Ask Isaac: Transracial Adoption, LEGO, Loneliness, Anarchy, Meditation, Mentors, and a Death Match

Today I hit everything from the personal to the radical to the bizarre.  This episode is twice as long as I shoot for in a typical Ask episode, but there were a lot of questions, some fairly involved, and I have a big mouth.  Here are the questions submitted:

  • Would you defeat Ludwig von Mises in a death match?
  • What kind of LEGO sets did you have as a kid? (and if we’re honest, today)
  • How to get over the loneliness of entrepreneurship?
  • What three people, living or dead, would you pick as life coaches?
  • What are your greatest tools for creativity?  Do meditation and psychedelics have a place?
  • Favorite cigar?
  • Are you an anarchist?  If so, would you end government overnight or do you think a gradual process is needed?
  • How do you get yourself to do things you don’t enjoy?
  • Did your beliefs have an effect on your decision to adopt?  Do you recommend adoption for others?
  • What was the adoption process like?  What unique challenges do you face being a transracial family?

Thanks for submitting!  If you want so ask questions of your own, send ’em my way via this simple form,

As always, this and every episode is available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

How Do I Convince My Parents to Let Me Do Something Other Than College?

This is a written transcript of a portion of an Ask Isaac podcast episode where this questions was asked.

The first thought when I read this question is you shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone to let you. You are free to do what you want to do, especially once you are 18+. You don’t need to have that permission-based mindset. “I have to win them over. I have to convince them to allow me.”

You’re free to do what you want to do.

Now, once you acknowledge that, “I’m completely free. I could just not go to college right now. I could leave home. I could pack up my knapsack and do whatever I want to do. I am utterly and completely free. There is no power or moral law in the universe that obliges me to do otherwise.”

Now that you have that freedom… now you can start talking about it in costs and benefits. OK, if I do that, what are going to be the costs to me? Am I willing to bear those costs? Are there ways to mitigate those costs? Then you can have an honest conversation about what you are willing to put up with. But do you see how it puts the locus of control on you right away? No longer are you able to blame. “Well my parents won’t let me.” Well, that’s irrelevant. You can do what you want to do. You may find that your real reason is “if I did it, my parents wouldn’t support me financially, and I am not willing to live a lifestyle that’s beneath whatever amount of income – and I don’t believe I can bring that amount of income in myself without my parents’ help.”

Now that’s an honest admission. And that’s one that many people don’t want to be true of themselves. They want to be such rugged individualists that they’re not willing to compromise their dreams just to have a certain amount of money or financial safety net. So, they tell themselves stories. “My parents won’t let me.” But that’s not the truth, and the quicker you can identify the true reason that you’re being held back, the quicker you can overcome it, or work around it, or work with it.

I do know people who truly care more about material comforts than going and pursuing something like that, and the quicker they can be honest with themselves about it, I think, the better they’re going to be. So, it’s not about you convincing them to let you do something. It’s about deciding what’s going to be the cost. If your parents are going to disown you, hate you, not help you, not support you financially in any way, you have to determine what that’s worth. That’s a pretty horrible thing.

But you have to decide if it’s worth 4 years of doing something you mildly dislike, or maybe something you absolutely hate, so that your parents are happy. So, you have to ask yourself questions like what matters more, your happiness or someone’s happiness with you?” And again, I’m not advocating “yeah, screw your parents,” because, I think, at the end of the day, they want you to be happy. They’re just always going to lack the imagination – any other person besides you – is going to lack the imagination to understand ways that you might be happy, that they haven’t thought of before. And only you can find those.

So the easiest practical advice I would have is to start small and say, “Hey, Mom and Dad,” and again don’t approach it like “I need your permission,” and say, “Mom and Dad, I have been thinking,” and let them know this is not some spur of the moment thing and ate some Cheetos with your buddies and was like “I don’t want to go to college”.  Say, “Hey, Mom and Dad, I’ve been thinking and I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and a lot of examining my own life, and making priorities. I am going to take a gap year.” Whether you’re already in college and you want to take a break or before you go – Say you haven’t gone yet, “I am going to take one year and I have very clear goals. I want to experience two different kinds of work (paid work), live in two difference cities, or whatever it might be. I want to earn X amount of money. I want to gain a particular skill like a programming language. I want to become an expert on this. Or whatever…”

You’ve got a couple things that you say. “I am taking one year to do the following things, because it’s really important to me. And I think if I don’t do this now before I go into college and get roped in on a path, I’m always going to regret it. I’m always going to wonder. Furthermore, here’s a bunch of evidence and research that shows people who take a gap year, perform better in college and perform better after college, etc.” Frame it as… not this once for all. Frame it as “give me a year.” And at the end of that year, we’ll see where I am and we’ll see what I want to do next, but I need this year.”

