(2021-08-12) Eliason The Lifechanging Magic Of Highspeed Career Sampling

Nat Eliason: The Life-Changing Magic of High-Speed Career Sampling. Well it seems I’m a crypto developer now. I deployed my first set of four smart contracts last weekend.

I started winding down my role in Growth Machine a bit over a year ago, and officially stepped out in December (tk). Since then, I’ve tried on three or four different new “careers” until I hit on this one.

I think the goal of any career search is to find a sufficiently lucrative infinite game you could keep playing indefinitely

The goal of high-speed career sampling is not to get a bunch of jobs. It’s to do a bunch of different forms of work. You can do types of work without permission or anyone giving you a job. And you should probably try on the type of work before you take on a 2-4 year job.

Basically you want to find a type of work that you enjoy doing, that pulls you in deeper, and that you’d keep doing for minimal compensation. If it happens to also pay a lot, great, but you should enjoy it even if it doesn’t.

Where do you start? Wherever you want.

Where I Started: YouTube. Ali Abdaal was blowing up and it seemed like all the cool kids were starting YouTube channels and I had a head start, so why not, let’s start a YouTube channel.

It’s a lot of work to do the shooting, editing, writing, etc.

Not a good infinite game for me.

Then I did a bunch of mushrooms and realized the whole thing was super inauthentic so I quit.

Round 2: Commercial Real Estate

Then I tried to start a town.

It’s an insanely expensive project, with very low returns

Two: time. If I committed to it I was looking at 2-3 years of construction management just to get started

Round 3: Software Developer

there was something just not quite right with all the normal software stuff. I don’t even know what it was. I just didn’t care as much about what I was building

Round 4: DeFi Builder

there was actually interesting stuff happening in Crypto besides speculating on shitcoins. Most people just weren’t aware of it yet.

so I started learning Solidity

This I loved. I don’t know what it is about it, but it just really clicked with me. There’s something really magical about writing some code that just runs autonomously on the world computer and facilitates millions of dollars in transactions.

And I get to blend it with my life-long love for video games?

The last two weeks I was working 10-12 hour days putting together the contracts for Crypto Raiders and it was fucking awesome.

Finer Points

How Do You Know When to Quit?

Psychedelics help. Or just when the work feels like a chore.

How Do You Fund This?

I was lucky that this site could pay for me to goof off for a year

If you’re in your 20s, don’t get overly swayed by the “magic of compounding interest.”

You should probably spend at least 10-20% of the time you’ll eventually spend on something deciding if you want to spend that time on it. So for a 10 year career, that’s a year of testing it

That’s Not Enough Time to See if You’re Good at It! That’s not the point. You’ll get good at anything you commit to. Most of talent is bullshit. Don’t worry about getting good, worry about seeing if you like the process of getting good.