<aside> đź’ˇ Description
A 2-volume collection of essays about independent consulting and life in the “gig economy” by Venkatesh Rao.
In Rao’s own words:
*For those of you who have no idea what this is about, between 2019-21 I wrote a limited-run Substack newsletter on the indie consulting life and the gig economy. About 2/3 of the newsletter issues were non-fiction essays. These are compiled into the two volumes above. All the essays have been carefully edited, updated, grouped into hopefully useful sections, and sequenced. The material flows surprisingly smoothly, if I do say so myself. The images and diagrams have been up-res’d, updated, and in some cases, entirely redrawn for the books.
As the subtitles suggest, Volume 1 establishes some foundational ideas, and Volume 2 builds on those foundations. Both volumes are at a roughly intermediate level of sophistication, and should be accessible to anyone with at least a year or two of work experience. If you’re in the gig economy, are considering diving into it, or have been unceremoniously tossed into it by layoffs and such, I suspect these volumes might be useful to you. They should also be valuable to recent graduates thinking about alternatives to traditional career paths, though I suspect the material will be harder to grok without at least a little work experience under your belt.*
About these notes:
These aren’t really notes. They are sparse Kindle highlights but occasionally I highlight an entire essay for future reference since they didn’t necessarily have their own blog post.
What I think of Rao:
Rao is one of my favorite active non-fiction writers.
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