But the mechanism does work if you can access it. I made more progress on my book in the berggruen year than in the 5-6 years of nudging it along before in the interstices of consulting and blogging (been back in that mode since)
Conversation
One reason I don't write proper "real books", besides having more of a taste for the essay length, is it's simply hard to work on longer projects in the middle of the boom/bust feast/starve indie hustle. Steady income is much more conducive to longer works.
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My first book took ~3y while at a fairly comfy Xerox job... and working off material I'd developed during postdoc just before. This one's at 7 years and counting (I started research/developing it around 2013, soon after the first one)
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... not counting the first couple of years where it was too ill-formed, but I think I made up the first outline for a potential book type thing in 2015
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What's actually making slow progress possible now is that I'm serializing it on my substack, now at 5 chapters in. The steadiness of substack revenue creates something of the stability necessary to keep at it. I'm now guessing an ETA of 2025.
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None of these mechanisms is entirely ideal for me tbf. I'm probably too old and oddly enough "too useful" in some sense... my normal money-making methods are almost too pragmatic and effective for me to compete with more economically hapless subspecies of humanity.
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If I were (say) a fine artist or avant-garde novelist trying to wrap those talents into a consulting package ("art for culture change!", "narrative leadership workshop!") it would be a different story. But my stock-in-trade is very pragmatic meat-and-potatoes consulting
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I joke about mansions because that's actually the only logical endgame...
2x2: useful to useless, impoverished to independently wealthy... I'm somewhere just north-west of the origin. Submansion class in both uselessness and wealth.
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ie, I have to become somewhat more useless and somewhat more wealthy to hit the enmansioned leisure class
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If some of my current bets work out, that's where I'll land. I'll turn 48 later this year, so goal is to be a privileged, entitled, useless burden on society by age 50, in time to ride out climate change securely in my mansion
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One of things I am somewhat wary of is when much younger people claim to be "inspired" by my trajectory without quite realizing the extent to which I'm still coasting on the fumes of my earlier institutionalized PhDified life. It's like my personal store of fossil fuel.
Replying to
I'm basically an industrial-age trustie who didn't actually start drawing on the trust fund till age 33. Just not the family-wealth type. To do something like I've done starting as an undergrad-only free agent at age 22, with no inherited wealth, would likely be 10x harder
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