Now, if you want help from them say, “I would like to propose to you… you were going to pay X for college… I propose you to pay less for that but you help me in the following way.” And be prepared if they say, “No,” and to be on your own. Do it anyway. Make up your mind how bad you want it, and what you want to do. And tell them in a non-confrontational way “this matters to me.”

If they see that spark in you and they see that this is so important to you and that you’ve thought about it clearly and you’re calm and rational about it, and you’re going to do it with or without them – this is like raising money for a company, by the way. The best pitch for an investment is, “this is what the company’s doing. It’s going to do the following. If you get on board it can do it faster and you can benefit, but it’s going to happen with or without you.” It’s so much better than “Oh, my gosh. I have this great idea. It won’t go anywhere, though. I need your help so bad or else the whole thing is not going to work.” It’s not as strong of a pitch in my opinion.

Anyway, “This is what I’m going to do, Mom and Dad. If you can help me, it would mean I could do the following. If you can’t help me, I’m going to have to do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to have to get 3 jobs to make it happen. And I’m totally prepared to do that. I don’t want you to be unhappy with me. I want your support. I want to be able to lean on you.”

Open it up and remind them that if they shut you down, they’re basically shutting down a line of communication and support to you emotionally. If you say, “I want to be able to come to you if this is hard and struggling with it, without you saying, ‘See, I told you so. You should have gone to college,’ I want that. I don’t want you to be upset at me for doing this, and I understand if you are but this is where I am coming from.”

I think if you present it like that, you have the highest chances of results. Again, it’s up to you what you want to do. You don’t need permission, but you need to understand the costs and benefits you’re willing to internalize and calmly and passionately share with your parents what it is that you want and have a clear idea. Not just “I don’t want to go to college.” Because to them, going to college means you’re making some sort of progress. To you, even if all you do is wander around for a year and do nothing, and that’s possible that it could give you more progress than college, but in their mind if you at least say, “I want to do X for a year, or two years, or whatever,” and at the end of that year if they’ve seen you grow and change and you know you don’t need college and “I’ve got this cool job, and this and that,” you can be like, “Hey, Mom and Dad, I’ve decided I’m going to take this further.”

You’ll have more courage. They’ll be more comfortable with it by that time. It will be much easier if you can get yourself to a position where they are excited about you having that one year.

If you want an awesome way to spend that one year, working with amazing startups and getting rigorous, self-guided personal and professional development, coaching, and a portfolio of projects, check out www.discoverpraxis.com.

What Praxis Set Out to Do

When we created Praxis we did it to fill a large and growing gap in the option set facing young people.  So many smart, ambitious, curious individuals are languishing in fluorescently-lit cinder-block classrooms.  Bored.  Racking up debt.  For no clear purpose.

The myth they are steeped in is that they have to do this.  There is no choice.  The options are presented: Be a loser, or sit around for 4-6 years at a cost of tens of thousands.

But the myth goes deeper.

The myth is that learning itself, and by extension self-improvement, are terrible, boring, passionless and must necessarily be enforced by bureaucrats and self-proclaimed authorities.  Your job, if you want to succeed in life (by whose definition anyway?) is to follow the rules, memorize the disconnected facts, take the tests, pad the resume, apply for the jobs, and wait for the conveyor belt to drop you off at ‘normal’.

How depressing and frustrating this is to so many of the best and brightest.

We set out to cut through the crap.  We wanted these talented young people to stop waiting for real life and to jump into amazing work experiences at amazing companies eager for their help.  We wanted them to shatter the old paradigm of education and start fresh, like newborns do, exploring questions that matter to them, creating their own challenges and structure, diving into a rigorous self-improvement project.

