✨ Hey there this is a paid edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey.
We often get asked for recommendations on what to read that could be helpful in making your next big career decision. We put together a list of the essays we most often recommend - most of which you would never find on Google.
Many of these essays have had a real impact on ourselves personally and people we know. And you’ll find many of them to be rather under-the-radar—there’s a good chance you have never heard of them (and won’t regret checking them out!).
So if you’re thinking about what’s next—maybe finding a new role or trying to get that promotion or starting a new company—we suggest spending a few hours reading some of these essays. Let us know what you think: hi@nextplay.so.
And if you’re looking for interesting startups to join, check out some of our latest posts here.
People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves. I usually end up suggesting that they skip straight to step 2 and start one themselves.
Why is that? Isn’t it better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than to have to make all of them yourself? At least for me, the answer’s been sometimes yes, but sometimes no.
In my experience, the way you end up doing good in the world has very little to do with how good your initial plan was. Most of your outcome will depend on luck, timing, and your ability to actually get out of your own way and start somewhere. The way to end up with a good plan is not to start with a good plan, it’s to start with some plan, and then slam that plan against reality until reality hands you a better plan.
Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask for the one you wanted. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer noticed that mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed, so with our encouragement he registered it, and then tried to give it to McDonalds, but their cluelessness about the internet was so hilarious it became a Wired story. Shortly before that I noticed that abc.com was not claimed so when I gave a consulting presentation to the top-floor ABC executives about the future of digital I told them that they should get their smartest geek down in the basement to register their own domain name. They didn’t.
The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.
For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you’re more likely to get there.
The problem? Recent research found evidence that fantasizing about your perfect life actually makes you less likely to make it happen. While it can be pleasant, it appears to reduce motivation because it makes you feel that you’ve already hit those targets.1 We’ll cover some ways positive thinking can be helpful later in the article.
My impression was that I was supposed to go meditate on a mountaintop until the perfect idea showed up. And, well, that was more intimidating than it was inspiring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
But there was another, more effective approach right in front of me: to open the door. In other words, the most effective way for me to get good ideas was not to sit around and wait for them to occur. It was to take action so that the ideas could arrive. To start before I knew what I was doing.
One visualization is to think about your mind like a great big hallway with thousands of doors. A Monsters Inc. sort of thing. Each of those mind-doors houses a different kind of idea. When a door is open, ideas can flow through the hallway and make their way to you. When it’s closed, you aren’t getting ideas.
If this year is anything like the last 10, around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates will enter the consulting or finance industry*. This is a big deal. This is a huge deal. This is so many people! This is one-fourth of our people! Regardless of what you think or with whom you’re interviewing, we ought to be pausing for a second to ask why.
What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable.
So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.
A life lesson I keep forgetting: do not say yes to something 6+ months in the future you wouldn’t want to do if it tomorrow. The human instinct to discount value of future time winds up biting you all the time.
Conversely, if you want someone busy to say yes to something, ask for a commitment way off in the future and you might get them to say yes – and most people are loathe to break a commitment.