An Exercise in Prayer

Think of a person that makes you mad. An archetypical face for the forces that oppose you, lash out at you, despise you, want to bring you down.

Then pray for that person.

Our real enemies are spiritual forces. The human enemies we see in front of us are hurting, broken people. They need prayer and redemption. The darkness wins if we fight them with the same weapons they use against us.

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On Disappointment

What does it mean to be disappointed?

You first have to be appointed. Something set before you. Something in your veins. A calling. A will. A fate.

To the extent to which you want and don’t shirk this thing, it’s also a desire. A dream. A goal. Perhaps a fantasy.

To realize you will never attain or achieve or become it is to be disappointed.

The appointment is over. The calling failed. The dream left empty, denied. The desire a vacuum.

The disappointment is in the finality.

The embers of hope burn painfully.

They were misplaced. The appointment was of what could be, but not what will or must be. Not what is.

Whether you failed it or it was always an ideal rather than a reality, you may not ever know.

But you have to let it die.

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The Time We Have on Earth

Every additional day is an opportunity to move closer to God.

Every day is an opportunity for those who are moving away from Him to stop, turn, and come back towards Him.

This is why, despite the strong desire for a final judgement when observing the sickness of the world and its institutions, we should be thankful for the delay.

In the meantime, we have work to do. On ourselves, with each other, and for others. The darkness that seeks to consume and enslave souls answers to us, for we have been given the power of Christ. The victory has been won, but we are the cleanup crew. Tasked with declaring the freedom available to those previously in bondage, and clearing out the lingering corners of darkness.

In Lord of the Rings, after Sauron is defeated, all of Middle Earth is free from his dark reign. Yet each people, each land, each village still had cleanup work to do to clear out any last vestiges and begin to rebuild on a good foundation.

When the Hobbits returned to the Shire, despite Sauron’s defeat, they found it ruled by a petty tyrant. They, knowing the power they had and the end of Mordor, quickly deposed the former servant of Sauron. Even though the war had been won, minions of the Dark Lord roamed and lingered, clinging to any bit of power they could get until someone with courage conquered them.

That is the position we are now in. Each day gives a chance to expand the Light, expose the darkness, and increase the number of those set free.

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Business Models

The biggest factor in how lucrative a business venture is is the business model.

Yet this is the part most neglected.

People think about cool new products or services, fun branding, effective sales and marketing tactics, how to service customers, pricing and discounting, and all the other more forward facing elements of business first.

But if I were advising an aspiring young entrepreneur, I’d tell them to think roughly in this order:

  1. Market/segment
  2. Business model
  3. Unique value proposition

The caveat is that this assumes a desire to maximize for profitability. Very many (most in fact) entrepreneurs are chasing a curiosity, a passion, or a sense of personal mission more than max financial ROI. That’s perfectly fine.

But if you want to maximize the financial ROI, start with identifying a good market, then a good model, then figure out the ideal way to solve a problem for this market under this model.

It’s amazing how easy it is to sell something that there’s too small a market for. Or something with too small margins. Or a sales cycle that cripples cashflow, or kills predictability in revenue.

These all sound like boring accountant things to the starry eyed young innovator, but they can make or break the financial side of the business.

It doesn’t have to be all mercenary though. Most companies start with a big idea for a product, and that’s fine. But before sinking a lot into it, really think through market, model, and value prop.

Start with curiosity. Observe every business around you and ask yourself about their cost structure. What’s fixed and what’s variable? Ask about their revenue model. When do they get paid by whom and how much? When do they have to pay their vendors? What’s the margin between costs and revenues? What’s the ceiling to growth? What’s the ramp time for employees to reach full productivity? See if you can model it out on a spreadsheet. A lot of cool looking businesses are actually pretty brutal to be in. And plenty of unsexy ones are crushing it with brilliant models.

If young people regularly asked these questions, there’d be a lower failure rate for new companies.

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Mystery and Madness

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” — Proverbs 25:2

The drive for knowledge is electric. Finding secret truths, piecing together mysteries, understanding the hidden aspects of the world; these are some of the greatest motivators of man. This is a good thing, and how we were created.

But why does pursuit of mysteries so often lead to madness?

The deeper you delve, the harder it seems to be to come back up with anything useful. Or, as I often say of psychedelics, you may become more enlightened yourself but you become less valuable and reliable to others.

Read deep penetrators of mystery like Carl Jung, or some of the great mathematicians and it’s hard not to conclude that they started out ravenously curious and ended up raving mad. Same goes for many brilliant artists who are trying to understand and portray hidden aspects of reality in their work. Ever read James Joyce, or listened to Kayne West talk?