The mindset is simple and powerful.  Awaken your inner entrepreneur.  You own your life.  You own your education.  You own your career.  You are the driving force in your own process of creation.  Do things for the results you value, not the hoops arbitrarily placed before you.

We wanted this entire life-shifting experience to take place in the span of a single year and for a net cost of zero.

I received this email yesterday from current Praxis participant Mitchell Earl.  It beautifully illustrates the mindset shift.

“If I had to estimate, I’d say I skipped class 2/3 of the time in college. I don’t sit still well. I couldn’t learn in that type of environment. I need to be stimulated. When I did go to class, I used to take the daily puzzles; either crosswords or sudokus because I needed something to direct my nervous energy toward if I was going to be forced to sit and listen to someone talk at me. I can’t even count the number of times I had a professor yank my newspaper away from me IN COLLEGE.

In my web design class, the syllabus alone put a burr under my saddle reading, “One absence is considered excessive for the course.” I redefined excessive. I turned in my work on time, but I refused to go sit in a classroom and be told how or what to code, design, or write. That’s not how I learn.

I didn’t and don’t want my work to be like grocery store milk, micro-filtered, ultra-pasteurized, standardized, and homogenized. For me to do my best work, I need to have the freedom to explore my creativity. Praxis has shown me that. It’s given me the freedom to explore my own needs as a learner. No one is yanking my puzzle away telling me to pay attention. No one is telling me how to learn. No one is shaming my individuality. With Praxis, I’m free to be me.”

Yes.  That’s exactly it Mitchell.  We set out to create more freedom.  To help you carve out a space, to break the other-imposed mold, and plot your own path to fulfillment as you define it.

Freedom isn’t easy.  It’s much harder work than just doing what everyone else wants and expects.  It takes a lot of deep, philosophical thinking.  It takes self-knowledge and self-honesty.  It takes discipline and hard work.  It takes tolerance of failure and the courage to put yourself in new situations, often over your head, and learn on the fly.  It takes the humility to be in environments where you’re not the smartest person in the room.  Your desire for personal growth must be strong enough to sustain these challenges.

Mitchell is tasting it.  So are our other participants and grads.  This is what we set out to do.  And we’re doing it.  One life at a time.

If you know anyone who sounds a lot like Mitchell was in school, give ’em a little nudge of encouragement to be free.  Remind them the dominant path isn’t the only one, and the best paths are the ones they’ll blaze themselves.  You can even send them my way and I’ll gladly talk with them about taking creative control of their education, career, and life, with or without Praxis.

Let’s awaken people’s dreams and increase the number of those who are truly living free.

Episode 34: Lucas Jack on Leaving Law to Play Music

Lucas practiced law in Chicago for five years, being ’propelled by the inertia of safe choices’ before he decided to quit and engage his lifelong passion – music. We talked about making scary decisions, engaging the audience and fans as well as how he writes music.

Go to lucasjackmusic.com to hear his stuff.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Published
Categorized as Podcast

Three Daily Questions

From the Praxis Blog.

  1. Do I like what I’m doing?
  2. Is it getting me somewhere I want to go?
  3. What am I giving up to be here?

These seem like simple questions.  Obvious even.  No need to be reminded of them.

Yet so much of what we do is the result of habit, social norms, envy, fear, outside pressure, or laziness in thought and action.  We follow paths already worn whether or not they’re a good fit for us.  The first step in the process of waking up to a full and free life is asking these simple questions.

It’s harder than you think.

It will take more time to answer than you think.

That’s OK.  Take your time.  Wrestle with the questions.  Don’t lie to yourself.  Don’t ask them with a preconceived idea of what kind of person answers this way or that.  If you do you’re likely to give answers that reflect the person you think others will find cool rather than the person you actually are.

Even if everyone in the world envies what you’re doing and thinks it’s the pinnacle of success, fun, or fulfillment, if you don’t like it be honest with yourself.  I know so many people who stay in crappy situations simply because they feel guilty about not liking something others would love.  You’re not them.  And there’s nothing noble about suffering through something you hate unless you are firmly committed to it as a clear and definite route to something you love in relatively short order.

If you don’t know where you want to go it’s especially bad to suffer through things you don’t like.  You’re suffering for no particular reason with no known payoff.  It’s OK to not know where you want to go.  If you don’t, start exploring things until you get a better idea.  The fastest way to find out where you want to go is to try things and eliminate the ones you really dislike.

