Young person discovers adulting is hard. Film at eleven.

Less snarky follow-up:

Has there been a more destructive piece of seemingly good advice offered to young people than "If you spend your career doing something you love, you'll never work a day in your life!"?

Seriously, what hogwash. Life is about choices. Like, nine people on the planet get to do something that is fulfilling, exciting, and financially rewarding. The rest of us have to decide what is more important in the phase we are in. If you don't love your job as a IT programmer for a life insurance company, guess what? You can have hobbies! Or a family! Or a crippling booze addiction!

Or you can quit and join the circus. You'll get better selfie opportunities but the pay isn't as good.

Has there been a more destructive piece of seemingly good advice offered to young people than "If you spend your career doing something you love, you'll never work a day in your life!"?

Seriously, what hogwash. Life is about choices. Like, nine people on the planet get to do something that is fulfilling, exciting, and financially rewarding. The rest of us have to decide what is more important in the phase we are in. If you don't love your job as a IT programmer for a life insurance company, guess what? You can have hobbies! Or a family! Or a crippling booze addiction!

Or you can quit and join the circus. You'll get better selfie opportunities but the pay isn't as good.

Agree 100%. It's like people totally miss the point that it's called "work", not "fun time".

If you don't love your job as a IT programmer for a life insurance company, guess what? You can have hobbies! Or a family! Or a crippling booze BBTF addiction!

FTFY.

A more useful phrasing is "figure out how to get paid to do what you're good at and enjoy doing." But it's still badly over-reductive. A know a woman who left the big corporate world to manage a local gourmet cheese store, because she looooooooved cheese. She was getting paid to do her hobby. She was living the dream. Two years later she quit and picked her prior career back up, with a significant loss of time and therefore career development and earnings. She'll hate cheese for the rest of her life. It became work.

It's good that he recognized the problems with his "dream job" early, and seems to be making a healthy, well-considered decision to leave.

One thing that caught my eye was, "it pays less than market rates because there is a surplus of good talent". It doesn't pay less than the market rate. Rather, the market rate, which incorporates factors like a large pool of qualified and willing applicants, is lower than he would like.

If you spend your career doing something you love, you'll never work a day in your life!"?

I'll be 40 years in on this in just a few months. I guess somebody has to win every lottery....

Years ago, when I did scorekeeping for Baseball Info Solutions at the local minor league park, when it got down to the last out of the game I would go stand just inside the gate, which was located past left field, where I could still see the action, but could skedaddle the instant the game ended and get out of the parking lot ahead of everyone else (we got paid per game, not per hour). Like at most minor league parks, there was an intern standing at the gate whose job was to hand out advertisements for whatever local company was paying to have their advertisements handed out. It's a crummy job which doubtless goes to the lowest intern on the totem pole. It was almost always the same young woman at the left field gate, enduring being either ignored, awkwardly hit on, or crudely hit on by a thousand people every evening (she had an athlete's figure, that's for sure). I saw her almost every home game for a couple months, never really talked to her beyond a friendly nod and a "have a nice night" on my way out of the park.

One night in July I was up there when the visiting team tied the game in the top of the 9th, when she approached me as the bottom of the inning was commencing and asked what exactly I was doing. I explained about BIS and the scorekeeping work. I asked her how she came to be interning in this nowhere town and she started out talking about how much she loved baseball, from when she was a little girl, and how she was working toward being an athletic trainer, and then kind of unloaded over the next inning and a half (the home team won in 10) about how far removed from her dreams the reality of working in baseball turned out to be, and how much she hated the culture among the interns and didn't fit in there, and how she was really pretty all around miserable. She seemed genuine when she suggested she might quit and look into scoring games like I was doing instead. The game ended and I wished her well and said see ya tomorrow.

The next night, she wasn't there. Nor the night after that. Then the team went on the road. Next home game a week later, still not there. I finally asked someone what happened to the girl that used to be at the left field gate. They said they don't know, she just stopped showing up and didn't answer the team's calls. There must be much more to that story than the little bit I knew. But I've spent all the years since hoping she found happiness somewhere, and that nothing terrible happened to her.

