Month: September 2017

TK Coleman calls it, “The lost art of processing”.  I don’t know if it’s been lost, or if it’s always been rare and the internet makes its absence more apparent.  Whatever the case, keeping your shit to yourself until you’ve worked through it is an unsung skill.

Transparency, failure-porn, mentors, community, and other ways to let it all hang out are uncritically praised.  An open culture is vastly superior to a closed one, and the trend favoring openness is a good thing society-wide.  But that doesn’t mean it’s a universal virtue on the individual level.

In fact, giving it five minutes, not giving up your power for attention, and learning to process your experiences and emotions in solitude may be a more important individual skill.  Real openness is better after you’ve done some inner work to sort through the mess.

You don’t always need immediate and public likes and support for every struggle.

You don’t always need a community with whom to share your innermost feelings.

You don’t always need a mentor or coach or guide.

All of the above are valuable, but their value is severely diminished unless and until you do the hard, quiet, thankless, individual work between you and your feelings.

It’s easy to see how valuable personal processing is when you’re required to do some before you take your struggles to the world.  At Praxis, our advisors do regular office hours, workshops, and sessions with participants on anything from improving websites, projects, pitches, or interviews to personal challenges and struggles of motivation.  When we added, “Send an email detailing the 1-3 specific things you want to cover” as a requirement for booking office hours, their value skyrocketed.  Just a little bit of pre-work before seeking external assistance goes a long way.

The share-it-with-someone knee-jerk reaction to hardship is often counter-productive.  It acts as a release valve, letting us blow off just enough steam and get just enough encouragement to forget the struggle and move on.  Meanwhile, the underlying system failure remains.

If your tendency is to bottle everything up inside and struggle with shame, this post isn’t for you.  Find someone you trust and get it out.  But if you find yourself immediately looking for a place to share every trial and triumph, learn to process first.  It pays dividends.  It’s not a bad thing to have layers to yourself deeper than what can be found on the internet.

A friend sent me some YouTube videos recently and I couldn’t get into it.  When the same guy from the videos came up again in a different context, from a different friend, I tried again, still to no avail.  Finally, yet another friend Tweeted a podcast episode with this same guy.  I tried one more time and I loved it.

I love podcasts.  Everything about the platform is superior to YouTube with the exception of shareability.  A good episode or soundbite is locked into the iTunes feed and the podcast experience is an isolated one, not a social one.  (Even this has some small benefits.)

I know a good many serious people who love to consume ideas via YouTube.  I don’t know how.  I hate YouTube as a way to consume ideas, unless they are ideas which can only be conveyed using video.  But lectures, monologues, interviews, books, soundbites, or podcasts…why would you ever go to YouTube for those?

It’s distracting with all the other stuff cluttering the screen, it requires more attention, it can’t be consumed on a walk, it has no organized, consistent system for moving from one to the next or tracking progress, and it’s hard to even stay on a single account without getting autoplayed to something unrelated.

Podcasts are so neat and tidy.  You subscribe, your feed autopopulates episodes in chronological order, you can see which you’ve listened to and where you left off, you can listen while doing other things and not staring at a screen, and you don’t have to contend with clutter, distraction, and randomness.  Oh, and mercifully, no comments.

[Both YouTube and Apple’s podcast platform suffer from horrible search functions (odd for YouTube, given that Google, the master of search, owns it.)  So bad that sometimes even typing in the title word for word fails to bring up the result you want.]

Besides congruence with my listening and cognitive tendencies, podcasts have another advantage.  If you go to YouTube to learn what kind of stuff Richard Dawkins, or Mike Rowe, or Ryan Holiday think, you’ll get all kinds of cut up videos with wild titles like, “Dawkins Totally Owns Evangelical Christian!”, and other loud sensationalism.  The message is mixed up, not by the medium of audio/video so much as the platform on which it’s delivered.