Finally, even if you have an idea where you want to go and you’re doing something you dislike right now to get there, you need to compare to the alternatives.  Just because an elaborate and expensive exotic diet and mountainside yoga routine could help you lose 10 pounds, could you have lost the same weight doing something cheaper and less painful like portion control and a little cardio?

The danger of having someplace you want to go – a goal – is that it can blind you to opportunity cost.  If you know you want to reach X, and you know Y is a way to do it, you may overlook the fact that X is a lot more painful than A, B, or C, all of which could also get you to X and give you a lot more in the process.  Just because you have a goal doesn’t mean the common path to reach it is the only or best.

Ask yourself these questions a lot.  Don’t get panicky.  Don’t walk out on your boss in the middle of work because you got bored for a few minutes.  This isn’t about being flaky or avoiding difficulty.  It’s about being resolute and facing difficulty and fear head on but knowing why you’re doing it.  It’s not about the path of least resistance, it’s about having a reason – your reason – for fighting.  It’s about choosing your own challenges instead of floating downstream just because.

You might be amazed how many things you’re doing that you dislike, that have no connection to somewhere you want to go, and that are causing you to miss amazing and valuable experiences.

Questions are powerful things.

‘Begin With the End in Mind’

I’ve never been really big on formal goals, goal-setting, or visualization of a desired end-state.  Instead, I focus on eliminating things I don’t like and always making some kind of progress on things I do, even if towards a relatively open future.  It’s fun and mysterious.

But I’ve begun to realize something.  Even though rarely formalized or deliberate, I’ve always dreamt and imagined myself and my projects in different future states.  The more carefully I observe and recall, the more I see those imaginings becoming reality.  It’s subtle and sly sometimes, but it happens.

I am largely living a life I once imagined.  I frequently have experiences where I’ll stop and realize that what I just did is almost identical to something I dreamed up years before.  Only after launching Praxis, for example, did I rediscover a long-forgotten PowerPoint called “Education Revolution” wherein I laid out my plan for a “new model of higher education”.  I had envisioned it with no particular goal-setting attached, forgotten it, and only after having launched a realization of the concept did I recall the dream.

In recent years I’ve started getting a bit more deliberate with my visualizations of the future.  I don’t know what power, if any, it has to bring it about, but I have discovered the immense power such visualizing has to focus my mood and energy in the present.  There’s also the entertainment value of looking back on thought-out and written-out goals years later to see what I ended up creating and how well it tracked.

I think there is some power in what we feed our subconscious mind.  I think it aids our awareness and thoughts with our conscious mind in ways we don’t yet fully understand.  Instead of simply letting my thoughts run wild, I’m trying to get a little – not a lot, as I want plenty of room for free play – more focused and deliberate with my visualizing.  We’ll see how it goes.

Stop Doing Shit You Hate

I shared this pithy little quote from entrepreneur and social media super user Gary Vaynerchuk yesterday.

12096376_10153620021288350_8263209000098393156_n

I’m fairly resistant to cat posters and motivational image-quotes online.  But this single sentence caught my eye.  It’s something I constantly preach as a better alternative to trying to find and do what you love.

In fact, I think this simple sentence contains one of the most powerful truths in the universe for unlocking your own potential and fulfillment.

Here comes the resistance…

It was Facebook so of course this couldn’t go without objections.  A commenter quickly claimed that (paraphrasing):

This idea is laughable to anyone who has ever had to pay bills.

A tragic response.

Charitable interpretation

Perhaps the most important skill if you want to gain maximum value from the stream of ideas in the world is the principle of charitable interpretation.  It’s simple, but really hard and really rare.

Assume people aren’t idiots who have never thought of objections.  Assume the best possible interpretation of their words.

In this case one could uncharitably assume that Gary V means to immediately cease doing anything uncomfortable, even if necessary for survival.  I hate preparing food and eating is often an annoyance.  Is Gary telling me to die?

It doesn’t take much charity to move beyond such a silly interpretation.  The source must know that a single sentence can never cover every context.  He chose to share it anyway because he must believe there is still some nugget of truth in it.  If you set yourself to finding that, instead of pointing to the obvious ways it might be misunderstood, you just might get some value.