It doesn't pay less than the market rate. Rather, the market rate, which incorporates factors like a large pool of qualified and willing applicants, is lower than he would like.

I assume he meant the overall labor force market rate for someone with his skillset (good with numbers, knows how to do research, etc.). In baseball, the supply/demand ratio for folks like that is clearly a lot different than in the bigger labor marketplace.

Young person discovers adulting is hard. Film at eleven.

Full agreement. Disappointing piece. Glad to see some snark in the comments.

This author does way too much navel-gazing and only devotes a vague 5 bullet-point list on what aspects of in-house MLB analytics jobs are problematic.

Which analytic dogmas are now predetermined by department heads? What areas of personal interest did they not permit you to research on company time?

While somewhat admitting to his relative lack of experience, the piece also oversells his level of expertise with IRL MLB analytics work culture.

He says his 2020 internship was wiped out by COVID and he was immediately having second thoughts about his chosen line of work before reporting for Day 1.

He later admits in the piece of a sense of relief when he decided to leave the profession 4 months ago, placing his decision into the spring of 2022.

Between uncertainty whether the 2021 season would even start until the eleventh hour due to COVID and labour strife similarly delaying the start of 2022 beginning in December 2021, it's reasonable to wonder how many months this young man actually spent as an active analytics staffer.

As someone similarly disillusioned with their chosen field and all its systemic corruption, I'm happy this young man got out before he got in too deep.

But a whistleblower piece is useless if it focuses entirely on "I want to spend more time with family and find myself" platitudes in lieu of revealing to others the specific systemic factors that lead to your decision to leave and can stand as a precaution to others.

Being overworked and underpaid is much harder to accept once you’re experiencing it firsthand.

Some of this is incredibly banal, but why would anyone ever think they'd feel good earning $40K for an 80 hour week when they could make $80K for a 40 hour week? Even if you love baseball analytics, you can still spend that extra 40 hours on baseball analytics.

I took my senior photo with a baseball and a calculator.

I fear for this person's social prospects.

Kid is only 22-23 so I'll cut him a break, but as one who has supervised and promoted lots of people over the years I can tell he has gaping holes which probably made the work hard for him:

1. Lack of clarity in his writing. There's a lot of meandering in his writing style. Translate that to a quick pitch/presentation to your boss and they lose interest and don't want to hear from that fella again

2. Lot of complaining about personal issues. I'm assuming this carried over to the workplace. Bosses hate that stuff because it never ends. I don't like my commute, I don't like the rigid working in office logic, I don't like that I'm never in the room when big decisions get made. I'm having troubles adjusting to my new environment. There's a certain expectation from managers that you will keep your #### together in the office - if you can't do that then.......

3. My work/life balance is the inevitable end game. What I always explained to people who brought these issues to me was a simple logic "if you don't like your job, work-life balance is always a problem and maybe the problem isn't the balance but the actual work." To this guys credit, he figured that out. If you like your job, none of these personal issues matter.

4. Finally I would say, he seems to have a data analytics background. If he doesn't like the humdrum of corp life, maybe he can take his data skills and love of baseball into the boutique world of consulting. I'm sure places like a minor league team or driveline or baseball savant etc probably have needs for people with his skill sets h

3. My work/life balance is the inevitable end game. What I always explained to people who brought these issues to me was a simple logic "if you don't like your job, work-life balance is always a problem and maybe the problem isn't the balance but the actual work." To this guys credit, he figured that out. If you like your job, none of these personal issues matter.

I disagree with this completely. You can love your job at 40 hours a week, and despise it at 80. The problem is the balance 90% of the time. There is literally no job on earth I want to spend 80 hours a week at, and there are millions I'd like just fine at 40.

Your job should not be your life. Nobody should be expected to spend more than 40 hours a week at their job.

maybe he can take his data skills and love of baseball into the boutique world of consulting.

He says in the piece he has gone into consulting teams and it is a "better fit."

A more useful phrasing is "figure out how to get paid to do what you're good at and enjoy doing."

