Thank you, brother, and merry Christmas to you as well. May the peace and blessings of Jesus Christ our King be with you and your family on this day.

Moses goes from the prince of Egypt to the shepherd of Midian and didn’t miss a beat.

He dwelled in physical comfort in Egypt but was not a comfortable man.

In the liberation and exile, the rabble complained about missing the cucumbers and melons of Egypt. Not Moses. This man knew what was good in life and focused on his God, not his FOMO.

The same for John the Baptist. The man is filled with Holy Spirit and lives in the wilderness with horrible fashion and culinary preferences. Maybe not the model for all men, but there’s a lesson here: When you fear God, not man, God moves through the man.

The Christ goes straight from his baptism by John into wilderness combat for 40 days while fasting…this man did not follow the path of comfort. He certainly moved men.

Merry Christmas Didact, this is a good essay.

Somehow I thought you already had one of those in addition to finance.

It would help especially with understanding the dynamics of something I’ve come to call “the pop-up company”: you start it on an idea that sells well for a while but is predictably doomed because of long-term market cap and loss of novelty, and so you get in, get the cash, and get out.

People tend to run their companies like “forever relationships” even when they’re clearly not.

I used to love the pop-up restaurant concept in London especially because of the feel that this was particularly suited toward the time (2015, for instance) yet completely doomed in the future (2020, as was the case with my favourite Chicago-style barbecue stop at Westfield London).

Can we create companies where all of the stakeholders and creators that matter can cash out well?

That’s worth figuring out and understanding, there’d be brisk sales in books that describe how to make that work, if you’re looking for a “side hustle” during your education, of course.

“Getting Norwegian citizenship is MUCH harder than British or Western European citizenship – takes longer and requires a lot more effort.”

True enough, but my feel of the culture is that there’s less Jante Law than Sweden, and so they’re not resentful when you come in and create a new business.

Whereas I get some of that even in America, the whole “you didn’t build that” thing when quite clearly I did in fact build that. Americans get pissy about this because you didn’t really need them for more than access to markets and labour, and so when you say you want to pull up roots because there’s no “magic dirt”?

But with Norway, there are angles, such as angles connecting to global businesses like oil exploration and energy firms. The right kind of “pop-up company” would fast track you to the arrangements you want.

That’s why I said it’d be very uncomfortable: in reality, you would have three jobs, the first being the student arrangements, the second being any kind of work you’d qualify for to maintain the arrangements, and the third being whatever companies you start.

Of course, this may also be true of the UK, although you’d likely have more effort to allocate toward maintaining the student arrangements.

“Most Westerners have no idea how much harder life is with a completely garbage passport – especially in the current time, when countries and companies around the world are really tightening up with respect to work permits and visa sponsorships.”

One of the things to realise when watching the moves of such people as Simon Black and Andrew Henderson is that there are good passports for being in the investor class and good passports for people who still intend to work for employers.

My general drift has been that working for employers over the long haul makes you poorer, and that the best thing to do is to focus on your “side hustles” so that they eventually take over the load from an employment arrangement.

But as for your over-specialisation contention, I have a counter-point.

Every job that pays a decent amount is essentially some kind of specialist arrangement.

Also, I come from a semi-rural, semi-urban English aristocracy that looks upon working for others in non-peer relationships as somewhat disgusting, and so there’s a lot of pressure on making new ventures and having work done between companies instead of trying to fit some employer’s mould of an ideal worker.

British corporate residency is generally a good deal, and until Trump’s changes to the tax laws, the UK was much more competitive for limited companies than the US. The UK is still more competitive, of course, because of high state-level taxes, and with the plan to lower below 20%, it’s staying more competitive.

VAT recapture is also a concept that the US could clearly learn from.

That’s because such structures are only able to capitalise on the labour of people who provide it within well-defined commodity boundaries. Anyone else outside of those is either wholly unemployable because they fall below those thresholds or is over-skilled because of rising well above them, and neither fall within the predictable rates of return demanded for commodity labour.

The best management advice that I’ve ever seen came from a John Ringo book:
“The secret to this place is to find the one or two people who are not complete incompetents – and work them to death.”

That’s been my whole professional career. And, honestly, I’m quite done with indulging that sort of silliness.

I don’t know what you’re studying, but why I suggested Norway and NTNU was that it wouldn’t be comfortable and that it would be very different. You’d need about 20k EUR per year to support the high cost of living in Norway, but the education itself would be provided without additional costs.

While you’re there, you could figure out how to Be More Rat and work out new ventures independently from what everyone else wants to do.

Took me a while to cotton on to what you meant. I had to go lookup that comment – it was from back in February. I do remember giving it some thought at the time.

There are two major reasons why I didn’t take that advice. The first is that I painted myself into a specialist corner in my previous jobs. This was a huge mistake. I needed a near-complete reset, which is why I’m pursuing a business degree. (Yeah, I know – y’all are free to mock me here in the comments.) The second is that I need to get rid of this shitty passport that I’m stuck with right now. Getting Norwegian citizenship is MUCH harder than British or Western European citizenship – takes longer and requires a lot more effort.

I really can’t emphasise the importance of that second point enough. Most Westerners have no idea how much harder life is with a completely garbage passport – especially in the current time, when countries and companies around the world are really tightening up with respect to work permits and visa sponsorships.

The world runs on well-greased mediocrity, but once you understand that, it’s possible to perform a type of situational arbitrage.

There are plenty of books on how to reorientate yourself toward “the way of the rat” or to say “hello to laziness”, and they’re worth considering as an alternative to high engagement.

Inevitably mediocrity punishes high engagement and high standards, so don’t bother with those when engaging with mediocre standards.

Anything that requires excellence should be an endeavour you first do for yourself and then for others.

Once you understand how to arbitrage your situation so you’re less engaged with it, you build more mental and temporal space for your true ambitions and goals.

And so back to your 2018 statement: the modern corporate structure applies mass numbers of mediocre individuals in order to simulate the excellence of one or a few people.

That’s because such structures are only able to capitalise on the labour of people who provide it within well-defined commodity boundaries. Anyone else outside of those is either wholly unemployable because they fall below those thresholds or is over-skilled because of rising well above them, and neither fall within the predictable rates of return demanded for commodity labour.

Inevitably the best solution is to ignore the call to adapt to the corporate environment and to heed the call to be a more capable army of one.

I don’t know what you’re studying, but why I suggested Norway and NTNU was that it wouldn’t be comfortable and that it would be very different. You’d need about 20k EUR per year to support the high cost of living in Norway, but the education itself would be provided without additional costs.

While you’re there, you could figure out how to Be More Rat and work out new ventures independently from what everyone else wants to do.

Imagine what you’d like to do as being Linus Torvalds seeking a new kind of Linux to build, first for himself, bringing others into the fold later, instead of imagining how you fit some team who could never build Linux even with twenty thousand coder monkeys throwing Shakespearean-styled code efforts at it.

Imagine building something so cool that it actually pisses you off that mediocre people want to fuck it up.

Then start from there.

The engine of our societal repentance will be disgust. But that means that the lies will need to be stripped away.

Have a joyous Christmas, then harden up.