The fact that it feels like it's written by an AI aside (because you know, someone obviously wanted to spend time on a beach instead) - there is an endless cadence to the "entrepreneur, money and life" article of which this is a part.
What always strikes me is that these articles rarely mention a sort of quiet, middle way entrepreneur group - of which I consider myself a member. Like most of the people I know who work for themselves or have a little product or a freelance business, I'm not in the game to "100x" anything, I'm not funded, I'm not interested in million dollar deals, and I could give a monkeys about hockeystick growth.
Instead I - and many / most of the people I know in this group - are just getting along. We've got a pretty good work / life balance. We get to look at the sea and do the occasional deal and sign some nice work up - we all pay for our mortgages and our families. We're doing business, we're doing entrepreneurship - and we're doing it pretty well without having to make these grand declarations about busting our balls until 35 and then retiring or working 4 hour weeks etc etc.
We probably don't ever make any articles like this because it's not the WOO story that everyone wants to read of rabid success or astonishing failure. We're just here, doing what we do and having quite a nice time doing it.
Ha, author here -- I'm probably a member of this group myself. I bootstrapped my first company and then ran a small consultancy for awhile.
Spent some time at a fund, but we primarily bought and operated SaaS companies as cash flow businesses. It's been base hits all the way.
I think if you're happy with building a business that gives you freedom and work life balance, this can be a great life. Personally, I eventually got tired of consulting even though it was good money and lifestyle. There were other things I wanted to work on that I didn't have time for, and I wanted to create something of my own, rather than just working on other people's projects.
But that's just my experience--I think if you're happy in the freelance / agency life, it can be great, but you are still ultimately selling time for money. Maybe this is a 4th path, the career craftsman--working a job you enjoy with people you like, and not needing your work to be as aligned with a "passion" or some sort of calling.
Just my $0.02 -- appreciate the comment and will have to make my writing sound less like an AI in the future ^_^;;
The most common pitfall I see on the bivocational path is when work consumes so much of your time and attention that you don’t have the energy to pursue art in your spare time.
One common pitfall of the integration approach is what I call the “bakery trap.” It goes like this: someone likes to bake pies, so they decide to open a bakery. A year in, they realize that they’re spending all their time bookkeeping, managing staff, and trying to market the business—and don’t get to spend any time actually baking.
these are really very similar.
especially with your followup example of travelling for work and never making it to the beach.
because that is actually choosing your work so that it aligns with your hobby, and not making your hobby into your job.
that is fine, it's just different from directly integrating your interest with your work.
i once worked as a developer evangelist. i got to travel and give talks. i never made it to any beach either, but that didn't matter because going to conferences and hanging out with tech folks was the very thing i enjoyed doing, and here i got paid for it. perfect job.
so for integrating, you really have to make sure that the thing you enjoy doing is the very thing that pays you. or realize that while you managed to align your interest with your work you didn't integrate them and you still are on the bivocational path.
EDIT TO ADD:
and the key for the bivocational path is to set proper priorities.
i never let work get in the way with spending time with family, meet with friends or other activities that i'd do after work. don't work over time. don't allow work to become more important than your other activities. if they do, fight back or switch jobs.
and if anyone questions your priorities, straight out tell them that your family is your priority. (while you are single, this means building a family and finding a partner, which requires time to spend with your friends and on your hobbies)
unless you intent to never get married. then you may need a different excuse.
As someone mid-sabbatical with a plan to transition to something entirely self-run, it’s really good to read this comment.
I’ve done the busting my balls in big tech thing and burned out hard, which made me realize I needed to make a serious change. But it’s pretty common to find content focused on exactly what you describe instead of the “I’m just doing what I need to do so I can pay bills and lead a happy life”.
I want to build something successful, but not so successful that I’m back to burnout mode. Some people seem happier to burn themselves out for their own endeavor, but I just want to find a good balance between paying bills and enjoying life.
I’ve been building out a series of blog posts talking about the sabbatical itself, and how I’ve spent my time, and just wanted to mention that I’d be one of the first readers if you or someone like you decided to write about their “middle way” experiences.
I hope I can write about that eventually, but it’s all aspirational at this point.
Well you obviously didn't read the article, as the article very explicitly covers an approach that is "[..] the choice to make income in a way that leaves time to pursue meaning outside of work in the form of art, hobbies, or side projects." How is that any different than what you just spent 4 paragraphs describing?