Yep. Working in Business Intelligence, I do a lot of what the analysts in baseball front offices do -- write a lot of SQL, analyze data, dabble in AI/machine learning (would like to do more), make recommendations to execs, etc -- but not every freshly degreed quant who is a sports fan has been pining for a job in the mortgage industry for their entire young adult life, so I'm not expected to work 80+ hours a week for $40K in exchange for the privilege of working "in mortgages." I do a lot of my own baseball analytics at home in the evenings too, but that's my down time. I'll never have a front office World Series ring, but that's OK, I have the time and disposable income to let my vintage card collection satisfy my memorabilia craving. Speaking of rings though, one of the guys I work with used to be a mechanical engineer on the design team of a successful NASCAR driver, and a while back he broke out his rings for a Daytona 500 victory and winning a Winston Cup or NASCAR Cup or whatever it's called now. Looked like Super Bowl player rings. Very impressive and lots of diamonds.

Agree with Snapper (that doesn't happen often). I also generally agree with "doing what you love" turns what you love into work.** Good attitude or not, I decided a long time ago that work's role was to provide the means to do some things I love, not to provide meaning to my life. But for sure, work that also provides some meaning/achievement/impact is a lot more enjoyable but, even for us relatively lucky ones, that's a sometimes thing not an everyday thing.

I've been lucky enough (seriously) to be around some very high achievers in academia. They all put in 70-80 hour weeks, possibly even more in their young days. But they all seemed personally happy -- they were obsessed for sure but that also meant that at any given time, there was nothing they'd rather be doing than working on their own stuff, reading other people's stuff, networking with the other high flyers, planning out their next 5 years, etc. The admin and chasing grant dollars they didn't enjoy but they knew it was necessary. That obviously poses challenges for work-life balance but, at least by the time I met them, they wanted and thrived in an unbalanced environment. Their marriages often suffered -- where they found time to meet somebody to begin with I never figured out -- but I doubt the divorce rate was really any higher than for normal people. Lots of estranged/troubled kids but again I'm not sure that rate was any higher than normal.

So while that would drive me nuts, I can't imagine these folks doing anything else. If you enjoy reading academic journals more than watching TV or listening to music or getting out on your bike, more power to you. Seeing what it took to become a high-flyer in that world, I realized very early on I was not that person. I had the skills to help those folks achieve their goals and they paid me well enough, the only problems arising when their obsession encroached on my work-life balance. As Snapper suggests, I gave up a job I "loved" because it had become a 60-70 hour a week job. There were probably better ways for me to solve that problem but I can't say I regret stalling my professional career for a life that is better balanced for me.

So big-time academics are much like athletes in that way. In general, you don't get to MLB unless you are both insanely skilled and insanely focused on baseball. Obviously the latter can mess you up but it doesn't mess up everybody.

The article is a little disappointing because he never actually says what it is about the job that makes it a bad fit. So it's hard to tell if "data analytics for a baseball team" was a good fit or more of a daydream.

So, you move from 40 to 80 without any recognition of what that means. 40 is basically 8-5 with 60 minutes for lunch. Or some minor variation. Working more hours to get ahead doesn't mean amping up to 80 which is basically 16 hours on The Weekend plus 8-11 at night M/F.

I'm not sure I know anyone who thinks that average workweek is reasonable, even investment banking outfits. I've done 80 during deals - loved every minute but not as a lifestyle.

If your goal is pay, benefits and minimal advancement then working 40 is fine. If you expect to make something of yourself, you are going to have to put in more hours to get ahead. Something akin to 50-60 HRs a week until you get on the fast track. People who don't like their work usually can't stomach this and that's when all the woke-life balance starts to make an appearance (the point you made but applied to an insane number of 80 HRs per week ). People who like their work usually don't have an issue with this with the following caveat. They better get the recognition - pay, promotion, power.

My guess is that this kid saw no way up the org chart after working hard and once he realized that, he became miserable

Speaking of rings though, one of the guys I work with used to be a mechanical engineer on the design team of a successful NASCAR driver, and a while back he broke out his rings for a Daytona 500 victory and winning a Winston Cup or NASCAR Cup or whatever it's called now. Looked like Super Bowl player rings. Very impressive and lots of diamonds.

