoon.

• There will be an exodus to smaller cities and more rural areas. As people realize that they can be as productive while working from their homes, they will decide to move to smaller cities to have a better quality of life, maybe to be closer to their families or just to pay cheaper rent.

4. Collaborative across geographies

• Tech will allow for more serendipitous collaborations by linking people with the same interests who might be in different cities and countries.

• Intellectual and scientific pursuits will be easier to start and maintain between amateurs and experts working together.

• As we are facing global challenges that need global solutions, distributed teams will be able to tap into individual resources but still work together and share findings to achieve better results.

5. Accessible: skills > credentialism

• Partnerships will happen between teenagers, 30 year olds and people over 60. It will be based on interests and skills, not based on a diploma or title.

• People in the developing world or from non-traditional backgrounds will be able to compete for jobs based on their talents and projects, not their credentials.

This is a very rough draft of what work will look like, I know. What else am I missing? Let me know.

With this post I am extremely happy to tell you that I’m starting a new consulting project for people who think they can do more with their work life; those who want to craft a new path or redefine the one they are in.

It is called Form Consulting. If you are interested, you can find more information at form.consulting

This will be a newsletter where I’ll attempt to make sense one of the most important, time-consuming activities ever devoted by man.

Some topics I’ll delve into:

- Philosophy of work

- Future of work

- Remote work

- The Organization

- Startup and entrepreneurial culture

- Creativity and work

- Passion and craft

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In the meantime, tell your friends!