It's incredibly ironic that you try to diss the article as sounding like it was written by an AI, when your comment reads as copy+paste echo chamber commentary on work ethics/money which isn't actually connected to the article you're supposedly commenting on.
> An example of this succeeding is my friend Nicole, who started making watercolor paintings about climate change for fun and sharing on social media. Her work went viral, and after four months, she decided to quit her job and go all in on art. Now, she makes a living through merch and commissioned work.
Ironic to bring that up as an example when your header image is an LLM-generated "watercolor" painting. Sorry, Nicole.
The claim is that using a two-stroke leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as many hydrocarbon emissions as driving a pick-up truck from Texas to Alaska. Clearly she has never actually thought about the logistics of this!
The shortest route I could find on Google Maps was from Dumas, TX to Metlakatla, AK at around 2500 miles. I drive a car in the UK, but that would be probably 200L or more (or 100 gallons for US folk) and even more for a truck. There's no way that ANY leaf blower gets through 3 gallons of fuel a minute! In fact, google tells me that a typical leaf blower uses 0.43 gallons per hour. So driving a truck will use approximately 500 times as much.
I'm concerned about climate change, but making completely ridiculous claims like this, even if they are pretty watercolours, isn't helping the cause - especially when it's immediately obvious that it's nonsense!
First off, kudos for putting in the effort to critically think through the implications of stats you see!
Actually, the counterintuitive truth is that two-stroke engines produce ~300-500x more PM/hydrocarbon emissions from the same amount of fuel use than a four-stroke engine, due to the fundamental nature of incomplete combustion and the oil-fuel mixture used in two stroke engines, and the efficacy of emissions controls on modern cars vs common leaf blowers. Your calculations are correct, it's just this difference is so big it seems crazy when you first learn about it. (Which is what Nicole's art is trying to communicate!) This is cited in the NYT article from the tweet you link: https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d... , although for a more scientific source you can see https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... .
While technically, carbureted two-stroke engines can sometimes produce less NOx than four-stroke fuel-injected counterparts for equivalent fuel use, incomplete combustion means leaf-blowers and the like have a massively outsized impact on air quality, especially for the operator. The good news is that electric systems are now cheap and lightweight enough for most applications, which is fantastic.
From that article you linked to, while it's true that the figure for "NMHC" is higher (0.005g/min to 1.495g/min, yes this is almost 300x), this is just the worse case result - look at the other figures too: NOx is 0.005g/min to 0.010g/min (a doubling) and CO is 0.276g/min to 6.445g/min (about 25x). Of course, all of these figures will be dwarfed by CO2 emissions which will be roughly proportional to the amount of fuel used.
Now consider the time spent doing these activities - 30 minutes compared to 47 hours (according to Google), so multiply all those per minute figures for the truck by 100 to make a fair comparison. Now, the blower is triple the "NMHC", 2% of the NOx, 25% (EDIT: I made a mistake before) of the CO and about 0.2% of the CO2 (100 gallons vs 0.2L).
Honestly, I don't know what "NMHC" includes - as presumably it doesn't include NOx as that is called out separately, but whatever, it's just part of the emissions and so the claim that the image makes of "fewer hydrocarbon emissions" is clearly false. I'll agree that it seems to be a bad summary of the article which was "the emissions are dirtier".
EDIT: Actually, I should add that the image has done a good of raising awareness that leaf blowers are clearly pretty dirty even despite not using much fuel, so I guess it served its purpose even if after looking at the sources, I'm still not really sure by how much in actual terms, because the things I know to look out for - CO and NOx - aren't as bad as claimed, only NMHC, something I've never heard of before, and I've no idea how bad that is.
That's a fair point, although I'm not sure I'd personally categorize it as "actively deceptive", I agree it could be a lot clearer about "Emissions", and empirically you're clearly right that is has some folks confused. To be charitable, like all science communication it's trying to simplify a very nuanced topic and probably could be improved. I do think the illustration of how leafblowers pollute at ~300x the rate a car does is largely true, and the GHG/environmental impact is a lot messier than just primary CO2 emissions.
(Disclaimer: I've never met or interacted with Nicole, but I know people that have, so I'm likely biased to assume good intent.)
