What struck me was all the concrete detail. While it is personal, it’s also in service of giving useful lessons to other people. It helps establish how generalizable the career advice would be to other people and it reframes some standard career advice in a way that centers the constraints as a first-order consideration.
I would not have taken the adversity quotient framing seriously otherwise.
The one addition that might help is mentioning whether there were aspects of your career path that felt unusually lucky or aspects of your life circumstances that felt strong relative to others in your situation. Structural barriers can be a subtle thing (like someone getting a decent math education because they went to a decent school in a bad neighborhood). Mostly this helps with generalizability to readers.
Thank you so much for the feedback and the kind words! I was trying to strike that balance between personal narrative and broader relatability, so it’s validating to hear it landed for you.
Great point about sharing what felt unusually lucky or advantageous—I’ll definitely weave more of both sides into future posts.
A few things come to mind where I felt unusually lucky in: I had English fluency from a young age (schools in the Philippines taught English, and I read constantly) and access to top schools partly due to doing well on standardized exams, which also helped me get scholarships. Being in these schools meant I was surrounded by more privileged peers who sometimes covered my expenses, including food. They also showed me (through how they lived/carried themselves) the power of having money and what it could afford which helped me grow in my ambitions. (Not in this post, but I initially studied business and engineering in uni because I was working toward earning enough to live on 10% and donate 90%—even before discovering EA.)
I discovered EA while still in university, giving me time and psychological bandwidth to pivot without the sunk costs or maybe lifestyle fears that come later.
Regarding lifestyle-related fears: interestingly, I think growing up constrained was also an advantage in some ways, so taking career risks didn’t feel as scary. These subtle advantages (and not-so-subtle advantages, especially around education which I was extremely privileged in) absolutely shaped my path.
Again, I very much appreciate the prompt to include this side more!
This is really good.
What struck me was all the concrete detail. While it is personal, it’s also in service of giving useful lessons to other people. It helps establish how generalizable the career advice would be to other people and it reframes some standard career advice in a way that centers the constraints as a first-order consideration.
I would not have taken the adversity quotient framing seriously otherwise.
The one addition that might help is mentioning whether there were aspects of your career path that felt unusually lucky or aspects of your life circumstances that felt strong relative to others in your situation. Structural barriers can be a subtle thing (like someone getting a decent math education because they went to a decent school in a bad neighborhood). Mostly this helps with generalizability to readers.
Thank you so much for the feedback and the kind words! I was trying to strike that balance between personal narrative and broader relatability, so it’s validating to hear it landed for you.
Great point about sharing what felt unusually lucky or advantageous—I’ll definitely weave more of both sides into future posts.
A few things come to mind where I felt unusually lucky in: I had English fluency from a young age (schools in the Philippines taught English, and I read constantly) and access to top schools partly due to doing well on standardized exams, which also helped me get scholarships. Being in these schools meant I was surrounded by more privileged peers who sometimes covered my expenses, including food. They also showed me (through how they lived/carried themselves) the power of having money and what it could afford which helped me grow in my ambitions. (Not in this post, but I initially studied business and engineering in uni because I was working toward earning enough to live on 10% and donate 90%—even before discovering EA.)
I discovered EA while still in university, giving me time and psychological bandwidth to pivot without the sunk costs or maybe lifestyle fears that come later.
Regarding lifestyle-related fears: interestingly, I think growing up constrained was also an advantage in some ways, so taking career risks didn’t feel as scary. These subtle advantages (and not-so-subtle advantages, especially around education which I was extremely privileged in) absolutely shaped my path.
Again, I very much appreciate the prompt to include this side more!