Arc review.
I was raised as a minority in a third-world country with an authoritarian government, and developed a survivalist approach to asserting personal identity as a member of civil society. Personally, I identify primarily as a technician, with interests in STEM and design.
Thus, in view of spending some time to prepare for the rest of life, my university projects were mostly directed internally, (1) to comprehend the structure of human education in general, (2) to be comfortable with solitary confinement for long durations as an embodied experience.
It is most productive in the dimensions of my interest to avoid conflict and to invest energy in study. However, as a matter of preparedness, I am typically concerned with swift threat removal or avoidance, when deemed convenient. So, my approach to post-university was to take the path of least regulatory resistance, and to begin a study of commerce and politics in my home country. Basically, I have been a US-bear since 2005, and losing money on that trade ever since. Haha. I only laugh at myself.
Back in my emerging markets home, while I have learnt a lot about local culture, it has been very difficult over the course of twenty years to learn anything of fundamental (STEM) importance from commercial and social organisations. So my career strategy has been designed to take short positions on cash, and long positions on learning. Nevertheless I have been fortunate enough to command enough economic clout between ascetic optimisations, moderate business development, and the minimum wage, such that I have never been direly short of living expenses, even if the businesses I worked for had been under duress. This has been a great blessing over time.
When I graduated from university, the popular career aspirations of my peers were investment banking, management consulting, and the petroleum industry. I had systematic reasons for avoiding early-career specialisation in each of these, mainly due to the emerging markets environment and thus the lack of sophistication in local opportunities. I figured, and still hold the views, (1) that investment banking is what one naturally engages in as one develops capital, and it is of less learning potential to simply use it as a method of accumulating capital, (2) that management consulting is what one naturally engages in as one develops expertise, and it is of less learning potential to simply use it as a method of accumulating capital, and (3) that oil and gas is an uncomplicated and cushy business governed mainly by politics, also absent of fundamental learning opportunities. All of these positions have of course been abstractions with respective opportunity costs, but with lower opportunity costs for me personally due to my fundamental preparations of independence from society in general.
I am now on day 502 of what may be considered a mid-career sabbatical, where I have nominally set aside my years from the age of 40 to 49 for the purpose of deeper studies in areas of my deficiency, relative to my peers in various sectors. The studies are roughly :
1. Physical conditioning. I had intentionally avoided heavy training between college and the present, in the interest of spending more cognitive time on my early-career work. We all have the tail-risks of dying today, and of dying at the age of 120 ... so having past the first third of the period of relevant concerns, I am strategically circling back to reinforce my foundations for the worst-case scenario, in a timely manner.
2. Hardware. My early-career moves were half directed at accumulating knowledge of software engineering, since this study was not available to me in university. I am circling back to improve my comprehension of electronics and material science, with concern for control systems and waste management in general.
3. Finance. My early-career was only moderately directed at financial capital dynamics, as strategised above, and so it has also become time to circle back to this and to get a grip on how global macro works. The data sources nowadays are more easily affordable than ever.
All of these mid-game concerns are ultimately glued together by software, and they are approached with the intention of maximising my long-term capability to do more math and science as primary concerns, commerce and design ("art") as secondary concerns, and government ("philanthropy") as a tertiary concern.
At the end of my university life, I said to my peers in an honours society that I was happy with my life to date, and that I looked forward to designing the rest of my life. I am still of that view, today.
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## if you lack for clear goals, strategy, or implementations, feel free to study my approach, maybe it can help ; in a worse case scenario, hire me as your coach ... i think at this age, i can afford to offer something useful to much younger people, and maybe some older but more confused ones as well ##
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