I'm not sure about actively deceptive. What else does it mean? Hydrocarbon emissions are what you get when you burn hydrocarbons - H2O, CO2 and CO. If it's referring to a different thing, it's not a hydrocarbon emission.
The image, and the claim within it, is actively deceptive because it's not true.
It's a little messy, and it's not clearly disambiguated what concept the artist is referring to. I agree "Hydrocarbon emissions" could reasonably mean what you get when you burn hydrocarbons, but that definition can also include literal "Hydrocarbon emissions": uncombusted or partially combusted hydrocarbon fuel being emitted out of the exhaust after ignition due to non-ideal combustion. Like you mention, this is alongside CO, as well as elemental black carbon and other trace combustion products like NOx etc...
You're right that there isn't orders of magnitude more CO2 from a two stroke, but there are orders magnitude more CO, as well as these literal "emitted hydrocarbons", which I think it what the direct claim the art intends to illustrate with either dinfinition. But the fact we're having this conversation is evidence the claim at the very least isn't clear.
You're assuming 1 gallon of fuel consumed by a pickup truck emits the same amount as that emitted by a 2-stroke leaf blower engine consuming 1 gallon of fuel. They definitely don't.
I link some sources in a separate comment up-thread, but the short answer is two stroke engines run orders of magnitude "dirtier" than a four stroke in a car, primarily due to incomplete combustion of fuel. (Some of this is fundamental to the physics of their operation, and some of this is they aren't subject to the same strict automotive emissions standards, so less engineering goes into reducing their emissions)
Intuitively, this is why you can sometimes taste a lawnmower running the next block over in the air, but the same isn't true for a modern car idling, even if they were consuming fuel at the same rate.
You can flag stories, but I don't like to flag things. I don't want to flag this story -- I just think it's yet another entry in a million shallow, vague, pointless "hustle" lifestyle newsletters written by wannabe Thinkfluencers.
> "by making an honest living with part of our time, we can carve out another swath to do the work we really care about"
i usually feel too burned out from work to even think about what else i might care about. sometimes it feels like nothing, i would be happy with hot water, a roof, warm bed and internet access. i don't want to be a consultant or entrepreneur or any of that.
When you build a business that makes money, you need to create value for someone. It can be anyone really: your neighbor down the street, people in another zip code or country, a demographic all over the world, etc. There's just one person in the entire world for which you can NOT create value for: yourself. No one will pay you to create value for yourself. This is the essential difference between work and play. Work is creating value for others. Play is creating value for yourself. Money and "Meaning" are far more mutually exclusive than people realize. the fastest way to make something UNfun is to get paid for it. Just try this experiment: imagine anything you want to do for fun, then realistically imagine what it's like to get paid for it. If you're really honest with yourself and understand the equivalent job, you'll see that it becomes quickly unfun the moment you get paid.
This is a really interesting and clever way of thinking about it, and I think you've hit the nail on the head! I'm bookmarking this comment.
I've tried to start a bunch of businesses and side projects over the years in that intersection of money and meaning, and in retrospect that's been a big reason they haven't been successful: I created something with value for myself and then tried to find other people that would also get value from it. That's much more difficult, marketing-focused, and roundabout than just doing something that I know creates value directly and trying to find meaning in that.
"Follow your passion" can be a valuable outlook on life. The overly broad interpretation of that is what many people find confusing.
I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity.
Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.
An attainable goal for most people is: a job reasonably well suited to your talents, which you usually don't mind doing, and which pays reasonably well.
Actually having a passion for it -- well, that's a would-be-nice. Not a gotta-have.
And for a lot of people who do have a passion, turning it into the nine to five kind of ruins it. I think it's a pretty rare sort of person who can really love their job for a long time.
What is worse is then once you have done your job. You have no left over energy for your own projects anymore. As you have basically consumed the energy you would for your own projects into the job. The only way it works is if you have a passion for something AND for doing it for someone else.
A career you don't hate, sure. But also a job that's not so toxic that you are exhausted at the end of the day. That's the theory of the day job: in many disciplines it's tough to get to the point where your discipline will comfortably support you. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with a day job. Just, a day job that's not toxic. So you can pursue your discipline the rest of the time.