So did that guy burn out too? I'm kind of with Snapper: I can loove or meh my way through anything for 40-50 hours. But 60-80 is too much for most people and the folks who do sports for a living have to have a certain amount of unreasonable drive in order to succeed. I (and the author and probably your NASCAR buddy and most other people) are probably not wired that way.

Your job should not be your life. Nobody should be expected to spend more than 40 hours a week at their job.

Most jobs don't really require more than 25 or 30 hours of actual work a week. The rest is usually wasted in meetings and other management/co-worker ennui.

Ignoring the work/life balance thing, two of his complaints are that the team analytics department already had analytical approaches in place when he joined, and that it was hard to see how his work was contributing to winning the World Series.

Short of Bill James, not many people are going to get freedom to work on their own, high impact projects that early in their career. And Bill James himself was a night watchman in a bean factory at that age.

One ability that's useful to develop after college is the ability to make someone else's project be successful. If you can do that, people usually don't mind if you've got a pet project or two on the side.

So did that guy burn out too? I'm kind of with Snapper: I can loove or meh my way through anything for 40-50 hours.

Pretty much, yeah, that's the story. I don't get the sense that he was ever a big NASCAR fan, but he did go to a very competitive engineering school, and I'm sure the chance to do mechanical engineering at 200 mph would have been interesting.... just not interesting enough to want to spend every waking hour of his life doing it.

Which analytic dogmas are now predetermined by department heads? What areas of personal interest did they not permit you to research on company time?

I agree this is the weak point of the article but he also can't divulge insider information. "I wanted to work on X but the Rox weren't interested and made me work on Y" tells other teams the Rox don't know much about X and may just be catching up on Y.

And sure, there's the naivete of the 23-yo throughout. Both in the sense of "welcome to the real world" but also in the sense of "you're just starting out, of course you're going to be given the mundane assignment not the big picture stuff." Still I suspect what went on is that he thought he'd be involved with player acquisition and finding the unfound insights but that day-to-day analytics is about "how can we save a million $ on salary," "give me a list of minor-league pitchers whose spin rates have increased by 5% this year" and "here's the latest batted ball distribution data, update our batter positioning profiles and flag any cases where we need to move a fielder by more than 6 inches."

Obviously there are plenty of baseball nerd topics I enjoy spending some of my free time expounding on endlessly here. Probably not a single one of those is of interest to a modern baseball analytics department. [EDIT: Or any of interest were worked out 5+ years ago] Obviously all the questions related to baseball history are right out the window. What does Trout's future look like?" Other teams aren't interested because he's not under their control and the Angels aren't interested because that knowledge is too late to really matter. In practice, that question is really "let me know if we reach a point where Trout's in decline but we can still sucker a team into taking that contract off our hands" for the greatest player in team history. That's not a question for a lover of baseball to answer. "Can we improve Adrian Sampson's pitch mix?" is probably a "big" question the Cubs would like answered but is not a question for a baseball fan.

Anyway, it might be called "research and development" but a lot of the actual work will be production and customer service, especially if you're just starting out.

#21 Nature of my job is that I probably average less than 20 hours of what most people consider work. Because thinking about a problem doesn't count for most people and my job has evolved into, "What's going on here Ron?" "Dunno. Let me think about it."

With a side order of all hands on deck, 15 hours a day until the situation is resolved. (which doesn't happen more than a few times a year).

If your goal is pay, benefits and minimal advancement then working 40 is fine. If you expect to make something of yourself, you are going to have to put in more hours to get ahead. Something akin to 50-60 HRs a week until you get on the fast track. People who don't like their work usually can't stomach this and that's when all the woke-life balance starts to make an appearance (the point you made but applied to an insane number of 80 HRs per week ). People who like their work usually don't have an issue with this with the following caveat. They better get the recognition - pay, promotion, power.

I refute this. I've been working for 25 years. I spent 5 years in an 80 hour a week field (management consulting; top tier firm) putting in 55 hours a week. Worked like 3 weekend days in 5 years. Since then I've never put in more than 45 hours a week (averaged over any reasonable period of time). I'm not a super-star, but I'm in the top few percentiles of the income distribution.