Who doesn’t have to pay bills?

Everyone has to pay bills.  Scarcity exists everywhere for everyone.  Sure, the tradeoffs change.  For some it’s a ham sandwich or a bus ticket.  For others it’s a private jet or a Caribbean island.  Everyone needs stuff to maintain what they see as an acceptable lifestyle, and stuff is not free.

If by pointing out that the acquisition of material needs and comforts requires work you think you’ve revealed that no one should attempt to avoid stuff they hate doing, you’ve already refuted yourself.  A large part of the reason to do things that aren’t fun is because it enables you to do more things that are.  The quote is a reminder of the why behind the process of doing crappy stuff.  So you can do less of it.

It’s a process

Even if in the present you feel compelled to do things you hate in order to pay bills, this quote provides an inspirational challenge and reminder.  It nudges you to ask yourself what things you do that you hate.  It pushes you to plot a path to escaping them.

Even if at this snapshot in time you have to do something you hate the message here is that your life extends through time.  You have tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Do you want to do stuff you hate forever?  Can you put together a plan of action or some tests to see how you might exit those activities?

Do you hate your bills?

If paying bills keeps you from doing things you enjoy, maybe the bills themselves are the problem.  If you hate paying bills, can you conceive of a way to do a lot less of it?

A great many people are lifestyle slaves.  You keep doing work you hate because you have to to pay for a car you think is necessary because the neighbors in the place you chose to live would be leery of someone driving a beater.  And so it goes, on and on.

If you really love these things and gain value over and above the suffering you endure to obtain them, fine.  If not, Gary’s quote is a good reminder.  If you hate paying for the car and cable bill, quit.  Build a new lifestyle in a cheaper house or city.  Create a new standard that doesn’t appeal to those around you but only the things you really value.

What’s the alternative?

If the commenter’s objection is an inescapable truth, what’s the implication?  If it’s impossible to quit doing things you hate because of bills then life must be an inescapable cycle of hated activities.  Yet a great many people don’t seem to hate every minute of their life.

To deny the value of this quote is to say that you have already eliminated every possible hated thing from your life.  There is no improvement you could make.  Has this ever been true of anyone?

The number of things you do that you hate – whether going to a soul-sucking job or attending a boring social event or family reunion – is higher than you suspect.  When you begin to examine your life you realize you spend tons of time and inordinate mental energy on things that make you unhappy.  Many of these you can shed right now with minimal consequences.  Others require planning and an escape process.

What’s really holding you back?

If you admit that it’s possible to do fewer things you hate you become vulnerable.  Now the burden shifts on to you to make it happen.  If you embrace this philosophy the pressure is on to implement it.  But what if you fail?  What if you say you want to quit doing what you hate and go pursue something you like and it doesn’t work out?  Better play it safe and not try.

Fear of failure and embarrassment is the major roadblock.

You will fail.  So what?  It’s a process of experimentation.

It’s comfy and has some rewards to be a martyr or a critic (I’ve written about these roles and why they keep us from exiting a bad situation in more detail here).  It’s also dangerous.

The other truth is that doing things you hate or merely tolerate is easier than doing things you love.  You might imagine doing what you love is easy.  A lucky life for the fortunate.  It’s not.  It’s a shitton of work.  Sometimes you don’t quit because you don’t want to work that hard.

This is not to say you need to do work you love.  It all depends on what work means to you and what your other values are.  Doing work you love and being happy are not necessarily the same thing.  It does mean you need a great deal of self-knowledge and self-honesty to find your values and the courage to move ever closer to living them.

It’s not just about work

Don’t limit your notion of things you hate to work.  You probably have habits and relationships and other things you hate.  Quit those too.

There are a million reasons to laugh at the advice.  I doubt any of them will improve your life after the short-lived glow of the clever dismissal.

Things can always suck less.  See if you can figure out how.

Ask Isaac: God, Too Many Ideas, and Talking to Parents About Dropping Out

This was probably my favorite episode to record to date!  In this edition I take on the Big Ones:

  • What is your viewpoint on God and Christianity? (The answer to this one comes as an addendum to the previous Ask Isaac episode.)
  • Any advice on how to keep your ideas fresh from what you read? Do you keep some kind of an idea-to-do list?
  • How do I convince my parents to let me do something other than college?

