Month: August 2017

If you don’t understand the product, it’s not for you.

If you’re offended by it, it’s not for you.

If you’re searching for objections, it’s not for you.

If you’re eagerly anticipating a “gotcha”, it’s not for you.

If it’s not for you, it doesn’t need to change to become for you. Because it’d never be for you anyway.

In their own words…

We pound the importance of lightning quick email and professional communication at Praxis.

It’s not just about speed, it’s also about tempo.

Early in your career, when you need others more than they need you, it’s especially important to not break the tempo set by your interlocutor.  This applies to in person meetings, video interviews, phone calls, and emails.  Especially if you’re in sales (and to some extent, we are all always in sales), keeping the tempo increases the odds of getting the result you want.

If you enter an interview and the other party asks a long, slowish question and pauses, they’ve set a slow tempo and you can and should be deliberate as well.  If they hit you out of the gate with a quick, no BS, “Why do you want this job?” they’ve set a quick tempo.  Follow suit.

For email this is under-appreciated and maybe more important.  If someone takes a day or two to respond, though speed is always the side to err on, you can take a day or so if need be.  You’re not breaking out of the tempo they set.  But if they respond in ten minutes or one hour, they’ve created a tempo that you need to maintain!  Get on it and respond now!

You’d be surprised how much this matters.

True.

When people appeal to group identity, the problem is not that they’re trying to frame their group as too different and unique from all the rest.  The problem is that they’re not going far enough in that direction.

Your struggle and triumph do not just belong to abstract categories you’re defined into, they belong to you.  The sooner you define your goals and challenges as your own, not some group’s, the sooner you’ll make progress.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” — Ayn Rand

Imagine if you were prevented by force of law from emailing certain people, adding certain friends on Facebook, or texting people.

Imagine a government body that excluded vast swaths of the population from the list of those you are allowed to communicate with.  Imagine if every Facebook friend request or Twitter follow had to go through some months-long approval process, and most got denied.

Imagine how your world would shrink.

We’d cry “censorship!” and “I have a right to free association!” and we’d be right.

Immigration restrictions do the same thing, only with even more grave consequences.  Lives and livelihoods are at stake.  Bureaucracies and armed agents preclude you from hiring, renting to, selling to, or inviting into your home or business the majority of the earth’s population without near impossible approval processes.  I can think of no greater violation of human rights and dignity.

Government logic:

If you don’t do business with someone based on circumstances of birth, you’re illegally discriminating.

If you try to do business with someone born elsewhere, you’re violating immigration law.

It’s pretty hilarious to me how many people have a latent tendency towards efficient market hypothesis. Suggest an improvement or question the status quo in their favorite industry, and they’ll insist it is the way it is because it’s exactly what consumers want and the market demands.

Bullshit. It can always be better.

Success in life comes from defying statistical predictions.

Someone shared a video with me recently called, “You’re not special enough to NOT go to college.”  It was about some statistics of average employment rate among those with degrees vs. those without.  The message was,  “Don’t be an arrogant idiot.  Stats show that you need a degree to succeed.”

I can think of few better exercises in faulty reasoning.

The video was posted on Facebook.  Did the creator realize that they are not special enough to post a video to Facebook?  The overwhelming majority of Facebook videos fail.  It was narrated by an actor…does he not realize that statistics prove acting is a terrible profession to pursue?  Doesn’t he know how many wannabe actors fail?

You aren’t special enough to play sports, start a business, or have a happy marriage.  Statistics.  You aren’t special enough to eat healthy foods either.  Most who try fail. Statistics.

In fact, everything every successful person has ever done has been in defiance of statistical averages.  That’s almost the definition of being good at something.

If one person jumps 5 feet, and another jumps 10 feet, would it be wise to say, “Don’t get any ideas in your head about trying to jump more than 7.5 feet, stats show you won’t”?

If you live your life by averages, you’ve already lost.

I realized today that my old content consumption pattern has been abandoned for the past several years.  Time to return to it.

When I first awoke to the world of ideas I was about 16.  I read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis and it flipped a switch.  I bought and read every single book by Lewis I could (I think I have read nearly everything he wrote).  Then Aristotle.  Then I found David Hume and Adam Smith and read most of their stuff.  Then Milton Friedman, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Henry Hazlitt.  Again, I read just about everything they wrote.

This was my natural pattern.  I’d read a book I liked, then proceed to read everything I could by the same thinker.

These days, I read totally different stuff all the time, and rarely read more than one book by an author.  I realized that this reveals a weakness.  If I read a book and am not immediately compelled to read more from the author, the book probably wasn’t good enough for me to read in the first place.

The deep dive approach is so much more self-driven by interest, since you won’t deep dive into weaksauce.  The results are excellent too, as you can’t forget a line of thought if you’ve read it from the thinker in many books and many different ways.

Think of music.  The stuff you love best is usually from a band you know very well.  When you hear a song so good you must listen to more from that band, it’s the beginning of something great.  When you know the whole body of work you begin to hear themes and notice things that deepen not just your love for the band, but your musical understanding in general.

Going deep into a single thinker doesn’t mean you can’t be a broad generalist.  Think about it, if you read five books on one subject you will know more about it than 95% of the population and be able to converse with specialists.  Yet it’s only five books.  You can repeat this tons of times for whatever topic/thinker strikes your fancy.  It’s so much more fruitful than a single book in passing.

If it doesn’t make you want to read more, it might be time to put it down.  That’s the new rule I’m testing out anyway, hoping to return to my roots of multiple deep dives instead of tons of surface scratching.