Search any of those names on a podcast app and you’ll find interviews where you get a chance to hear them flesh out a core idea, or maybe they have their own podcast where they create a broader arc around their body of work.

Maybe YouTube is for fans, while podcasts are for inquirers.  Or maybe I’m just boring.

I’m not being judgey or anti-YouTube.  It’s a great platform for tons of stuff and I love what it’s done ushering in the long tail model of content creation/consumption.  But I have noticed that if someone’s primary platform for consuming an idea is YouTube, they are more likely an activist or agitator or casual fan of the idea than if their main platform is a book, blog, or podcast.  Maybe YouTube is more for catharsis than exploration.  I have no idea.  All I know is that, if you want me to be able to quiet my mind enough to explore an idea, send me a book, article, or podcast.  Please don’t make me go to YouTube.

And never, ever, under any circumstances, read the comments on a YouTube video.

On a podcast interview, someone asked me how I make sure my work doesn’t harm my family life.  There’s something lurking in this question that I’d like to unearth and cast out.

Guilt is one of the worst shackles.  It takes away personal freedom and fulfillment and replaces it with bitterness and self-loathing, most of the time without detection.  It lurks always, and it’s easy to let it drive us to needless suffering and slavery.

I think questions about work-life balance are predicated upon a subtle, persistent guilt that permeates our culture and our ideas about work.

If it’s merely that work and family are two important areas of life that we’re trying to balance, you would expect to hear questions not only like the above, but also the reverse:

“How do you make sure family life is not harming your work?”

We never hear the question asked in that direction.  No one seems concerned about the person who ruins their career because they can’t say no to family, only the other extreme.

This reveals a strange feeling most people have about work.  They think it’s bad.  Family, or “life”, is an unquestioned good, while business or work are seen as dangerous, though perhaps necessary evils.

The unquestioned value ranking of work as the lowest thing on which to focus and family the highest means we feel guilty when we’re working.  Oh, and we also feel guilty when we’re watching Dora with the kids and secretly wish we were working.

This strikes me as a stupid situation all around.  This idea that you’re bad for liking what you like is dangerous and useless for anything but increasing the surface area from which you can be manipulated and made miserable.

I don’t like dividing up my life into work/family/fun etc.  I prefer to think of my overarching purpose or goal in life as the thing I’m always up to.  For me, it’s to live as free as possible, help others do the same, and enjoy the process.  Then I consider all my activities in light of how they help do this.

I also ask myself, in the words of Dan Sullivan, for whom I want to be a hero.  For me, it’s concentric circles, starting with myself (if I’m not proud of who I am, none of the rest matters), my wife, kids, Praxis teammates, customers, potential customers, and finally fellow travelers/readers/listeners.  In my pursuit of my mission, these are the people I care about.  So if something wins me tons of points with someone outside these groups, I ignore it unless it’s very low cost.  Or if something is valuable to fellow travelers but costly to family or team, I’m less likely to focus on it.  If something scores points with any of these, but makes me less proud of myself, I don’t do it.

Everything – from playing LEGO with my kids to running a workshop for Praxis – is part of my life mission, and the balance isn’t about work/life, but about who I’m being a hero to and whether it’s who I care about.

Not dividing things up into work/family is helpful in many ways.  Being a hero to my kids, for example, might not mean going to the park, it might mean growing the business or giving a talk or staying up late working on something meaningful to me.  They see who I am and what I do, and seeing me live a life I believe in is just as important as going for a bike ride with them.  In fact, if I’m bitter about the bike ride and really wish I was finishing that spreadsheet, it’s probably worse to model a life of unhappy obligation than to focus on what I think helps me live my mission best in every moment.

The point isn’t to define your life into separate segments and decide which is more important, the point is to stop framing life as a tug of war between things you value.  Instead, try to think of your core goals/values/missions/purposes, let everything from earning a paycheck to backyard BBQ’s tier up to those, and define who you most want to be a hero to so that you can ensure your activities aren’t chasing vanities but hitting your intended market.