Most jobs don't really require more than 25 or 30 hours of actual work a week. The rest is usually wasted in meetings and other management/co-worker ennui.

Yup, even with meetings, I could easily do my job in 30 hours a week. I put in more not to draw attention to myself.

I became a chef and rarely cooked at home and most definitely hated cooking for the holidays. I stopped being a chef and now I cook at home all the time.

Anyway around this guy's age I got interested in trying to make a go of it in analytics. Had nowhere near the amount of knowledge and training this guy had but back then the era was kind of in the border space between night security guards and a bean factory doing baseball analytics and guys graduating from Harvard doing it. So I wasn't totally out of my depth but in the end I opted not to because I had no interest working for nothing or next to nothing for either some team in a podunk town or trying to get by in a major city while working 80+ hours with no guarantee and no real likelihood of a good career.

When I worked in hotels I'd say I would average about 10 to 20 hours of real work a week and spent the rest of the time surfing the internet.

During my time in hospitality, first at the front desk and then in management, I'd say in an average 45-50 hour workweek I was doing Real Work about 25-35 hours of it, depending on the customerguest load.

26. I dont know what you are refuting. Your description of your career is exactly what I laid it out point by point. Work 55 hours a week for a while, become a valued employee, throttle down to 45 and make a lot of money.

And just to remind you, you were the one who went from 40 hours to 80 hours to make your point. When, in fact, your own experience in an 80 hr a week industry was that you worked about 55 at your peak. That path , btw, would be echoed by a majority of people

I'll stipulate as I did above that no one can work 80 hours a week and still love their job.

We are in violent agreement

The concept that people work 25 when they get paid for 40 is just the way it is. There's no way to avoid dead time, meetings, events that sideline your task for the day. Part of being productive in your real work of hours is learning from the non productive 15 hours. Whether a staff meeting with your boss is useful is entirely up to you. I found that while 98% of what was discussed was meaningless to me, I'd take info about the way my boss processed issues which helped me be a better employee to him. Life is what you make of it.

When I was 18 I worked 6 days a week and probably did about 50 to 55 hours most weeks. I did about a year of that and after that I averaged 45 hours a week in the kitchen. It wasn't until I got to hotels where I discovered that corporations expected salary employees to work at least 50 hours a week. I almost never did. I had one boss that was very adamant during the interview process that the job was for 50 hours a week and I was like you got it. I would work exactly 10 hours a day for 5 days and not do a minute more regardless of what was going on. Every single day there was about 3 hours of dead time where there wasn't a thing for me to do even if I had wanted to do something. No customers no employees. Yet there I remained.

I'll stipulate as I did above that no one can work 80 hours a week and still love their job.

I did work that many hours a week (counting travel) in the 1990s and loved it - with a caveat: I built up so many owed days that I'd then get an entire 3+ months of summer off (ok, maybe work one or two days in that entire span).

so I'm not necessarily disagreeing: late in that 8 to 9-month stretch, knowing what lay just around the corner was vitally important. I mean, there has to be gold at the end of the rainbow....

His critique of modern baseball analytics is well thought out, but not a surprise: he wanted to work on the big questions and the teams only wanted answers for the small questions.

I can actually see how sabermetrics could be an unfulfilling path for someone with a significant analytical background, especially if you don't get to choose your own projects.

I once applied for a job at a hedge fund. The screening question was a bunch of unlabeled data columns. You were supposed to clean up the data and use columns A-F to predict column Z (or something like that). The job itself promised to be more of the same, except column Z would be labeled "money". Seemed like the dullest job in the world.

Yeah, travel is interesting. My jobs had me traveling all over the world all the time. There was a healthy debate amongst us who did that, that we should travel M- F instead of on weekends. I was just happy to do it. I went everywhere. I did a trip to Australia from Chicago for 48 hours. Had a ball. Flew to Asia on Singapore airlines 20+ times. What a way to travel. I never considered any of that a hardship. I loved it.

Domestic travel - another discussion. Ugh

If you expect to make something of yourself, you are going to have to put in more hours to get ahead.

