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Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something that Excites and Fulfills You
My latest at Fast Company started with venture capitalist Jordan Kong’s tweet that rocked the Twittersphere, “Unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is to work on the weekends.”
If I were watching myself from, let’s say, a security camera, I’d look like I was working on the weekends for most of the 2010s. It started in college, when I made a little bit of money writing blog posts on the weekends. I was never alone at the library — a lot of students study on the weekend — so it never felt weird.
After I graduated, I just didn’t stop. In some ways, I felt like I’d squandered a lot of my youth, so I actually really became motivated to work harder. I wanted to develop all sorts of skills, and I started a business. I spent a lot of my weekends working. I’d visit my friends and then leave them while they watched the soccer game or played FIFA so I could go to work. I’d invite friends to work with me, which they often did.
During these weekends, I’d probably be working on — or in (there’s a difference!) — my editorial studio, compiling quotes from Kanye or Chamath, or writing at Medium. Maybe I’d be learning new skills, like how to use a scraping tool to crunch data, or building Ryan Leslie’s first website for the…
