No More “Insight Porn”

To me, this sounds like a line from a multi-level marketing pitch. It sounds like they're saying "This may not apply to you," but a lot of people will hear "There are chosen people (and you're probably one of them)."

It reminds me of the Calvinism sect of Christianity. They believed in predestination for salvation: God has always known who be a good person and deserve salvation. So there was no point in trying to be virtuous, because the outcome was set before you were born. Still, Calvinists often adopted public shows of virtue, like meticulous gardens, to convince others they were part of the "to be saved" group.

So… not what Jocko is talking about?

When I was in college in the late 90s I was fortunate enough to figure this out through experience.

First, there was a real fear all programming jobs were going to be outsourced. So I decided I needed programming + something else (in this case business).

Second, as a sophomore I got a job at a small custom software shop in town (it was the late 90s - if you had a pulse you get a 'programming' job). Our clients didn't care about the code, the language it was written in or anything else technical. They only cared about what it did, and if it solved their problem. It also connected 'solve customer problem' to 'getting paid' in a very direct way.

I haven't read the original article, and won't, but I'm imagining what they mean by that is 6*3=18 (+6 hours of sleep = 24).

I have two jobs right now; primary gig + ~10hr/week contracting, both tech. I'm actually a big fan of this model of thinking, though not as extreme; I'll elaborate:

Classify 3 days a week as "hell days"; 9a-6p job1 + 7p-9p job2. Tweak the numbers as you will for your own situation, but critically, for every hell day there's a heaven day: Monday you're working 12 hours, but Tuesday you're only working 6 hours, and alternate.

I've found this model to work well, even when it was only applied to a salaried 40-hour-per-week job; Mon is 6h, Tue is 10h, etc. If you've got the right gig that can support something like this (many remote SE roles can). It averages out to the same (sometimes more) hours per week, you can plan for more fluidity (e.g. i'm going out drinking with friends thursday evening, so lets front-load some hell days early in the week so we get a heaven day friday), and it tends to really vibe well with engineering workloads (hell days are great for deep focus, centralize as many meetings as possible on heaven days, whatever works for you, etc).

And sure, I'm being a little vague in how to attain this for yourself, if its something you'd even want; the sin of Insight Porn. It really comes down to "find a job that allows you to do it", and boom, Luck has entered the chat (with some mitigating "Skill" in being in a desirable field, knowing the right questions to ask in an interview, etc).

All that considered, I still like the advice. If I want to spend my free time with loved ones; its so much more valuable & meaningful, to me, to spend an entire afternoon and evening every other day, or even only once/twice a week, than just an evening some/most evenings. Everything is better without interruption; work & play; and classifying your days as "WORK/play" versus "PLAY/work" rather than trying to evenly split every day, has just been better for me. YMMV.*

Of course; extending this idea to "3 work days per day, that's 15 work days per week" or "6 hours of sleep per night" is crazy and no one should live like that.

He didn't want to see the feed that everyone was posting because he knows it just saps your attention / can be toxic, but he wanted the ability to post on other people's feeds so they would see the content he wanted to promote.