I try to live my life in such a way that, if asked, I honestly can’t always tell whether I’m working or playing or doing family time or whatever else.  My goal is to always be doing something valuable to me, that moves me closer to who I want to be, and that creates value for the audiences I care about.  Sometimes it’s Play-Doh, sometimes it’s an email marketing campaign.  They don’t seem so different to me.  They’re both meaningful, fun, hard work.

Probably 80% of the time, advice-seeking is a way to avoid acting on what you already know.  Another 10% it’s seeking attention.  But the 10% of the time when you have a tight, clear, specific conundrum and a tight, clear, specific person whose take you value, it’s one of the most valuable things in the world.

The challenge is that it’s not always easy to identify which motivation is driving you.

I like browsing Quora and answering questions.  If you do, you’ll notice that many people ask bad questions.

It’s not that the content is bad, or the thing they’re trying to get at, it’s that many questions feel like no pre-work was done to drive them to the question.  Or the asker hasn’t considered the best way to get the information they want.  Or they have no idea what it is they want or why they’re asking the question.

Questions like this:

Should I become an engineer?
What can a startup do to succeed?
What’s the best career to have?

These questions are so vague and context-less that it’s hard to imagine really useful answers.  The questions are general questions about the world at large, rather than specific questions about the individual’s specific goals and challenges.  They don’t demand accountability, and they smack of searching for guarantees, off-the-hooks, or just dilly-dallying.

I was thinking about the importance of specific vs. vague questions the other day when someone found out I knew someone else and asked for an email intro.  I said sure at first, then when I went to draft the email, it felt incredibly burdensome and like I’d be burning a lot of social capital for unclear reasons.  I went back to the person and said, “I can intro you, but what specifically are you asking of the person?”  They told me they didn’t know, and I said come back when you do and I’ll do it.

I’ve been on the other end.  An email with a specific, relevant ask is not hard to answer.  “Can you tell me what software you use to record your podcast?” or “Where do I submit a guest post to the Praxis blog?” etc.  A generic ask is the worst.  It eats up so much mental space.  “Hey, we have a lot in common, here’s a bunch of info, we should connect”, or, “Meet person A, they’re really cool and think similarly to you.”

What can I do with that?

I’ve had the temptation to be really general myself.  When someone I respect opens a line of communication, I feel like I have to use it somehow!  But if I don’t have a real, clear, specific ask, it’s worse to keep the line open then to let it close.

Ask questions you really want an answer to, and make them clear, specific, concise, and contextual.

Most commenters on articles or social posts are not making arguments or offering objections. Most are playing out an emotional state from compulsion or for catharsis.

I saw an infuriating video of police arresting a nurse who refused to draw a patients blood at their request.

Comments on Twitter included a lot of, “Why are police so nasty and brutish?”, and most responses were, “They need better training and to be nicer.”

Nope.

The incentive structure dictates the result.  As Lord Acton said, power corrupts.  Put a good man in a role that requires him to do bad to succeed, or turn a blind eye when others do, and either you’ll attract only bad men or good men will become bad.

Police misconduct is ubiquitous not because they lack training.  It’s because they face no competition, have no threat of losing money or position, and don’t need to please customers.

Remember the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment?

Now imagine if the prisoners got to choose the guards among several groups?  Of course guards could choose whether they wish to offer services to the prisoners too.  Guards would only get compensation and maintain their role if chosen.  How would treatment change?  Guards would be competing with each other for the most humane experience.

It’s not that complicated.  Government services are always worse than everything else because they don’t have to earn customers money, they just take it.  Incentives are powerful.

Traditions emerge for a reason.  Society is impossible without them.  Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning.

But tradition can be tyrannical.  Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society.

So where’s the line?  When does tradition become tyranny?

