#11: Rational artists, money, and articles as prototypes

Hey there,

I’m sending this late.

A full disclosure:

Instead of finishing an article I really wanted to include here, I binged Squid Game on Sunday. So I edited it yesterday and published it today right before writing this.

However, I set its publish date to yesterday, so it’s not the same as this reflection.

Don’t tell the police.

Okay. So what is the article I risk the time travel jail for?

I want to work like a Rational Artist

As I mentioned before, I’m working on the “How to Find Freedom at Work” guide (the name will probably change). I have the table of contents, and I’m writing articles on each topic.

I’d like to publish 1-2 every week and slowly compile the best of them into a guide.

The article I finished yesterday (ehm, today) is:

→ Rational Artist – The Ideal Way to Work

It’s one of the opening ideas in the guide. Kind of experimental because I have no idea how it’s going to resonate with people. It resonates with me, but I don’t know how weird I might be.

Anyway, in this article, I describe what I see as the best approach to solve the two problems of finding freedom at work: Money and Joy.

Articles = Prototypes

If you read this article (or any future ones), please, let me know what you like and don’t like.

I make articles as polished prototypes, not fully crafted products.

It means I use articles as samples of ideas to test their merit, so I don’t need them to be 100% refined.

I realized this yesterday, and it solved my long-term dilemma: “How good should my articles be before I publish them?"

This puzzle haunted me for the last year and a half. And this realization freed me enormously.

Before this, I felt bad when my article didn’t seem 100% (and it never does). But, at the same time, I wanted to keep writing. So I kept going but wasn’t very happy with some of my imperfect babies.

As a designer, this prototype-oriented approach is much closer to me. It allows me to learn faster, and it fits into my workflow much better.

Money is half of your freedom

Freedom is linked with money.

I have gaps in knowledge about money, so I’ve read a lot about it lately. Mostly about its relationship with personal freedom and living a good life.

These are some of the sources I’m exploring:

• J. L. Collins – Mostly investment advice for achieving financial freedom, plus some core principles for handling money well. I like this guy, even though I’m not very interested in investing right now.
• Alan Watts – Philosophy around the intersection of money, work, and freedom.
• Ramit Sethi – Entertaining speaker. A bit too sales-y for my taste. But I like his idea of a Rich life – spending extravagantly on what you love while cutting mercilessly what you don’t care about.
• Mr. Money Mustache – Mostly early retirement stuff.

I’m going to write a few articles about money soon. So if you know about some good sources, email me, please.

That’s it for today.

Please, tell me what you think about the Rational Artist if you read it. That would really help me out.

And be brutal. It’s a prototype, so extra polishing before (if) it makes the cut to the guide is expected.

Have a good week.

Byyye.