If you work hard eight hours a day, you can become a boss and work hard twelve hours a day!

I'm surprised that there's near unanimity in the reaction to this article — and shocked that everyone else had the same take I did.


Though I will point out that the discussion above is almost all about being an employee. As (now) my own boss, the dynamics are different than the discussion above about hours. There are no arbitrary 30/40/50/60 hour requirements. I do as much as I need to do. If my plate is clear, I don't have to prove to someone that I'm putting in hours by "working" all day. If I'm busy, I work 80 hours to get my stuff done, not to "get ahead" of others. (I do very little hourly work, so I feel no pressure to bill hours.)

I like my job and my work, but it absolutely doesn't define my life. If it were causing me to miss my kids' lives, I would do things differently so that this wouldn't happen.

Also, I have to say that the headline was a bit of an oversell. Other than the fact that work is work, I don't get a good sense of what he wished he knew. I did find the thing a bit bizarre: he desperately wanted this job and then barely gave it a chance. I don't care what some guy I don't know does with his life, but if a friend or relative came to me and recited this story as his/her own and asked for advice, I'd be suggesting that a year and change during a pandemic is not sufficient time to make such a drastic decision.

Many years ago John Thorn announced he was looking for a research assistant and I applied. I envisioned myself going through reams of computer paper to come up with brilliant insights that would change how teams align their defenses. In reality, I didn't get hired and teams figured it out without me. So instead I do Treasury and finance work and spend my days with spreadsheets. Is it the best gig in the world? No, I suppose not but it beats doing anything Mike Rowe does, it pays for 40 hours a week and, as others have pointed out, most weeks I don't have to actually do 40 hours of work. I get to do it from home and I'm never going back to working in an office full time again so I can't complain too much. It pays decently, too, so it keeps a roof over my head and a pillow underneath it. The family doesn't starve so life is good! All my baseball analysis these days is relegated to spare moments here and there but that's ok, my brain's not as creative as it used to be anyways. Retirement is around the corner and I'm looking forward to it!

The other thing no one mentions is that, if you're intellectually curious, any challenging job should be fun. Mapping out complex problems, and solving them is fun. I don't care if it's how to quantify miLB defense, or how to optimize movie marketing dollars.

If you work hard eight hours a day, you can become a boss and work hard twelve hours a day!

Nope. I'm the boss, have 30+ staff and no one works more than 38 hours a week. I do not expect anyone to take home or jump online and do work. I don't do that and I don't expect my staff to do that.
I like my work and my team, however it's just a vehicle for earning money that enables me to do the things I really like and spend time with my family.

I like being busy so will always have a hand in something, in this case it's just nice to be well remunerated for it.

I have a John Thorn pre-print - is that "first edition?" - of his early 1980s book. hideous lime green cover. thought it was interesting. not positive who I got it from, but it's around here somewhere.

......................

and I have found this discussion fascinating. I got reasonably close BITD to not being, per Post 2, one of the "nine people on the planet who get to do something that is fulfilling, exciting, and financially rewarding" for their entire working life.

that said, "living the dream" doesn't mean getting everything you want, in every way, on every level, by any means.

still, I wouldn't change a thing - and it sounds like not many of you would, either. that makes me smile.

I don't care what some guy I don't know does with his life, but if a friend or relative came to me and recited this story as his/her own and asked for advice, I'd be suggesting that a year and change during a pandemic is not sufficient time to make such a drastic decision.

When you go into a job that you know that (1) you'll have to work real hard and (2) you'll get paid jack-squat, you're basing that career choice on some preconceptions. If those preconceptions aren't met, then there's not much reason to stick around. This kid's LinkedIn page shows he just took a data scientist job with Nike, so it's not like he has joined a convent or is selling lawyer propaganda posters for his aging great-grandfather's book store.

As for COVID effects on the work, when your job description includes stuff like "visualization of machine learning processes in R", that doesn't sound like content that's going to change much next year.