What’s the lesson?

I’m not entirely sure, but I suppose it has something to do with constraints, hierarchy, and perspective.

One thing I’ve noticed as an entrepreneur is that having a wife and kids acts simultaneously as a constraint and a saving grace. It puts limits on how much time and mental energy I can spend on my big ideas. It constrains how crazy I can get and how much risk I can take.

Sometimes, especially in a very early stage startup, this can put me at a disadvantage against single founders. But over time, it keeps me sane as some of them go mad.

I think it’s similar when it comes to pursuing truth.

It’s not just the constraints time and attention, but the rank-ordering of importance. Knowing family is more important than my vision is key to not losing my grip. Knowing God is above family all the more.

It pulls you away when you’re about to get sucked too deep. You remember that, some corners left unexplored or mysteries not pondered is a price worth paying to have a right relationship with your family, and with God.

You just can’t achieve everything or know everything. An eternal perspective helps keep madness at bay as well. No, you won’t get the answers in this life. But why the rush anyway?

This is why I resonate more deeply with pursuit of freedom than pursuit of truth. Of course I love and pursue truth, but sometimes that pursuit can make one a slave to paranoia.

I’ve written elsewhere that insanity and genius come from a common root – seeing connections. When you start to see them, you can’t unsee them. Then you see them everywhere, within and around everything, even when they’re not there. Seeing too many connections is at least as dangerous as naively seeing none.

Seek the mysteries. But realize it will never have a natural stopping point. It’s up to you to impose one on yourself.

“And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” — Ecclesiastes 12:12

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Reputation Markets and Risk

I was chatting with someone recently who was surprised and impressed from his interactions in the not-fully-regulated gray market of health supplements.

The mechanisms by which consumers and producers keep each other honest seemed more sophisticated and effective than in the normal, fully above ground economy.

I suspect the reason has to do with the stakes of the game.

Give a phony review on Amazon, and what’s the worst that can happen?

Have poor customer service or unclear information as an FDA approved, compliant, publicly traded drug company, and consumers just assume they are the ones who lack understanding.

Signals of trustworthiness are complex things. When outsourced to large institutions, especially governments, people get lazier and less scrutinous. Likewise, polite society tends to have relatively small punishments for inaccurate signals. It would seem barbaric, for example, to imprison someone for a false Amazon review.

The cost of this humanitarianism is less reliable signals. In medieval times, people could swear a verbal oath, or appeal to a family name or signet ring and be believed. Those are very easy to fake, but they remained believable because the stakes for faking were absurdly high. No one wants to be put in stocks or beheaded.

This is true in most illegal trades as well. If you’re selling or buying something that could land you in prison if caught, you’ve got to find really robust mechanisms for proving reputation.

I’m guessing this is what my interlocutor bumped up against in the supplement market. Though not as high stakes as something like the market for cocaine, higher stakes than selling gummy bears. Producers and consumers, without recourse to regulatory bodies, courts, or even public opinion, must find reliable ways to signal trustworthiness.

There’s a lot to be learned from higher stakes environments when it comes to reputations.

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Bodily Distractions

I have a very hard time not getting annoyed at my physical body.

I feel a kinship with St. Francis, who called his body “brother ass”.

Injury, illness, hunger, fatigue; these are so inconvenient that my first reaction is irritation. Why is this body so demanding? I’m trying to get stuff done!

I suspect this is one of the attractions of Gnosticism. Let’s just call the body bad and try to escape from it.

But that isn’t right. Christianity offers a bold, difficult, but also comforting picture.

The body is imperfect. You must master it, but not reject it. It is useful and, in its pure state, an imager of God. It’s not in its pure state, but the answer is to allow God to redeem it and to participate in that process. It needn’t be worshipped or rejected.

I’m trying to switch my default reaction from annoyance to thanks when my body impedes my will.

Being both spiritual and material is a blessing. I certainly remember this when eating a good steak or smoking a cigar or enjoying other physical activities (wink wink). I should remember it in the suffering too.

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Eternity

I think everyone believes in eternal life.

Some will say they don’t, and of course I can’t prove otherwise, but the way they live seems to indicate that deep down, eternity is set in their heart.

If you really, fully, confidently believed you were going to cease to exist entirely forever after 80 or so years on this earth, would you put effort into improving yourself? Would any kind of sacrifice make sense? Would the desire for a legacy exist?

Wouldn’t it make the most sense to spend every bit of goodwill, reputation, and social capital accumulated, not to mention physical wealth, by the time you die? Why take it to the grave with you if you could cash it out in your final years of existence and have a better time? Why not steal, lie, cheat, or even kill if it benefited you and you were close enough to the end to evade earthly judgements for these things?

