In this episode, Roy talks with author Eric Ries: software engineer, accidental blogger, initially-reluctant public speaker, and author. His first book was The Lean Startup, which gave the startup world its vocabulary. And his newest is Incorruptible, about how to help companies stay true to what they originally set out to do.

We learned that the writing comes last. Eric spent years trying out metaphors that fell flat, meetings that went nowhere, and typing out blog posts on a Palm Treo keyboard at a Starbucks on Sand Hill Road. This all happened before a single word of the manuscript existed.

A book isn't a longer blog post. And understanding the difference between those two mediums is most of the work.

The most important thing an author does is collect. From academic papers to weird governance ideas, and stories that don't make it in the published edition. You're like a baker gathering ingredients before you know what you're baking.

Eric dives into the inner life of the job and walks us through his journey: what it means to have your ideas escape and stop belonging to you, the strange “optimal level of fame” where people know your work better than your face, why the feedback is almost always about the reader and not about you, and what it's actually like to write and rewrite, and rewrite again.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:3:20 Becoming an author in the first place

00:54:00 Getting ideas

01:18:00 Making the work (crafting the writing)

02:23:00 Selling the work

02:45:39 Communicating about yourself and the work

03:59:30 Progressing your career

03:02:42 Understanding and improving the system

03:08:018 Final words: What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

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Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

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In this episode, Roy talks with litigator Doha Mekki: history teacher, bioethicist, trial attorney, and Acting Assistant Attorney General. She has seen every corner of the law. And her testimony is that almost nothing about being a litigator looks the way you think.

Exhibit A: the courtroom is the last resort, not the main event. The real work is years of investigation, millions of documents, hundreds of depositions, and memos that account for every single sentence with a hyperlinked source. Exhibit B: every trial is a morality play. Exhibit C: the most important thing a litigator does is listen. Let the witness go somewhere unexpected. Then follow.

She'll also testify to the inner life of the job: the immigrant’s weight of an unstated pressure to succeed, the junk food of praise, why you have to build your own internal governor, and what it felt like when a company walked in with a binder full of documents proving she'd been right all along.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:09:21 – Becoming a lawyer in the first place

00:27:56 – Getting ideas (choosing what to work on)

00:55:48 – Making the work (the craft of litigation)

01:38:22 – Selling the work

02:04:16 – Progressing in your career

02:34:29 – Understanding and improving “The System”

03:03:11 – What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

Follow Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/

Follow Roy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roybahat.com

Subscribe to Roy’s newsletter: https://bit.ly/notanewsletter

Read Roy’s blog: http://roybahat.com/

Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

#thisisnotadvice

Roy Bahat talks with Kelsey Shwetz, a painter, and a professor at Columbia and Pratt, about what it's actually like to be an artist.

She traces her own path from Winnipeg to nearly becoming a psychologist, to the moment she decided to tell everyone she was a painter – and never looked back. Kelsey shares the parts most people don't see: how a painting actually starts, why she stages photo shoots with glass fruit and Zelda-screen composites, and what it means when a painting is "misbehaving." She talks art vs. commerce, how gallery relationships really form, and why pricing by square inch is actually liberating. The conversation goes deep on the inner life too: impostor syndrome, the paralysis of making work that might be seen, and why talking to friends beats therapy. And they close on what AI might mean for fine art, drawing a historical lesson from French Impressionism.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:03:20 – Becoming an artist in the first place

00:17:54 – Developing ideas

00:36:15 – Making the work

01:02:59 – Selling the work

01:17:21 – Communicating about yourself and the work

01:24:15 – Progressing in your career

01:43:14 – Understanding and improving "the system"

01:50:10 – What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

Follow Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/

Follow Roy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roybahat.com

Subscribe to Roy’s newsletter: https://bit.ly/notanewsletter

Read Roy’s blog: http://roybahat.com/

Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

#thisisnotadvice