Submit your own questions any time!

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Periscope Experiment

I’m usually slow to adopt new platforms and technologies.  It took me ten years to finally appreciate Twitter despite repeated attempts.  I still have no use for the trendy workplace platform Slack.  I barely Instagram, I’ve never Snapchatted, and I can’t remember the name of that other one…Yik Yak?

But I’m in love with Periscope.

It’s one of the newer kids on the block, and it’s pregnant with potential.  Don’t be deceived.  If you download the app (do it!) and look around the globe to see who’s broadcasting, you might think it’s a little nutty or just a time waster.  So were all social platforms at first.  But this is so, so much more.

Periscope lets anyone with a smart phone live stream video for anyone in the world to watch simultaneously.  Not only that, viewers can comment in real time and the person recording can respond in real time.  It’s Twitter plus YouTube plus Yahoo Forums in one, all live.

Why did I add Yahoo Forums?  What’s one of the first results when you type “How do I know if this swollen cut is infected?” or, “Where is my carburetor?”  Cheesy, relatively inefficient forums where others share their thoughts.

Imagine streaming live while you try to fix your car and letting viewers instruct you as you go?

During the crazy rains here in SC I found several people showing live footage of what was happening near them.  Live concerts and shows are common.  One guy was giving live fantasy football advice right before kickoff.

There is so much more.  The possibilities are amazing.

I’m going to be experimenting with Periscope this week.  I’ll do at least one live session every day this week (yesterday I did one on how I prep for a podcast).  Check out my profile here: periscope.tv/isaacmorehouse

After this week I hope to settle on some kind of idea for a weekly Periscope session where I can cover some topics and take questions live.  Who knows, maybe this is the future of Ask Isaac?

Episode 33: When To Not Read A Book and Why Curiosity Is Like The Blob, with TK Coleman

TK Coleman comes back to talk about one of his greatest passions – books.  How do you find a good read?  How can you can give yourself over to curiosity and follow your intellectual desires?

I try hard to insult and goad him into admitting he wastes too much time on weird books with no payoff, and he remains composed and artfully defends time spent on books…and makes me look like a big jerk by not engaging my insults.

Check out TK’s blog on readings and ideas he explores at tkcoleman.com.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Get Off the Conveyor Belt

Excerpted from Freedom Without Permission.

The reason many people fear opting out is because of a paradigm of linear, externally-defined progress that I call the conveyor belt mentality. This mentality is holding you back and must be demolished. It goes something like this:

You are plopped onto a production line at whatever stage you’re supposed to be based on arbitrary things like your age, class, and gender. Then you let the belt do the work. By essentially doing nothing but what you’re told, you get handed certificates at each next stage. 18? Unless you did something truly outrageous, here’s your diploma. 22? Here’s your degree. Degree? Here’s your job (or so you’re led to believe).

Most people believe this and live it. It’s revealed in the kinds of questions we ask strangers. “What grade are you in?” “What’s your major?” “What kind of job do you have?” If your answer is not the appropriate one for your age and assumed station in life, people worry. “I dropped out of school to do X” is cause for concern to almost everybody, no matter what X is. “I’m a sophomore at university Y” is cause for comfort to almost everybody, no matter what you’re actually doing with your time at Y. So long as you’re at your station, no one much cares if you’re productive, happy, successful, fulfilled, or free.

Parents obsessively check their child against a list of averages on everything from height to reading ability and stress if junior is not “on track.” No one really ever asks who built the track, where it’s going, or whether junior has any interest in arriving there.

The conveyor belt sucks. It’s not taking you where you want to go. Aggregates are not individuals and your goals and abilities are not definable by summing the abilities and behaviors of everyone your age and dividing by the population size. Time to get off.

It’s scary at first, because your mind is trained to think that progress is defined by moving on the conveyor belt in the only direction it goes. Maybe really special or hard working people go faster, like the people who run up an escalator instead of letting the machine do all the work, but everyone is channeled in the same narrow corral moving in the same direction. That’s not progress.

Progress, for you, is moving towards your own goals and desires and becoming more fulfilled as you grow and overcome challenges. There are as many directions as there are people. Once you jump off the conveyor belt, the hardest part is actually discovering what makes you come alive, then being honest and unashamed of what you discover. It’s worth it. You can never start too soon.