I expect, for most of these, the problem is stopping at the one-liner. The one-liner is not a complete recipe. Often the one-liner is catchy but misses the point entirely. Always, the one-liner needs pages of details.
the missing ingredient is teaching kids and exposing them to things that would help them develop a passion.
and more importantly help them to develop a purpose.
for myself i believe that the very purpose of life is to contribute to the advancement of civilization. iaw: do something useful for the world. no matter how small. developing a passion from that is much easier
this also solves the problem of ruining a passion if it is turned into work because do something useful is a higher order value.
Statistically, I'm thinking the group being able to have "life changing money" in their thirties or forties is quite small. Likewise, making reliable income from a passion in the area of arts, music, is only for the few.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, I'm just saying we need advise for the rest of us. If you're not in that 1% group that will make it big at a young age or can retire early, I propose the pseudo-retirement.
I'm middle-aged and slowly but surely optimizing my expenses. Paying down the mortgage. Optimizing the energy use of our home. Going from 2 cars down to 1. Buying extremely durable goods. Cutting useless daily expenses.
The idea is to bring expenses down to such a manageable level so that much less income is needed to keep everything going. Somewhere in the age range of 50-60, we pseudo-retire. We switch to a simple job nearby.
We're in our forties and could already make it on 2 minimum wage jobs right now. We still have a lot of room to cost optimize and if we really stretch it, 1.5 minimum wage jobs in 5 years is on the table, as well as 1 minimum wage job in 10 years. Quite likely we'll go for 2 x 3-4 days/week jobs, but even 2 x full-time would be fine.
The main motivation for this strategy is the very high retirement age (about 70-71) by the time we get there but also to get out of our demanding, stressful jobs. They're frying our brains and sanity.
These feel like recipes for failure because it doesn't acknowledge that most people lack the ability to:
A. Earn enough to employ these strategies
B. Succeed at their "passion" in a meaningful way.
Here is a more realistic approach if you have a passion and don't know how to balance it with a more boring career choice:
Figure out some way to dedicate a few months to it. You most likely don't have the talent or dedication to succeed. After a few months you will realize this and move on with your life having checked that box.
Here's someone who has lightly lived off their passion.
First and foremost, look up the origin of the word "passion" if you're not familiar with it. You'll be surprised by its original meaning.
Living off something you love and that lights up your eyes doesn’t take months, it takes years, many years. In the initial years, you have to fight against all possible forces, starting with your own imposter syndrome, the lack of money (if you’re not from a wealthy family), and then there’s the phase of convincing everyone around you who doesn’t believe in your "talent" - that is if you come from a culture that needs the validation of others to feel good. Besides that, you still have to deal with the sales and marketing part. It’s not enough to be talented, it’s not enough to do your job well, there are still many variables. All of this doesn’t get resolved in months (maybe very, very lucky people manage to turn their passion into success in months, but that should be less than 1% of the entire sample). Anyway, I could spend many hours talking about this topic that I experienced firsthand for 7 years and was forced to switch to the corporate world because of the pandemic.
Yep -- this is where I tend to see people end up after doing a sabbatical. That, or they alternate between periods of highly paid work and periods bumming skydiving, making art, etc.
Damn, I would have loved for this article to have any substance. As someone who has been doing consulting the last two years, these kinds of questions are always on my mind. And I have no good answers.
Hey, author of the post here. My takeaway after trying all these strategies is that there's no one right answer. All paths can work but also have failure states.
If you want to talk, feel free to drop me a note - hi@nosmallplans.io. I spent 2 years doing consulting before shifting into other work, happy to share more specific thoughts / reflections offline.
"Let's put that in perspective. To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska."
What always strikes me is that these articles rarely mention a sort of quiet, middle way entrepreneur group - of which I consider myself a member. Like most of the people I know who work for themselves or have a little product or a freelance business, I'm not in the game to "100x" anything, I'm not funded, I'm not interested in million dollar deals, and I could give a monkeys about hockeystick growth.
Instead I - and many / most of the people I know in this group - are just getting along. We've got a pretty good work / life balance. We get to look at the sea and do the occasional deal and sign some nice work up - we all pay for our mortgages and our families. We're doing business, we're doing entrepreneurship - and we're doing it pretty well without having to make these grand declarations about busting our balls until 35 and then retiring or working 4 hour weeks etc etc.
We probably don't ever make any articles like this because it's not the WOO story that everyone wants to read of rabid success or astonishing failure. We're just here, doing what we do and having quite a nice time doing it.