As a childless woman in her mid-30's, I take issue with this comment. I run a successful business that supports the livelihoods of a dozen people, I volunteer and am a an active community advocate, and I teach, among other things.
My decision to not have children is so I can focus my attention on other economic contributors and keeping my team employed. I'd hardly call that "dicking around without responsibility."
I completely agree. It’s a fairly bad take whenever people say “you can do both”, because it really doesn’t work that way. Like theoretically you could, but chances are, one will negatively affect the other part.
My sister, in her late 30s with 3 children, always emphasized how she wouldn’t be successful if she didn’t have unlimited support from her partner in terms of income and career. But that’s very rare for an average family.
Your post is a great example of the NAXALT fallacy.
On the whole, he's right. There are some people who can't have kids because they're too busy managing companies and employing dozens of workers, but such people are a very small fraction of the populace.
...And even that, I'd suggest, is cope. Lots of extremely successful people have children. They just hire nannies, utilize daycares, get grandparents involved, etc. It can be done.
I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with other business owners going through the same things I am.
Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting, personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other social network I use.
I feel the same way; weddings have always felt like an unnecessary extravagance.
Some friends are getting married on the weekend and I was shocked to learn that they're spending close to $50,000 on the wedding, and that's after a raising over $5,000 at their social and getting financial support from both their families to pay for the event. That's like a downpayment on a house! Insanity.
That kind of expense sounds outrageous to me. we married in the czech republic (we lived in austria at the time, now in germany - both border CZ) & I believe the bill ended up being around €5-6k which our parents on both sides wanted to split between them (we could have paid for it ourselves had they not).
partially its because it's just plain cheaper there but a lot of it is just how freaking overboard some people go with weddings!
Bump for Trello. I use it to manage my team (who work remotely) and personal life, too. We use it for vacations, long-tern house projects (gardening, building things, etc.)
I've tried Slack in a few different contexts and have always found that the chat-based interface encouraged users to do just that: chat.
A combo of Trello + email work better for keeping communication focused on the product/project, in my experience.
I started freelancing 5-6 years ago, doing copywriting projects mostly. Website copy, monthly blog posts, that kind of stuff.
After a few months I realized that none of the clients I was working with had an actual digital marketing plan in place; they were just farming out copy projects because they "knew the needed to have a blog."
I pitched all of my existing clients and spent the next year building up a side roster of additional clients who relied on me for their digital marketing strategy, copy, and social media management. This pivot away from being just copy-based to strategy and execution/management earned me enough recurring monthly revenue that I was making more from my side project than my 9-5, so I quit.
I've been running my company, Starling Social (https://www.starling.social) for just shy of three years now. I have a Copywriter, an Account Manager, and it's looking like I'll need to hire an Ads Specialist in the not-too-distant future. Life is pretty great.
I had to try many brands. Finally found one I can wear 18 hours a day. Hard to think of a benefit to Lasik. Maybe open water swimming I fear losing a contact, but has never happened yet.
Ooh, I'm glad I scrolled down to see your comment identifying this (I generally avoid the comments section online unless it's on HN, heh).
I was taken aback by a lot of statements made in the article, which seemed to essentially state "I worked hard and it's not fair if other people don't have to, too" but in light of this his stance on the matter makes a lot of sense.
I want to add a bit to your comment - it's important to try and identify the kind of meetups you'd like to attend that will help you meet your desired customer base, and the kinds that will help you get known in your local community (ie: meetups for web devs to connect).
I find that meetups can sometimes become circle-jerks for people in a similar field to just get together and talk/humblebrag. Which is fine, but if that's not your goal you need to look at different meetups which serve that goal.
Some meetups I went to were the exact circle-jerk/humblebragfests you're talking about.
The one I consistently go to (shameless plug [OpenHack Syracuse](http://www.openhacksyr.com) is a monthly meetup for developers to talk about what projects they're working on and to spend time together working on projects, ideas, and sharing info. It's really just an organized hangout/hack session. And it's these types of meetups which are best for getting contract work (because contract work isn't the goal)
Whether it be business opportunities, employment prospects, or romance, there seems to be a consistent theme: improving your prospects often comes as a result of improving the relevant factors you can presently control. With that being said, all three seem to benefit from enhancing your network.
I assume that this is what's going to happen. While I'm a bit nervous about this whole "10,000 char" thing, it would totally destroy their current user experience and make Twitter unreadable if they actually implemented it in your feed.
Still, I don't quite know if I like that idea. I guess we'll see.
Totally. There's no way they'll dump 10,000 character posts into your feed without providing a summary and read more link. That would destroy the experience on any social network, which is why Facebook already summarizes lengthy posts automatically. A tweet-sized summary would make everyone's complaints about this a total non-issue.
For reference, here's what 10,000 characters looks like:
In figuring itself out now, Twitter's real problem that its existing users haven't had to experience any real degree of change for a long time. Facebook was kind of smart to "move fast and break things" and ignore the complaints from people who don't want to have to learn new ways of doing things :P
I'm actually in the process of updating my quote template for my content marketing services at the moment, and looking over it again it's basically a bunch of gibberish and nonsense that wouldn't have made sense when I was growing up. Weird.
My decision to not have children is so I can focus my attention on other economic contributors and keeping my team employed. I'd hardly call that "dicking around without responsibility."