The thing is, the mold-breakers who jump the belt don’t struggle any more or less than those who stay on. They have a hard time too. But it’s a different kind of pain. It’s the pain of working to achieve a goal they’re passionate about that has huge rewards when won, not the pain of subjugation to a monotony that brings you nothing in return.

My Monthly Newsletter Is Awesome. You Should Signup.

I wanted to find a way to deliver some kind of uniquely valuable stuff to you, my faithful readers and listeners, in a new format.  Something special and exclusive so you can brag to your friends that you are part of a secret club with decoder rings.

The decoder rings turned out to be too complicated and heavily monitored by the DHS so instead I opted for the next coolest thing.  A monthly email newsletter.

That’s right.  If you sign up (in the sidebar or the tab that says “Monthly Email”, which is a code-word for our secret club) you’ll get something super special in your inbox once every month.  It’s like a cartload of fresh ripe Honeycrisp apples delivered right to your door except it’s an email of words delivered to your screen.

I just sent out the first one yesterday.  I can’t verify, but initial reports indicate life-changing effects rippling across cyberspace.  Did you feel that?  Probably my newsletter blowing someone’s mind.

I will not normally include the content of these newsletters here on the blog.  It’s super secret and special, remember?  But just this once I will do so.  Very big of me, I know.

The newsletter is built around a review of a piece of media each month.  A book, movie, TV show, podcast or some other tidbit.  This month it’s the HBO series Silicon Valley.

You can check out the newsletter here.  More importantly, you can signup here!

Tell everyone.  But be secretive about it.  See you in the club next month with the other cool kids.

How to Search for a Job

unnamed

From Life Learning on Medium.

A lot of people are looking for jobs. The thing is, not all job searches are equal. “Looking for a job” might actually mean hoping someone finds your resume online, shooting out a few emails, or posting unsolicited comments on Facebook pages that say, “Are you hiring?”

If you want a job — really want a job — you’ve got to go level five with your job hunt. And call it a hunt, not a search. You’re not hoping to stumble into a pot of gold, you’re tracking your prey and bagging it.

Let’s take a look at how to do it.

Level 1: A Good Resume

While most of the best jobs you’ll get in life will be gotten without a resume, if you’re job hunting you should have one on hand. I don’t particularly like them, but a lot of people expect them. A good resume will never get you a job, but a bad resume could lose you one.

For a resume to actually convey something, serve as a starting point for interview questions, and keep you from being dismissed out of hand, there are really just two main features: Nice appearance and outcomes-based content.

For appearance, keep it simple, clean, a single page, uniform use of line breaks or bullets, not too many indents and sub-sub points, and a clear order top-to-bottom of what’s most important. (Hint: experience is more important than education to most people, even if you assume otherwise). Oh, and get your spelling and capitalization triple checked.

For content most people simply list credentials they have and activities they engaged in. This is boring and conveys a lot less about your ability to create value than what kind of outcomes you produced. Don’t just list that you were a digital marketing intern and ran email campaigns. Show that your A/B test improved open rates by 10%.

Even if you were waiting tables, see if you can demonstrate value created. “Server at Applebee’s” is less interesting than, “My section consistently brought in 15% more tips than average sections.”

Anyone can have a title and do a task. The good ones create value and can show positive outcomes.

Level 2: Good Profiles on LinkedIn, etc.

Whether you like it or not, LinkedIn is hugely valuable in the working world, especially for those making hiring decisions. Have a profile. Have a decent headshot that actually looks like you. Have accurate information. Keep it up to date.

Your LinkedIn profile should be consistent with your resume, but it is not the same thing. It allows you to go a little deeper into who you are, what drives you, who you’ve worked with, what you did, etc. Same goes for Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else you kids are using these days. Be you, but use good judgement. If someone only ever found your online accounts, would they have an accurate idea of who you are and what you want to be known as?

Many people fear all social media and online presence because they think of it as a liability. Some people try to stay undiscoverable online as a protective measure. This is a terrible idea. First, always assume if some hacker wants to find your stuff bad enough they’ll find a way, regardless of your settings. But more importantly, seeing social media as a liability blinds you to the fact that it can be a huge asset. There is no neutral. It’s either helping you or hurting you. Being completely anonymous online hurts you. Take charge of your online presence and make it an asset.