Why would concern for the welfare of your children extend beyond your existence? From your perspective, when you cease to exist the whole world might as well cease to exist.

Yet we are concerned with these things. We don’t live as is we’ll be forever snuffed out upon our death. We live as if all of humanity is in some way our business, and our place in it will always matter.

Probably because it’s true.

But the fact that we don’t live as if we’ll cease to exist doesn’t mean that we do live fully recognizing the weight of eternity.

It seem everyone believes in eternal life, but no one believes in it quite enough.

If we were really, truly aware of our immortal souls, we’d likely spend this 80 or so years differently too.

For one, we’d probably slow down. It’s not a race. We can work on our minds, our health, our character, as we should, but without as much desperation for particular outcomes or attainments. We have eternity to keep improving. The habits themselves become more important that what they produce in the blink of an eye that is earthly life.

Same for bad habits. Sure, we can get away with them and put up with the bad consequences for a few score years, but imagine the compounding effects of those habits over millennia?

When you consider the idea that you have to live with yourself for eternity, it changes what seems important to focus on. The news and trends of the day will pass. But who you are will persist.

This is weighty in some ways, and convicting. But I find on the whole it comes as a relief. I don’t need to strive quite so much to achieve specific outcomes or worry about where I stack up in the eyes of others by the time this body fails me. I have eternity to keep working on the things I’ve started here.

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The Experience Industry

I’ve always hated the, “America used to manufacture things, now it’s just services” sentiment.

For one, because it’s collectivist. Who is “America”? Individuals act, not notions of nations.

Two, because economic value, being subjective, is always the result of human experience. Experiences are not merely material. I may value a memory as much as a physical object.

Every economic decision is made weighing the value of experiences against the next best option. A well-made shoe that evokes little emotion because the marketing is nonexistent may create less value for me than a lesser shoe with marketing that makes me feel inspired every time I put them on.

There’s nothing scandalous about this. In fact, it’s a wonderful realization. It means you can get a lot of value without always needing tons more physical labor and material.

Creating experiences is always necessary for economic value. Creating material objects is only sometimes required.

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Give Me a Car

Unless it’s walkable, I’ll take my own car over any other form of transportation hands down.

Planes, trains, Ubers and buses are varying degrees of inhumane, stinky, nausea inducing, and soul-sucking.

Yes, you can occasionally have a nice experience, but as a general rule, the more public the transportation the less civilized.

Country road or open highway behind the wheel. Everyone get out of my way.

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Suffering and Independence

One of the hardest things as a parent is to let your kids suffer. But if you don’t, they’ll have a harder time becoming independent.

At each step, letting them work through harder things more and more on their own requires a small death as a parent. One, because you have to resist your instinct to save them. Two, because you can feel little by little them going out on their own; becoming less and less the child under your care and more and more an independent entity.

This is a wonderful development, but you can’t get there without the suffering of letting them suffer.

And maybe the hardest part is that your kids will not understand or appreciate how hard this is for you. In their weaker moments, they may even accuse you of enjoying it.

But parenting means, if nothing else, letting the part of you that wants credit for things die.

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The Weird Distribution of Socialism

The water in French hotels is way hotter than the US.

There seems to be no governor on water heaters like the paternalistic US with its weak water heating thanks to regulatory condescension.

Then again, France is widely considered more socialist than the US. Everyone is always on strike, entitlement is common, taxes are high, and employment laws stifling.

This is why it’s quite hard to compare how free or unfree any two polities are. As a visitor to France, the things that most affect you feel refreshingly more free. Few smoking bans, lax alcohol regulations, and of course truly hot water.

But things that affect a permanent resident get worse.

The US has a bit lower taxes and fewer regulations on business, but a ton of nanny state laws on all the day to day stuff.

It’s hard to predict how government control and redistribution will emerge in each place. I try to not judge too harshly and find and appreciate the freedom in each.

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I Want Details but I Don’t Want to Teach Them

I’ve got a problem when it comes to details.

When I work with teams, details get missed and I get upset. But as I diagnose how it happened, it’s almost always because I was too laissez faire in my management and communication style ahead of time.

I inculcate a bit of a loose ship mentality, but individually I run a very tight ship for myself.

I’m like this at home too. My desk, my office, and things I have total and direct control over are ship shape. But things shared with my kids tend to get messy and make me grumpy.

I am not good at teaching or showing others how to dial in the details. I do it myself, or delegate it, but don’t know how to handle the transitory in-between.

When details get flubbed up by others, it leaves me mad at myself every time. But I still don’t seem to get much better at preventing it.

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