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Foreign and Familiar

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All my random thoughts in one place, served up weekly. Sometimes I write about startups, parenting, or short term rentals.
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Foreign and Familiar

Week #33

Aaron Kardell
Sep 10, 2023
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Foreign and Familiar

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Hello! I’m Aaron Kardell. In my Sunday newsletter, I pick one random topic to go deep on and have some disparate quick hits at the end.


A few weeks ago, Kate was cleaning out a drawer and uncovered this:

I barely remember giving out this bizarre “gift certificate.” But I remember Kate asking me around that time, “Can’t you just have one weekend per month that you fully take off?”

I’ve left this gift certificate in a place for the last few weeks where I see it daily. And each time I look at it, I perceive what I’m seeing differently.

It serves as a reminder of how hard I worked to build a business. 80+ hour work weeks were the norm for 10 years.

The life I was living then feels so foreign to me now. I want to think I’m now at a place where it’s exceedingly rare to choose work over family or to work every weekend. And I’m fortunate that I don’t need to work as hard now as I was then.

Still, there are other times I look at it where I still see a near and present familiarity. I’m better at prioritizing my family, working a more sensible number of hours, and living out work-life integration in general. But one thing that I don’t think has really changed is that I don’t have an off switch. And I rarely make it through a weekend without doing some work.

I’m a changed man. But I’m still very much a work in progress.

What things in your life from years ago are similarly foreign and familiar?


This Week’s Quick Hits

  • In honor of one of my nieces, who’s a big David Bowie fan, here’s a brief write up on how Queen and David Bowie collaborated on making “Under Pressure.” David Bowie and Freddie Mercury never performed it live together, but here’s a video mashup of them as though they did.

Photo by Austin Curtis on Unsplash

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Foreign and Familiar

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