Level 3: A Personal Website

It’s easier than ever to setup a personal website. If you’re serious about finding a great job, just do it. Go over to WordPress and get started. In a few hours you can have a clean, simple website that serves as a repository of all the things you enjoy and want to be known for.

A personal website gives you far more control than profiles on third party sites. You can feature whatever you wish, you can blog, share video, include a longer bio, express aspects of yourself you wouldn’t cram into a LinkedIn profile, and really use the blank canvas to create whatever you wish.

But more than what you have on your site is the fact that you have one. Anyone who has put together a basic, neat, up to date personal website stands out. Not many people do, despite how easy it is, and if you do you’ll have something that gives you far more cred than just a decent resume in a pile.

If you really want to gain an edge, overcome fear, build confidence, and become a better communicator and thinker then take the next step and blog on your site regularly. I recommend blogging daily, but if that’s daunting, try weekly. You can always hide bad posts, but the act of doing it and knowing it can be seen by others will do more for your creative capacity and productive power than any other simple activity I know of.

Level 4: A Portfolio of Projects

If you’ve already setup your personal website here’s a way to really beef up the value. Beyond a nice homepage and about page with a bio your website can feature projects you’ve completed.

Remember when I said the resume should show outcomes instead of just telling about activities? A portfolio allows you to show in much greater detail what you’ve created. It’s especially easy for those with skills in art or coding or engineering to share publicly what you’ve produced. You may think that your management or communication or sales skills can’t really be put into a portfolio that shows what you’ve done, but it can.

Go to a freelancer website and pay someone $50 to design a nice one-pager that shows the results of that event your organized and executed. Have someone build an interactive graph tracking your fundraising or sales campaign. Show articles you’ve written and clicks they received.

If you can think of nothing tangible that you’ve completed to put in a portfolio it’s a good sign you should get cracking! Writers and photographers know that their portfolio of work is what really matters. If they have none, they start out just doing things for free to build it up. You can do the same. Just get started creating something and share the results. Do projects for free that will help you get something under your belt.

The great thing is, the success or failure of your projects is less important at this stage than that you completed it. I’ve talked with tech companies who say they’d rather hire someone who built a cheesy, non-innovative notepad app than someone with a stellar resume who never built and “shipped” anything at all.

Level 5: Unique, Stand-Alone Websites, Videos, InfoGraphics for Your Target Company

Here’s where the great stand apart from the very good. If you really, truly, deeply want to work for a company why not devote yourself to studying them in depth and presenting your unique take?

Remember Nina, whose resume was lost in the heap at AirBnB? She went level five and became internet famous. She put together an impressive site that deserved attention, still it’s telling of just how low the bar is among job-seekers that a simple website was such a viral sensation. No one is doing this. But you can.

One thing employers will tell you when sifting through job applications is that too many people talk about themselves and too few talk about the company they claim to want to work for. “I’m Joe and I’m great at XYZ” tells me nothing about why Joe applied specifically for my company. Does he just want a paycheck, or is he passionate about my business? Does he even know what we do and what we value?

There’s no better way to demonstrate your knowledge and passion for a company than to dig into the industry, business model, customer base, competitors, and build something unique that describes what you love about and what you would do for the company. Don’t think about what would make you look good, think about what would actually be valuable to the company.

I guarantee spending 30 days doing a deep dive on your target company will be more valuable than spending an entire year getting a second major and more clubs to list on your resume. If you can create something of value to the company before you’re even working for them that sends a strong signal that you’re a person they want on board.

What Are You Waiting For?

One of the reasons I launched my company Praxis is precisely because so few young people realize that they have the power to create their own professional future. There are more tools available than ever and more opportunities but so few realize it. You can’t sit on the conveyor belt and expect it to drop you at a fulfilling job.

Look, I’m not saying it’s easy. But don’t tell me there’s no way to get a great job if you aren’t willing to push yourself to level four, or ideally level five. You can probably think of ten more things I didn’t even list here if you really try.

The days of buying a degree and hoping it buys you a job are over. Be your own credential and prove through the work you do that you can create value.