WORK LESS WEDNESDAY

WLW #142

January 29, 2025

👋 Hey Reader!

This is issue #142 of Work Less Wednesday, where I share with you 5 things you should know about, in 5 minutes or less. That leaves you with 10,075 other minutes this week.

✈️ 1. Greetings From 30,000 Feet

I am:

✈️ 30,000 feet in the air on a flight.
🥤 Drinking a cold Diet Coke.
🐟 Livestreaming a perfect video feed of Phish’s show.
✏️ Writing Work Less Wednesday on my laptop.

Sometimes it blows my mind that stuff like this is both possible and relatively easily accessible, and yet we still take it for granted.

Anyways…

📈 2. On Quiet Compounding – Article by Morgan Housel

🌱 “Nature is not in a hurry, yet everything is accomplished” – Lao Tzu.

Great article by Morgan Housel on the magic of Quiet Compounding.

Here’s a perfect example of Quiet Compounding at work:

“Every few years you hear a story of a country bumpkin with no education and a low-wage job who managed to save and compound tens of millions of dollars. The story is always the same: They just quietly saved and invested for decades. They just quietly compounded.”

Quiet Compounding isn’t sexy, but:

It’s how nature creates masterpieces.
It’s how incredible businesses are built.
It’s how deep relationships are formed.
It’s how most investors get rich.

The growth isn’t immediately visible, but the results are astounding.

Quiet Compounding requires a few things in order to take place:

The Plan. A thesis & vision for the future.
Conviction. Enough trust, faith, and belief in “The Plan” to see it through.
Daily Actions. The things you do now. One day at a time. One step at a time. This could be saving, investing, writing, etc.
Patience. Enough hands-off time to let compounding happen.

Quiet Compounding is not just a great strategy, it can be a way of life.

At it’s best, it looks like this:

“You’re not in a hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

📰 Read The Article

💻 3. “I Am Rich & Have No Idea What To Do With My Life” – Blog by Vinay Hiremath

Interesting blog about the “Zero-th World Problem” of what happens when you “Are rich and don’t know what to do with your life.”

This was written by Loom CTO and co-founder Vinay Hiremath, who is currently having an existential crisis after selling Loom to Atlassian for $975 million.

Here’s a preview, “I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it, and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic about life.”

So what happens next?

Well for Vinay it looked like:

Going to the Redwoods and giving up $60 million
Speedrunning investor meetings 70 robotics startups for two weeks
Breaking up with your girlfriend
Climbing a 6800m mountain in the Himalayas
Doing 4 weeks on Elon Musk’s DOGE task force
Studying physics in the jungle

I’m not gonna tell you what to think about this dude and his story.

I’d prefer to leave it open-ended, and let you extract your own meaning from it.

📰 Read The Blog

🦬 4. Quote I Can’t Stop Thinking About – Lord James Bryce on “American Haste”

Ken Burns‘ documentaries are the best sleeping shows ever. 😴

Put one of those bad boys on, and the calming voice overs and music will put you into an instant coma.

(Oh yeah, and they’re also incredible documentaries.)

This week, we had Ken Burn’s The American Buffalo documentary on for bedtime.

If you haven’t seen it, the one sentence summary is: We did a lot of really messed up stuff to the buffalo.

But I digress.

At the beginning of the second episode, this quote from Lord James Bryce hit me hard, because it’s just as relevant today as it was in 1888.

(It’s long, just read it.) ⬇️

“Gentlemen, why in heaven’s name this haste?

You have time enough.

Ages and ages lie before you.

Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying that you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people?

In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy.

You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid nature, who first lifted up their axes upon these tall trees, and lined these waters with busy wharves.

Why, then, seek to complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years over in the older continents?

Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts?

“American Haste” means constantly playing fetch with our happiness.

It is always striving for something better, but at the expense of the wonder of what we have, right here, right now.

They felt it in 1888, and we still feel it today.

🖐 5. More Things I’m Into This Week

🎧 Audiobook I’m Listening To – A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

🤖 Very Solid Introduction To Writing With AI – I Discovered The Perfect AI Writing System (Life-Changing)

❓ 17 Questions Worth Asking Yourself – Article By Morgan Housel

🎨 How An Artist Can Be Commercially Successful – Video by Blake La Grange