The best thing I ever did for my career as an independent wealth manager was to briefly reduce my hours in 2013 from about 45 a week to 20. In 2012 I had been the solo-wealth manager with no employees or help and run for state legislature. I burned out. I decided to trim my client base substantively and picked the people who were the ones who made me want to sell my book of business back to a big wirehouse and just bail.

So, long story short, my service model improved massively for the clients I kept and I got referrals to clients much better fits for me (and my pocketbook) because of it. By mid 2014 I was making more than double what I had in 2012.

Not every path to financial success involves doing something you hate. After I got rid of the clients I couldn't stand making richer (or keeping rich), I loved the job. I still love it.

I'd encourage anyone who is actually good at a valued niche skill to give it a chance.

I'm with #43 (and #7). Due to immaturity, I was nearly 30 at graduation (Crammed my four-year degree into just eleven years!) but then got a position with the forest management company I most wanted to work for. After 10 years I became chief forester for Maine's Public Reserved Lands (now about 630,000 acres) and retired July of last year after 46 years in forestry. Forester pay tends to be modest compared to many other fields requiring a bachelor's degree or better, but I was eager to come to work almost every day and headed home knowing I'd accomplished significant things. (Had a few bumps in the road, of course, called "displaced by a more senior department employee, but things always returned to normal.) Probably averaged 45 hour per week during all those years, not counting some forestry figure fiddling I'd do on my own time, mainly because I liked doing it, and exactly one week of 80+. That was the field audit portion of Maine BPL seeking certification of sustainability, which started on Sunday afternoon and finished Thursday of the following week, with the 2nd Sunday off. Workdays were generally 11-12 hours with one of 15-16 and included some rigorous exercise - bushwhacking thru the Maine woods is different from a walk in the park. But that 11-day marathon was one of the most important things I ever did, and that made the long week easy to take, especially as it was one of a kind. I've been blessed.

I may have something of a dissenting opinion; or at least, I agree with these minority-opinion remarks: "It's good that he recognized the problems with his 'dream job' early, and seems to be making a healthy, well-considered decision to leave" (Icebox #6); and "Kid is only 22-23 so I'll cut him a break" (Duke #13).

I think a common pattern in entertainment/creative professions is to intuit early on that actually earning your living in such businesses is frustrating - but hang on anyway. I don't know if you can very readily get pay, flexibility, and meaningful impact in most jobs; certainly not in those that need to turn fun into money. But you can get attached emotionally to being in a given business and neglect your escape route for a long time. So 22-23 seems like a good time to detach from a given industry.

I also know people whose vocational choices were very frustrating, by they were convinced it was the best plan, and years later they have a satisfaction of perseverance that few others have.

Also, I have to say that the headline was a bit of an oversell. Other than the fact that work is work, I don't get a good sense of what he wished he knew.

This is I think more attributable to a currently hot headline style than anything else. It's everywhere.

I wonder about these people who are super-stars in their fields. For a time you're a big shot that everyone is bowing and scraping to, then one day, you retire, or get canned, or disgraced, or just fade into to irrelevance. That come down has got to be pretty hard. An ex-CEO is the same as any other retired guy, except he plays golf on nicer courses. All you really have to show for 40 years of 70 hour weeks is the money.

Glad I did not blog when I lost my virginity.

For a time you're a big shot that everyone is bowing and scraping to, then one day, you retire, or get canned, or disgraced, or just fade into to irrelevance. That come down has got to be pretty hard.

And Tom Brady is determined not to find out.

That's one guy who really doesn't like his family.

I work for an architecture firm, and it sure seems as if me and everyone around me is doing actual work all day, every day.

The deadlines are unrelenting, and while the technology has evolved so things can be done more quickly, timelines have compressed correspondingly.

But it is very satisfying to see the end result.

An aside: one of my very first projects was to design four plaques and some lettering that were to be affixed to the newly constructed Centennial Fountain, near the mouth of the Chicago River. Everything came out very nicely, and I always enjoyed pointing those elements out in the few times I was there with other folks. Fast forward several years, I've moved to the East Coast, haven't seen the fountain in years, and I go back and see that in the interim, some hack at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District wanted HIS name and his board members listed on the fountain, and they squeezed in some additional poorly matched signage onto the fountain, completely destroying a very balanced composition, and it looks terrible now. (His own name is now in giant letters above the original line "The Centennial Plaza and Fountain," so now it doesn't even make sense.)

