Counterflows #44: New US Work Visas, Mental Health for Remote Workers, How to Write With Originality
Your offbeat guide to the future of work, creativity, and global living.
Hello 👋
I published another future of work story with Digiday this week. It covers:
💻 What it’s like to work on a fully distributed team
💰 The startups smoothing the way to remote hiring
🏢 The role of physical offices in this brave new world
Thanks to Sam Claassen of SafetyWing, Andrew Bondarenko of Portal and Sophie Op den Kamp of TNW Spaces for sharing their insights.
Read the story here and give it some Twitter love here.
-Lauren
😊🚀 How to Give Yourself a Mental Health Boost as a Remote Worker (Building Remotely)
SafetyWing's Sam Claassen (also in my Digiday story above) offers simple but effective advice on maintaining your mental health as a remote worker—even during a pandemic. Sam’s a fellow nomad, though these tips apply to work from home just as much as work from anywhere.
🇺🇸🛂 Why I Changed My Mind About Heartland Worker Visas (Bloomberg)
Journalist Noah Smith demystifies proposals to establish so-called 'American heartland visas', exploring the pros, cons, and confusion surrounding them so far. The basic idea is to allow targeted overseas migration into downtrodden places in the US. Will affordable housing in a select few regions tempt people to relocate?
👥🎓 Community-Based Education: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses (Forte Labs)
Online learning guru Tiago Forte deep-dives into the fourth wave of online education: cohort-based courses that care most about student outcomes—like the Building a Second Brain one he teaches. He argues that this new virtual education era is building around four pillars: community, accountability, interaction, and impact.
📚✍️ On Writing: Letters About the Craft (Charles Bukowski)
The internet has gotten us plenty used to consuming disparate fragments of story and information. This collection of Bukowski’s unpublished letters to editors, friends, and fellow writers is random and poignant, brimming with reflections on the craft of writing, the absurdity of art, and the relentless drudgery of work.
🦄📝 The Right Kind of Original (David Perell)
Original thinking is a difficult act, and writing is one of the best ways to trick your brain into doing it. This short essay unpicks the idea of originality and argues for dismissing the fear academia instills in us in favour of remixing and presenting ideas in new ways.
💬🎙️ Can You Challenge Your Perceptions? (Storyteller by Lisa Golden)
Writer Tiffany Philippou discusses work, writing, growth, career-building, and creativity in this intimate and thoughtful podcast episode (~42 mins). Host Lisa Golden is an absolute pleasure, and this is one of the first interviews to reveal more about Tiff’s upcoming memoir, Unspoken, which I’m very much looking forward to reading.
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