Calvin Rosser
@calvin_rosser
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Flaneur and certified surf bum, still figuring it all out. I write stuff sometimes: 🎙️ Pod with @stephsmithio : @sydlis
✍️ Latest Essay
Joined October 2019
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Pinned Tweet
There’s a real scarcity of people sharing ideas simply because they find them interesting.
No agenda. No audience building. No selling.
Just ideas, the types of meandering, imperfect discussions you'd have in college or at adulthood dinner parties with friends.
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Each job pays you 5 salaries:
1. Financial
2. Psychological
3. Social
4. Educational
5. Freedom
When we're unhappy at work, we often focus on getting more of the wrong salary.
This strategic misstep fails to solve our problems, and it's entirely preventable.
🧵 A thread
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Only been in SF for 50 days and am pretty sure it's the most underrated city in America.
The delta between the Twitter/media story about SF and the actual lived experience is mind-boggling 🤯.
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@p_millerd
I think you can do both, especially today.
I spent 23-27 working for companies remotely, traveling to heaps of countries. Built skills + made money + enjoyed single life.
Cash allowed for much better travel. Skills + cash helped fuel flexible life starting in late 20s.
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@SchrodingrsBrat
Why are you here?
It's a sharp, but inviting question when asked well. A little shock for the soul that could mean "why are you on earth?" "why are you at this event?" "what messed up thing happened to you to lead you to this moment"
Let the listener interpret as they see fit.
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Blog pageviews by year:
- 2017: 1,751
- 2018: 46,280
- 2019: 82,308
- 2020: 362,126
- 2021: 633,179
Just start, and keep going.
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I failed to write a book for 4 years.
I tried every trick in the book: set goals, tell people about it, block off time, etc. Nothing worked.
It was embarrassing & I felt awful.
I finally found an unlock in November 2021.
Now I'm a few days away from a 60k word draft 🧵
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Courses that should be mandated in school:
1. How to Have Difficult Conversations
2. How to Lie with Statistics
3. Personal Finance for Adulthood
What else?
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I want to follow more people who are sharing the mundane, silly, and profound experiences of their lives.
No selling courses, building in public, dunking, memeing, etc. Just little thoughts about life.
Any recs on accounts that are good follows for this type of stuff?
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Mom would be 56 years old today, and I wonder what her life would have become.
I like to imagine that she would be living her dream: a slow and sunny life on the sandy shores of Florida. But I can only speculate about how her story may have unfolded. She passed away six years
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@thesamparr
Why - Intelligent, light-hearted entertainment
More - Insight into what you struggle with
Less - Low signal episodes that exist to increase monthly downloads. They increase short-term metrics but trade away long-term respect. A bad trade.
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Courses that should be mandated in school:
1. How to not be weird at social events
2. Why goodness > greatness
3. How to actually chill the f*ck out
4. The buffoonery of statistics
5. The art of apologizing even when it hurts
6. What happens when you lose someone
What else?
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@metaLulie
- Most decisions are reversible.
- No one knows what they’re doing.
- Everyone can teach you something.
- Follow your energy.
- Don’t wait for the money.
- Choose courage over comfort.
- Be around people who want the best for you.
- Progress isn’t linear.
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Congrats to
@stephsmithio
for hitting 100k followers!
I knew Steph before she wrote an article, knew how to code, or was on Twitter.
Now she's inspiring thousands of people on a weekly basis. Impressive to see the trajectory.
A great example of where hard work can take you.
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@p_millerd
You're right that too many people give up their 20s to rise up some silly ladder they eventually leave.
They miss the best window to explore, have fun, learn about the self, etc.
Most nomads in my time were early/mid-30s burned-out professionals who regretted their 20s.
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If you feel like the world is becoming insufferably polarized, go to a cafe.
Just sit and observe. How many people are actually as wacky as the stories we all see?
It turns out that most people are still kind and reasonable.