James C. Scott currently on the docket!

*Indebted to TK Coleman for the analogy to musicians.

Yesterday I had a short, mysterious post.

I’ve long been fascinated with the ominously named “Dark Ages”.  (As if Rome had electricity).  I just finished reading James C. Scott’s, Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states and it got me thinking about this again.

From a big picture view, the Roman Empire was like the Soviet Union in many ways.  Most of the people under its rule were subjected against their will.  Massive forced labor initiatives for vanity projects, public works, and military conquest.  Walls and fortifications, not only to keep non-subjects out, but to keep subjects in.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, it didn’t plunge Eastern Europe and Russia into darkness.  The visible from space monuments and state projects abated, and power dispersed from the center to several peripheries.

The fall of Rome was similar.  Not so much a big, dramatic, single event as a gradual process of decentralization, the inevitable result of the Roman state squeezing the goose laying the golden eggs.  The sheer cost of forced labor, massive slave populations, and constant efforts to prevent unhappy subjects from exit and revolt were unsustainable.  The center collapsed, bleeding power back to dispersed modules.

It didn’t all go dark for the former subjects; not any more than the million or so who left the City of Detroit over the past five decades.  Former Detroiters aren’t in a dark age because their old city is a shell of itself.  They’re in Chicago, Portland, Tampa, and the lovely suburbs of Oakland County.  Their lives likely improved (why else would they leave?).

Society and the state do not share the same progress chart.  The welfare of one doesn’t positively correlate with the welfare of the other.  In fact, most of the time, there is an inverse relationship.

Historians and archaeologists have a very difficult time documenting society, while state projects and written records are much easier.  The latter, of course, proclaim the glories of stupid boondoggles and the honor of conquest, mass murder, subjugation, and slavery.

When a state falls (and they all do eventually; not because of the wrong leaders, but because they are states), some people suffer.  Namely, state leaders and the rent-seeking monopolists in bed with them.  But on the whole, the shift in power away from easily identified state centers to dispersed, shifting modules is not bad for humanity.  Society tends to push in this direction for a reason.  Did the New World enter a dark age with the end of the British global empire?  Surely some state connected and supported actors suffered.  But how many slaves and subjects improved their condition?

In a thousand years, absent all the digital data, historians and archaeologists might discover grand statues and massive works of military and monumental prowess in the former Soviet Union.  They might realize these great works came to a halt, along with unified written narratives of the great leaders who pushed them.  They might conclude that the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the final straw for this great empire, and that a dark age descended upon eastern Europe and Russia.

Logically and historically, society precedes the state.  In fact, Scott’s work reveals that states are quite an anomaly, their fragile existence a factor in the minority of societies for short periods of time.  They are a parasitic pattern that pops up from time to time where conditions are right, then dies under their own incentive structure after a few decades or centuries.

We’d be wise to not conflate the welfare of societies with the welfare of the states that sometimes feed off them.

The following two opinions are far more alike than different.  The first is popular, the second unpopular:

The collapse of the Soviet Union was an overall improvement for humanity.

The fall of Rome was an overall improvement for humanity.

Today’s Forward Tilt discusses one of the key lessons I learned early on with Praxis.

My good friend and colleague TK Coleman tells a story about a guy he used to work with at Applebee’s.  This guy ran the show.  He was cool, customers loved him, staff loved him, he had a way with the ladies and he was clearly the alpha dog.  He’d been a cook at the location since it opened and was still a cook.  If you wanted to be cool at Applebee’s, you had to get him to think you were cool.

But that was at Applebee’s during working hours.  This guy had worked there way too long and hadn’t really done anything else with his life.  Outside of that tiny local venue, he had little social standing.  All the specific things rewarded at Applebee’s didn’t matter much in the real world.

College campuses have a similar effect.

Why are there so many crazy protests and ideas and shenanigans and crackpot philosophies at universities?  It’s not because there’s a critical mass of thinkers.  It’s because there’s a critical mass of people not earning a real paycheck.

Without market incentives and real profit and loss, campus currency evolves.  “College cool” or social points are counted in ways totally disconnected from the real world.  In the real world, anyone who shouts down a speaker at a public event is probably going to suffer high costs with little benefit.  On campus, you can score points.  You have no real financial risk during your time there, so you can afford to get weird.

When people exit higher ed. and enter the real world something interesting happens.  They stop joining causes and marches and saying weird stuff in public.  This isn’t primarily because they “sold out”, it’s because they started earning a paycheck.

A group of young Praxis participants was gathered recently and a conversation about current controversial events came up.  A few of them said they were really concerned about this or that political movement.  A participant who’d been in an apprenticeship for a while spoke up.  He said he used to be really worried about this stuff too, and he’d spend hours scouring the web keeping up on it, forming opinions about who’s right and wrong, and getting into debates.  Then something happened.  He got an apprenticeship at an awesome, fast-growing startup that’s creating real world value with a great product.  He said, “Suddenly, all that stuff ceased to matter.  I’m enamored in crushing it in my role.  I’m obsessed with new ways to make the mission of the company succeed.  What I’m daydreaming about is how we could document and systematize and optimize this conversation, not who’s right and wrong in some news event!”

He started earning a paycheck.  He entered the real world and became an independent producer, not a dependent consumer.

Fears of what’s being done and said on campuses are as overblown as that cook’s cool factor at Applebee’s.  Once people eventually move on and have to earn a paycheck, they attain an entirely different cost/benefit structure.