The key to any strong friendship, or business, is well-coordinated hairstyles.

Not every good professional collaboration becomes a social friendship, some friendships make terrible business partnerships. Maybe the qualities that make people good at working together are different from the ones that develop into deep emotional bonds, and that’s okay.

At the same time,  friendships start in workplaces every day. And doesn’t it sound like a dream to start a fulfilling and successful business with your best friends? How fun would that be?

I have personally found leaping the gap from cool coworker to actual friend very difficult. Maybe that’s just my hangups. How about you?

Do people you like at work become your friends outside of work?

What’s behind your failure or success to merge those worlds?

Do you like things that way, or wish you could change them?

A popular hobby for years, putting a bird on it has only recently become a viable career.

Now that life is so much easier than it was a hundred years ago — very few of us are farming 12 hours a day to feed ourselves — we’ve grown into a world where we don’t just expect to have a job, but have a job that we love. Turn our passion into our work. This Medium post explores the phenomenon:

With fewer reasons to stay in one job, workers began to explore a wider variety of options. For some, these options included turning a hobby into a business. Young people turned to what they loved, what they were good at, with an entrepreneurial mindset angled toward self-employment. It’s why we have so many artisan lollipops and food trucks.

But the side effects are things like convincing yourself that turning your pass time into a second job is somehow noble. Or not really enjoying the thing you loved the same way you used to once you tack on the added pressure to perform, earn, or succeed.

What are the benefits and costs of turning a hobby into a career?

Have you ever wanted to try? What would you do? What stopped you?

Is there something to be said for working a traditional job and pursuing other creative or recreational things purely for pleasure?

For a post-Cold War generation, socialism is more appealing than scary.

Of all the diagnoses for the reasons behind the financial collapse and slow (or at least uneven) subsequent recovery, this Time piece on the “financialization” of the economy seems to pinpoint the broadest underlying cause with the most specific reasoning. Well worth a read. This excerpt gives you the general idea:

Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses. “The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the textbook description of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today,” according to academics Oscar Jorda, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick, who’ve studied the issue in detail. By their estimates and others, around 15% of capital coming from financial institutions today is used to fund business investments, whereas it would have been the majority of what banks did earlier in the 20th century.

…

“Across all advanced economies, and the United States and the U.K. in particular, the role of the capital markets and the banking sector in funding new investment is decreasing.” Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds.

To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it’s only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.

And after this broad introduction it goes into finer details. The decrease in small business loans (and hence small businesses being started), the increase in cash upfront home purchases (and hence the decrease of younger families entering the home market), and the skyrocketing of debt, both personal and corporate.

How has this rampant “financialization” — lower interest rates, higher debt, lower loan availability, greater income inequality — affected you?

Have you put off or ruled out any options that would have been more viable at this stage in your life, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

Would you be happier in a world “pre-financialization”? How would your life be different?

I’ve been to the Google campus. They have mint flavored water.

The stories of tech company largesse and their endless perks are the stuff of legend. Free gourmet lunches, access to gyms, biking around campus, private shuttle busses with wifi and cushy seats. It all makes working in tech sound like paradise from the outside. But The Economist cites a survey that maybe all the free snacks and massages only go so far.

A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, under-appreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work. In many areas they were even more discontented than non-tech workers: 36% of techies felt they had a clear career path compared with 50% of workers in areas such as marketing and finance; 28% of techies said they understand their companies’ vision compared with 43% of non-techies; and 47% of techies said they had good relations with their work colleagues compared with 56% of non-techies.

If free candy can’t make a person happy with their job (to the point of being DISCOMBOBULATED, no less!), then I ask you: WHAT CAN?

Would the lavish perks of the tech sector make you like your job more?

Which perks actually improve life vs sounding good from the outside?

If not, what is the real key to being happy at a job?

Are unhappy tech workers right to be dissatisfied despite the perks, or are they being entitled and not appreciating their good fortune?

“If I could drop this mic, I would, but it’s attached to the podium.”

While listening to Obama on WTF with Marc Maron I remember thinking, in that more conversational, less guarded interview with the president, that more than anything else, he’s a brilliant man that is deeply saddened he couldn’t do more as president.

A lot of those same feelings came through in his final State of the Union speech last week. He’s always been a great speaker, he’s obviously very smart, and wants to make an impact that makes America better. That made him a good president, even if the obstacles in his way (which he dedicated almost a quarter of the speech to addressing) kept him from being one of the great legends he idolized like Lincoln or Roosevelt.

But in another year he’ll be done, and still a relatively young, healthy, driven individual. Still a charismatic figure, still an educated law maker and policy wonk. Where does that potential turn next?

What would you like to see Obama do after being president?

Who’s post-presidency will his most resemble?

What would make the biggest difference?

What do you hope he definitely doesn’t do?