There are bad apples, sure, but not that many.
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I wonder how many conspiracies spread bc people don't get how the internet works.
If you don't know how businesses use cookies, A/B testing, digital marketing, etc. you could easily believe that "big brother" is watching you.
But it's not "big brother". It's modern marketing.
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Surfed 43/89 days, read 14 books, and have had 0 Zoom calls this year. Pretty epic first quarter 🏄♂️.
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@stephsmithio
I avoid this distinction.
I think of life as an equation with your career, relationships, finances, learning, leisure, & health as the key variables.
The goal is to get each variable to a 7/10.
When any variable gets too low, I'm generally unsatisfied and need to "rebalance."
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4/ For many people, it's something else.
Not being challenged. Not feeling respected. Not having autonomy.
Not spending quality time with kids. Not surfing in the mornings.
The psychological, educational, and freedom salaries are lacking.
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Once you start doing stuff you actually enjoy, you don't need complicated goal setting frameworks, tracking, or any of that hokum that I used to gobble up.
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The My First Million Podcast with
@thesamparr
and
@ShaanVP
is the most potent drug of the 21st century.
Even on my content-free weeks, can't stop myself from tuning in.
Perfect mix of entertainment and useful entrepreneurial snackage.
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The idea that you can learn something new from EVERY person you meet is underrated.
Living by this principle helps you stay humble, open-minded, & curious.
It will make you better at dating, making friends, and being a good colleague.
Still, very few people do it.
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I’ve been stuck in the casino for the last 20 months.
At the start of Covid, I pulled my money out of index funds in an attempt to beat Mr. Market.
In my pursuit of outperformance, I traded everything: options, leveraged shorts, growth stocks, & crypto.
It's time to leave. 🧵
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1/ Let's first define each salary:
❶ Financial: Annual salary, bonuses, equity, healthcare, benefits, etc.
❷ Psychological: The internal and external meaning you derive from your work. Your connection to the mission, product, work you produce, and praise you receive.
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The big failure of most productivity advice is the focus on efficiency – getting things done more quickly.
We should be focused on effectiveness – making sure we're doing the right things.
Moving slower in the right direction is far better than moving faster in the wrong one.
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The legendary
@stephsmithio
, in the arena, Saturday, Tuesday, and every day, rain or hail or sunshine.
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@FitFounder
Surfing. Learned in my mid-20s, and it's made nearly everything in my life better while being surprisingly intellectually stimulating and fun.
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To snap yourself out of a rut, try doing small acts of kindness for others.
🌮 Make dinner for your girlfriend.
☕️ Pay for a stranger's coffee.
🙌 Tell a friend what you admire about them.
It feels good to help others, and often, it helps get you out of your own head.
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Been telling myself I'd write a book for 4 years. Only had a title + some research after dozens of false starts.
Thanks to a nudge from
@_brandswell
, I wrote for 1hr/day in November. I now have 25,000 words and am stoked to keep going.
It's stunning what you can do with 1hr/day
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A lot of smart people are focused on "impact at scale," but most real impact starts with small actions.
My conviction about small acts as the pathway to progress has grown over the years, but it started with a kind therapist who helped me break into Princeton.
The story 👇
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It's very weird how people think that taking a 3-6 month sabbatical will set them back in their careers.
If anything, it's more likely to have the opposite effect.
You'll become more interesting, learn about what you actually want/care about, and have more energy.
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Yesterday, I ate with a 100-year-old.
Her advice: "I've worked hard all of my life. I'm always busy."
I hang out with lots of old people, and outside of luck, it seems that living a long, cogent life comes from keeping your mind engaged and looking forward to things.
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The loudest critics are often people who have never built anything themselves.
If you actually want to change the world, embody that change yourself, inspire others, & create something.
Criticizing others is an easy way to get attention, but it rarely leads to enduring change.
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I had 46,000 pageviews and 318 newsletter subscribers after my 1st year of blogging.