I wonder about these people who are super-stars in their fields. For a time you're a big shot that everyone is bowing and scraping to, then one day, you retire, or get canned, or disgraced, or just fade into to irrelevance

Speaking just for myself, I find that getting on the Internet and regaling a bunch of strangers with stories of brilliant remarks I made in English Department meetings 35 years ago keeps me in fighting trim.

Salvo, Garry Cooper is no longer around so who is going to play you in your biopic?

Garry Cooper is no longer around so who is going to play you in your biopic?

(shrugs)

The CEO at my last company spent hundreds of millions to build a new Corp HQ and in the lobby had a "saying " of his etched in marble. It was nice, nothing too OTT and done really well. The new CEO came in and about 4 weeks later we all noticed a big piece of canvass over the marble. 5 months later the canvass was removed and a new saying from the new CEO was in its place but it wasn't done as well and looked "Jerry-rigged" for lack of a better phrase.

But it gave me a hearty laugh on my way in that day

I used to to tell my "friends" at work to never, never prioritize work over personal. That none of them would be at my funeral nor me at theirs. A couple people told me when I left that what i said changed their whole perspective because it's true that the day you leave everyone foefrrs about you.

For my part I actually have tried to keep up with a variety of people I worked with to see if I could prove myself wrong and to my surprise I've managed to keep a meaningful texting/calling relationship with several.

A couple people told me when I left that what i said changed their whole perspective because it's true that the day you leave everyone foefrrs about you.

Now I want to know what foeferrs means.

I used to to tell my "friends" at work to never, never prioritize work over personal. That none of them would be at my funeral nor me at theirs.

Nonsense. As the preeminent American philosopher Yogi Berra so eloquently put it: “Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours.”

I have been to two funerals of longtime colleagues in the past year, and would have attended a third if the logistics didn't make it impractivcal. at each one, I ran into dozens of other former colleagues....

I have been to two funerals of longtime colleagues in the past year, and would have attended a third if the logistics didn't make it impractivcal. at each one, I ran into dozens of other former colleagues....

Well, I think that depends at what age one dies. If you die in your 50's or 60's, you'll have tons of current and former colleagues at your funeral. If you make it to 80, probably none.

that gets more to the heart of the matter, I think. my Dad reached a healthy 92, and he was not thrilled about it as a 15-year widower.

my two colleagues, I worked with for more than 25 years. both were in their late 70s. not going to bother to do the numbers, but vaguely - imagine a department of, say, 35 people and more than 25 of them put in more than 25 years apiece.

that was the last of what really anybody is likely to ever experience - and I got on the last train to leave that station, at age 21.

there is a retired guy who still does his niche gig once a week, 67 years later (!). 35+ years used to be considered routine. those who started around 1960 were still going strong well into the 1990s - and they had stories of the old boss whose 40-year reign began almost 100 years ago as of 2022. and THAT guy had stories of old-timers he remembered when he started, so that gets you back almost to 1900 or so just talking with people I worked with.

time marches on and all that, but the privilege of being part of a generational legacy and - while not exactly a band of brothers or something - having experienced serious pressure to produce in a public way that is/was very unusual .... no complaints here about being a last dinosaur.

Now I want to know what foeferrs means.

It's that thing where everyone you worked with has some covfefe, tells their favorite story of you, then you're never spoken of in the office again.

I guess academics go to their colleagues' funerals: I have been to a few. Careers are long, tend to be with one's final employer for most of that time, and people genuinely share interests; you get to know them pretty well.

OTOH, academics can be very long-lived. It is not a risky profession, and even paper-cuts and stapled thumbs do not pose much of a danger in the digital age. I've had several emeritus colleagues reach 90+, and they might retire far away and not make provision to be shipped back to Alma Mater for burial. So it's not like I'm dashing over to the mortuary every weekend, either.

As Ernie Banks said "make sure you attend more weddings than funerals." I haven't been to to a wedding in a long time.