Choosing, rather than taking what comes
Two long engagements, and time between them to look at the practice itself. What rate, what refusals, which tools to keep for ten years.
Two long engagements this year, one in an international organisation, the other in industry. What is at stake is no longer volume but choice: what you accept, what you refuse, and at what price. It is also the year I started drawing seriously again, which has nothing to do with it and explains part of my reading. The year ahead is the one where I finally give my own company an identity.
The thesis is useful even without full agreement: passion follows competence rather than preceding it, and a rare competence is what buys the freedom to refuse. Read it when setting a rate.
The most misquoted book of its kind, and the most interesting when actually read: the simplicity it describes is bookkeeping, not a posture. He keeps a ledger of his spending, and that ledger is what makes the rest credible.
A hundred or so lenses, each a question to ask of what you are building. The method transposes unchanged to any system: it is not a book about games, it is a book about asking one question at a time.