When people asked me how the blog was doing, I felt embarrassed by my low reach.
Here’s how I hacked my way to 1.3M readers 3 years later 🧶
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If you take a taxi to Sayulita from the Puerto Vallarta airport, you pay $90.
If you take a 2-minute walk across the street and take a taxi, you pay $30.
A lot of life is like this. If you know where to look, things are a bit better. And the rest of the time you're the sucker.
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2/
❸ Social: Prestige, job title, and identity capital you receive.
❹ Educational: Skills, relationships, and learnings that contribute to your development as a person and professional.
❺ Freedom: Your ability to work on your own terms.
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3/ Time and time again, I've seen unhappy workers focus on improving their financial and social salaries.
The assumption is that getting more money or a better title will somehow solve their dissatisfaction.
The problem is that money and titles are often not the real problem.
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First night with the typerwriter and I'm staying up way past my bedtime and writing little poems for the first time in years.
Had the most amazing afternoon.
@calvin_rosser
found a man with 400 typewriters from as far back as the 1800s.
He spent 3h showing us the ropes.
“Good typewriters are inviting. They draw your thoughts onto the page.”
Boy, was he right. We left with one & coming back for more!
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“The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." - Hemingway
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I'm consistently surprised by the kindness, generosity, and openness that are present in everyday encounters with strangers.
Sure, there are some bad eggs in the world, but the norm is wonderful people who are happy to connect with and help others.
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Something that makes me very sad is all the young people who don't want to bring kids into the world because it’s "a terrible place."
Sure, the world is full of problems, pain, & suffering.
But now is the best it's ever been for most, and being alive is a beautiful experience.
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When people decide to spend "just a few years" at a job to build their resume, they drastically underestimate how that job will influence their future decisions.
This is how people who would be great writers or entrepreneurs get stuck in unsatisfying roles in finance & big tech.
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One of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself and the world is to chill out.
Most people are hurried, distracted, and fretting about this or that.
If you can find a way to relax into the wild ride of life (not easy), everything feels better and kinda works itself out.
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There are two types of people: Those who focus on what they have and those who focus on what they lack.
If you choose to be in the second group – and it is a choice – you'll be perpetually miserable, regardless of what you have or achieve.
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1 minute is very little time. You can take a breath, write an email, or slice an apple.
But 60 minutes is a different story. You can run 10 miles, cook a world-class meal, or write 4,000 words.
So go ahead, waste a few minutes. But don’t let hours pass by on pointless musings.
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I love spending my first 24 hours in a new city just walking around all day, getting lost in the different neighborhood vibes and exploring whatever seems interesting.
So much more fun than a rigid itinerary or hitting main tourist spots.
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Traditional schooling fails people by teaching them that the purpose of learning is to score well on a test.
The result is that some people get really good at doing tests, and others decide that school is not for them.
Only the lucky ones discover the pure joy of learning.
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There's a massive gap between what I enjoy doing & what people enjoy paying me to do.
I used to resist this gap, believing that "following my passions" meant profiting from them.
Life got a lot easier once I accepted that people will never pay me very much to read on the beach.
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@theSamParr
This episode is a great unlock for better sleep/energy, but overall, the pod includes a bunch of practical and accessible neuroscience-backed health insights from a Stanford professor.
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@roshanpateI
He can also choose surfing once he leaves tech, and flying helicopters if he has an exit.
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8/ So if you’re unhappy at work, start by rating each of your 5 salaries on a scale of 1 to 10.
This helps you understand the problem and diagnose the biggest areas for improvement.
Next, choose the areas you want to improve and brainstorm some ideas for improvement.
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I think a lot more people would care about the environment if we gave them beautiful experiences in nature, instead of telling them about carbon emissions or imminent worldwide doom.
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@NoraKAli
Surfing. It takes 6-12 months to move up the learning curve. But once you do, it's heaps of fun, an easy way to stay fit, & something you can do until you're in your 70s.
