Jacob Jaffe - Self-Help, Memoir
Jacob spent 30 years building a successful career � and the next few unlearning why he thought that mattered so much.
Do Nothing: What I Started Noticing After I Set My Status to Away (2025) isn't a guidebook. It's a collection of ten reflections written after the noise of full-time work subsided - and something else began to surface. He began his professional life in 1991 and spent
more than two decades at Microsoft, where the habits of productivity,
responsiveness, and outcome-driven thinking settled in without much
resistance. They served him well in business and
proved much harder to shake in retirement. In 2021, he stepped away
from corporate life with no grand plan, only to find that slowing down
was harder (and more valuable) than it sounded. When he's not writing about what it means to stop
doing, Jacob can be found playing pickleball, serving on his local condo
board, or taking long walks with his wife, Carolyn, and their
labradoodle, Guinness. They live on Bainbridge Island,
Washington, where Jacob's still learning how to let a day unfold
without needing to justify it. Their two kids, Jonah and Nora, show up
often -- both in his work and in the life that shaped it.
Do Nothing was his first book -- and, fittingly, not part of any five-year plan.