I offer simple test for the tyranny of a tradition.  Does it rely on violence?  When those who would deviate from tradition are threatened with violence, or a tradition must initiate violence to sustain itself, it has become tyrannical.  The beneficial aspects of the tradition are now outweighed by the harm in its maintenance or expansion.

Imagine a deeply religious society, in which a strong tradition of weekly church attendance has emerged.  Whatever you think of this tradition, it’s not tyrannical so long as attendance is voluntary.  When that society begins to mandate church attendance, or prohibit other activities during services, the tradition has moved to the dark side and become tyrannical.

Some liberators come along to break the chains of the tradition-turned-tyranny.  They succeed in ending the use of violence to support religious activity.  In the process, they gain considerable power and social standing as leaders of the secular revolution.  In time, the tradition of churchgoing strengthens once again, and more and more people choose to attend.  The secular revolutionaries, now threatened by the peaceful emergence of the formerly deposed tradition, employ violence in repressing it.  Church attendance is illegal, in order to support their “liberal” aims.

This hypothetical illustrates that the tyranny of a tradition has nothing to do with the tradition itself, nor do the intentions of those who support or oppose tradition determine whether it’s tyrannical.  Again, when violence is relied upon to force a tradition – even if the tradition is the rejection of older traditions – it has become tyranny.

Transition into tyranny is not always so visible and obvious, because the state obfuscates violence.  In state legal codes or edicts, violence is slathered with noble intentions and shiny rhetoric, and the perpetrators are several steps removed from the advocates.

Traditions upheld by state violence are harder to identify, but they’re tyrannical nonetheless.  When money is forcibly extracted from people and used to subsidize a tradition, for example, it’s moving decidedly in the tyrannical direction.  It may be a small tyranny at first, but it’s tyranny.

Anything from educational traditions and institutions, norms around work, language, or movements in art, when they accept the succulent temptation of government largess,  cease to be noble traditions and become tyrannies.  Accepting the fruits of violence positions a tradition to rely on violence to maintain its power.  Ironically, the stronger the violence used to maintain a tradition, the weaker the tradition.  Strong traditions don’t need boots on necks to survive or spread.

If you advocate a tradition, resisting the temptation of the violent fruits dangled in front of you – whether state subsidy, mandate, or prohibition – is necessary for preventing its morph into tyranny.

So long as it’s poisoned with violent supports, it’s impossible to know the true worth of a tradition.

A great many good traditions have been turned tyrannical because they follow the allure of ill-gotten gains.

I love sports.  Football is my favorite to watch, and the NFL is my preferred league.

A lot of people sing the praises of “amateur” college football, where the NCAA and government funded schools ensure 18-21 year old players can risk their livelihoods forever but cannot make any money, while the institutions risk nothing an make millions.

It is fun to watch.  The talent disparity between teams and individual player is huge, but the emotional maturity is so low that anything can happen.  It can be wild and crazy.  I enjoy college football.

But nothing comes close to the NFL.  Because the talent is so, so much better than college, it means you can’t win on flukes, emotion, or raw athleticism.  It takes a higher degree of strategy, and especially psychological toughness, consistency, and chemistry.

I love the chess match of the NFL, and the mental challenge of the best players to rise above mere talent and become something more.

If you advocate free speech, free movement, freedom in exchange, and freedom to engage in any peaceful activity an individual desires, you will hear an objection.

“But surely there are limits!”

The most important limits are limits on violence.  Yet these are the limits most people show least concern with.  At the first fear of the results of freedom, most people are ready to sanction violent repression of peaceful behavior, via government edict.

The limits that deserve our attention are limits on coercion, not peaceful behavior we happen not to like.

Do you believe:

A) Governments need to determine if/when people need to develop skills in manufacturing, knowledge work, farming, etc. in order to ensure that individuals and the economy as a whole can prosper.

Or,

B) Self-interested individuals reacting to market incentives will do a better job of matching their skill/interest with what benefits them and the economy as a whole than a government effort to direct them.