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When you lose someone you love, their absence is like air, spread over everything and impossible to escape.
My latest on navigating grief after losing my mom:
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@ShaanVP
The only real antidote to the problem is to have as many people as possible meet each other in person at least once.
Even a simple dinner builds enough rapport / trust to keep a connection alive and vibrant for many years.
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My current life orientation is simple: live most days how I'd like while being financially comfortable & around people I enjoy.
That means that I spend most days surfing, writing, reading, traveling, and hanging with ppl I love.
Will only change course when it stops working.
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Good life advice is easy to find, but hard to follow.
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I wonder if the well-intentioned idea of "living up to your potential," which sits in the hearts and minds of most smart and ambitious people, has done more harm than good.
On one hand, this idea motivates you to be and do more than you may have originally thought you could. It
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The most lucrative niche in the creator economy is selling other creators on the idea that they can be rich, happy, and successful just like you.
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I spent my 20s chasing absolute freedom.
But the closer I got to that goal, the less meaningful my life became. I had endless freedom, but life felt hollow.
It turns out the greatest joys of life come from chosen constraints that narrow your world to the few things that matter.
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When I met
@dannypostmaa
in Bali this year, I knew he was a smart and kind dude.
But I didn't know that he was going to create one of my favorite products of 2022.
Just created these images with his new AI profile pic tool: . Such a fun experience! 👏
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I surfed 164 days (200+ sessions) in 2023. Spent ~500 hours in the water + many more using a surf skate & doing surf-focused workouts.
I'm 4 years in & still have endless room for improvement. Insanely rewarding addition to adulthood. Feels like a calling, albeit a silly one 🏄♂️
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One of my only regrets is not recording a video interview with my mom before she died.
Memory and pictures miss the small details that I miss the most – her contagious cackle, smile, & kind presence.
If you're with people you love this holiday, record a short video with them.
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As a kid, I thought that I needed to be a businessman with a million dollars to be happy.
Now, I know that what I really needed was to be able to buy as many raspberries as I want without thinking much about it.
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10 Principles for Every Writer
1. Define your intention & audience: Who is your audience and what do you want to achieve? This will give you a level of clarity that will help you overcome writer’s block, set the appropriate tone, & improve your emotional connection with readers.
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I lost my mom to suicide.
So when other people talk about their moms, naturally I get a little sad.
But I'd never expect someone to not talk about their mom simply because it makes me sad.
You'll never thrive if you expect the world to optimize for your feelings.
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When you don't know what will work, moving slowly is often riskier than moving quickly.
Slow feedback cycles mean slow learning, and slow learning means slow progress.
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What do you do when life gives you lemons?
You play Calvinball!
My latest essay on a silly game that makes life a lot more fun.
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5/ Assuming the problem is financial or social, people continue to bang on the doors of their managers to get more money or a sweeter job title
Yet even when they're successful, they get a short-lived bump in happiness and then plateau again.
They didn't solve the problem.
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@SchrodingrsBrat
Think the most impactful/difficult pruning happens a bit later (late 20s/early 30s) when 10yrs of lifestyle choices, changes in values, & competing priorities lead to the fading of friendships you thought would last the test of time.
The early 20s pruning is easier on the soul.
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9/ Take action.
Evaluate your options and pursue the ones with the highest expected return for what YOU want out of work.
Don't optimize for what your friends find cool.
You may not get everything you want, but you'll get a lot closer than if you default to money or titles.
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I have mad respect for anyone who has the guts and chops to write and publish a book.
I wanted to do it for most of the last 7 years and never got over the finish line.
Even if the book is not a best seller or "great" by some silly standard, it's a huge feat to even finish.
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12/ I'm sharing this because I know a lot of people struggle with long-term projects.
Whether it's a book, a business, or something else, it's easy to let years pass without making progress.
And for me, that was a really painful period.
