The Best of the Lone Gunman

The Lone Gunman presents his best links of the year. Some wonderful entrepreneurial stuff in there. I particularly recommend Study Hacks' advice: decide what kind of lifestyle you want, and reverse engineer your career to fit it.

Example Lifestyles

• The Power Broker: You live in a big city in a nice apartment. You climbed the ladder fast in a difficult business. You wield power. You’re good at what you do. You’re well respected. Your job is intense but you are super-organized so it doesn’t drive you crazy. You’re surrounded by good, loyal friends, and when you have fun, you have fun hard.


• The Serial Entrepreneur: You live in a nice San Francisco townhouse. You’ve started several businesses. Some more successful than others. You tend to alternate between an intense year or two growing a business followed by some extended time off for intense relaxation. You’ve got a network of good friends across the country and a bar down the street that you visit every Friday night to catch-up with your closest buddies. You use your off time to develop extreme hobbies and indulge in grand, hopelessly ambitious and wildly fun projects.


• The Virtual Voyager: You live in your dream house in a cozy community-oriented town, surrounded by natural beauty. You work virtually for several technology companies; setting your own hours. Three or four light days a week is enough to take care of your expenses. You and your family spend a lot of time outdoors, barbecuing with the neighbors, and, in general, enjoying small town life. You travel a lot for the sheer adventure of it.

Also, apropos of the "should I go to grad school" posts this month, here's the advice of the Science Creative Quarterly, which suggests that you think twice about it, due to the fact that there's a linear replacement rate for science faculty, but a geometric proliferation of grad students. The Malthusian pressure thus suggests that most science grad students should exit the research universities to do something else (teaching, government, industry). While we're busy redesigning grad school, we need to upgrade these alternative options in the eyes of the people laboring there.