Sara’s Weekly Update #22

Welcome to my newsletter! I write down my thoughts & opinions on the topics I read/watch in the last week. My topics of interest are wide, please feel free to skip to the topic you like.

Jan 6th Indictment

Finally the indictment for Jan 6 is here. It’s just the indictment and he is not convicted yet, so he is innocent until proven guilty. Good to hear from the former head of the DOJ who served the Trump administration, about this case. One thing is clear, we don’t want one more Jan 6 and we need to make the people accountable for what they did. We have to wait & see how it all unrolls. Also looks like the DOJ is expecting a speedy trial, and it could be in Jan/Feb 2024. 2024 is going to be law & order series in real life.

Fitch Cuts U.S. Long-Term Ratings From 'AAA' to 'AA+'

Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating due to fiscal concerns, a deterioration in U.S governance, as well as political polarization reflected partly by the Jan. 6 insurrection

Ballooning debts & divided country are not helping Americans. Once the US bond rating is downgraded, investors demand more interest as the risk increases, and this in turn will increase the mortgage rate, car loan rates, etc and bring down the asset prices (home/stocks) and it will hurt every American. People should elect leaders who can unite the country, calm the country & also manage the debts. Hope US can fix this.

Books:

Started reading “The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman

Introduction

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create and take control of our destiny is encoded in human DNA—and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship. As Yunus says, our ancestors in the caves had to feed themselves; they had to invent rules of living. They were founders of their own lives first, and founders of civilizations only later. In the millennia since then we forgot that we are by our very nature entrepreneurs. Instead, we’ve been acting like “labor,” as Yunus puts it. This isn’t the way to create a great career.

One major change has been the disintegration of the long-term pact between employee and employer that used to guarantee lifetime employment and training in exchange for lifelong loyalty. With the death of traditional career paths, you can bid farewell to the kind of traditional professional development previous generations enjoyed.

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself. Companies aren’t inclined to invest in you, in part because you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there. This relentless decaying of the employer-employee relationship is especially true as companies become more geographically distributed and more employees work remotely—those employees can often feel less personally connected to their colleagues and company culture.

Professional loyalty in your career now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your superiors, as Dan Pink has noted. The United States (and its peers) have largely become, as he famously put it, a free agent nation.

The business strategies employed by highly successful startups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar. What I mean is, the principles for successfully scaling a company aren’t so different from the keys to “scaling” a great career—quickly growing one’s skill sets, relationships, and market relevance in the same way that companies quickly grow their products, operating capabilities, and customer base.

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. We believe it is essential to keep your career in “permanent beta.”

To live in permanent beta is to make a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth—to living according to yet. Approaching your career this way will give you an edge as the world changes, your competition changes, and you change. Professional life, after all, doesn’t take place in a vacuum; it takes place in markets, which are always moving toward new horizons. It’s Day 1. Every single day.