I'm not done, but I'm closer than ever.
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These aren't really status symbols.
They're values/behaviors of some people who have earned or opted their way out of the ambition and productivity schemas that drive most of the modern world.
If you live like this (as I have for some time), most people will not immediately
New Status Symbols
• Sabbaticals
• Long attention spans
• Quality time with kids
• Valuing time over money
• Slow and calm lifestyle
• Meeting-free calendar
• Having “enough”
• Early retirement
• Biological age younger than your real age
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Technology gave us more free time, but also duped us into squandering that time.
Instead of enjoying nature, family, and friends, we isolate ourselves in small digital bubbles, anxiously moving from screen to screen, wondering why we can never quite find what we're looking for.
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I don't have too many unfulfilled material desires, but damn this forest sauna vibe in Tofino got me.
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The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is one of the most interesting and powerful cognitive biases.
While it exists to protect us, it often clouds our perception & prevents us from building meaningful relationships.
Fortunately, you can mitigate its impact on your life.
🧵
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I've spent 8.5% of my waking time in the ocean this year.
I now receive regular "gms" from fish, can speak dolphin, and feel gills starting to form. Life is good.
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It's weird to see some friends become so serious and self-important as they get older while others get loose and lean into the cosmic insignificance of their existence.
Pretty sure staying loose is the correct answer to the test.
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The idea of working hard while you're young so you can travel freely when you're old is terribly misguided.
I lived out of a backpack without a home for years in my mid-20s, and it was no problem.
Now I can barely take a 2-week trip without being cripplingly exhausted.
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I’m in the final week of the
@Ultraspeaking
Creator Cohort course, and holy guacamole 🥑, it’s been phenomenal
So good in fact that I wrote an ode on the typewriter to share my experience.
Hands-down the best speaking training on the internet and one of the most fun,
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Surfing is a funny sport because when you ask anyone who is really good at it a question, they hit you with a cascade of words that make no sense.
Me: "How were the waves?"
Them: "Ah brew, mushburgers no doubt. Bog nation. Just hot dogged my way to the lip and got knocked."
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@ramit
Spot on. I was an indexer & lost my nerve during the 2020 drawdown. Went 100% cash, started active investing, reading headlines.
I underperformed the market, but the real cost was emotional misery and wasted time on noise.
Story for anyone struggling:
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Ideal day:
- Morning coffee in the sun
- Surf with friends
- Read
- Skate and walk around
- Dinner with friends
- Going to sleep with wife
I'm a simpleton, but this fills my bucket, and I try to spend as many days like this as I can.
What's your ideal day?
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Artificial Me...a spooky and enticing look into the future
Created with by the unstoppable
@levelsio
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After some moderate level of self-awareness, the best next step is rarely more books, psychedelics, journaling, retreats, etc.
It's to get on living.
Stop looking for more answers. Embody your insight in the real world. That's where you'll see if anything has really changed.
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Be cautious with advice from successful people.
They rarely know what actually drove their success & mostly tell you what works when you've already made it.
"Say no more often" is a great example.
It's a good strategy when you've made it, but bad when you're still striving.
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7/ None of this is to say that you shouldn't pursue more money or a better title.
You may be genuinely underpaid. A new title may be the next step in your career.
But don't lose sight that these things aren’t always the drivers of your dissatisfaction or lack of engagement.
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6/ What’s fascinating is that it’s often easier to get more in the psychological, educational, and freedom salaries.
These are the places where it's easier to find trades of unequal value – areas where companies can give you something that you find valuable and they find cheap.
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@thesamparr
Most ppl making this argument in good faith are concerned with the disproportionate concentration of wealth in a few hands (while so many people have relatively less), rather than a specific number.
Steph and I discussed the question in detail here:
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Internet Pipes by
@stephsmithio
Discord approaching 1,000 members 👀
Sensing a new revolution of internet sleuths armed with her cheat code for the internet
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