If you chose B, congratulations.  You understand history and economic theory.

If you chose B, you ought also to have no trouble answering a similar question.

Do you believe:

A) Parents/teachers need to determine if/when children need to learn reading, writing, alegbra, chemistry, history, etc. in order to ensure that individuals and society as a whole can prosper.

Or,

B) Self-interested children reacting to market incentives will do a better job of matching their skill/interest with what benefits them and society as a whole than a top-down effort to direct them.

If your answer is B to the first but not the second, you have a very shaky set of assumptions.

On the one hand, you believe it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meat, but by his regard to his self-interest in a market context.  On the other hand, you believe that children have no regard for their self-interest and do not respond to market incentives so must be forced and directed to do what’s good for them and by extension society.

If this is true, at what point do humans suddenly begin responding to incentives?  This view would require an entirely new social science completely divorced from everything we know so far, and also divorced from observed reality.

If, as I believe, there is no difference and the answer to both is clearly B, we ought to stop worrying about compulsion and curricula and “normal” ages for reading, etc. etc. and let children do what we all do in the market: respond to incentives.  When it benefits them to learn something, they will.  In fact, they’ll do it in record time.  When it doesn’t, they’ll fight it all the way and countless hours will be spent trying to get them to do something they don’t value.

Turns out, markets work.  Everywhere.

Great leaps in understanding human behavior when economists asked,

“What if we assumed individuals in the market were rationally self-interested actors?”

Leaps extended when Public Choice theorists asked,

Logically and historically, society precedes the state.  That’s from one of my favorite thinkers, John Hasnas.

This simple fact calls into question some of our deepest assumptions about the social order.  It smashes the Hobbesian notion that man outside the state suffers a brutal existence, and only Leviathan can bring order to the chaos.  It casts doubt on the idea that, absent the state, civilized life is not possible.  Indeed, the relationship is the complete reverse.

My good friend Chris Nelson offered a modified version of this statement yesterday: logically and historically, the learner precedes the teacher.

Consider the things everyone assumes must be taught, often forcibly and formally, by a teacher.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the most common.  If, absent the authority, expertise, method, and compulsion of a teacher, no one would ever learn these things, how did they become known at all?  Unless the myths of gods coming down to teach humans are literally true (even then, who taught the gods?), people had to first be learners before they could be teachers.  The act of learning must have preceded that of teaching.

This presents problems for our assumptions about education.  Learning does not require teachers.  In fact, the opposite is true.

This does not make teaching worthless.  But it does reveal the direction of the dependency, which helps us put teaching in its proper place: as a response to an individual desire to learn in that specific way.  The learner comes first.  Their desire to learn a fact or method or subject is – must be – the first mover in order for genuine education to occur.  If that desire prompts them to seek formal or informal teachers, the teaching is valuable.  If teaching is imposed on unwilling learners, it’s the opposite of valuable.  It does violence to education.

The economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk described the capital structure of the economy and the prices of goods with the theory of imputation.  The value of a higher order production good is determined by the value of the end product to the consumer.  A bulldozer or factory floor’s value doesn’t come first, and then determine the price of the widgets at the end of the process.  (A good way to go out of business is to build something and then price it based entirely on what it cost to produce).  The value of those tools of production is imputed backwards through the production chain by the price customers are willing to pay for the end product.  If your widget is worth little or nothing to a customer, than no matter how cool your production tools, they won’t be valuable either.

It is usually assumed that knowledge flows from teachers to learners.  As explained above, this is not always the case.  In those instances where it is – where learners voluntarily seek teachers to satisfy their desire for knowledge – education is similar to the structure of production in the economy.  The value of a teacher – or a process, method, or credential – is imputed from the value to the learner, freely shopping around to choose the method of learning that helps them best.  If they don’t willingly choose the classroom or the teacher, the classroom and the teacher are not educationally valuable.