When I’m driving, I sometimes imagine individuals from various points in human history riding with me as we listen to the radio. I think about the songs, lyrics, even ads, and consider what kind of conversations and reactions they would generate from a person from medieval England or turn of the century America.
What would Bach think of The Black Keys? What would a farmer or slave in the new world think of modern blues and folk? What would a chariot driver think of going 70 on the highway?
I’ve played this mental game as long as I can remember. Sometimes it gets so exciting I feel genuine pain that I can’t transport someone from the past to experience the present.
Peter Leeson is a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, known for his work applying rational choice theory to unusual rituals and superstitions, piracy, and anarchy.
His most recent book WTF?! an Economic Tour of the Weird, dives into some of the strangest rituals and events around the world and explains them using rational choice theory.
In the face of the mainstream popularity of behavioral economics claiming humans are irrational, Peter looks at some of the bizarre, weird, unexplainable, and crazy parts of societies around the world and uses clear economic thinking to explain the logic and rationality behind them.
In this episode, Isaac and Peter dive into some weird examples covered in the book and then some frustrating and confusing behavior from the world around us like the price of razors, or why people speed up when you go to pass them on the highway.
Moved from one house to the next in the same neighborhood. Night and day difference. Never underestimate the importance of the direction light comes into the house.
In the startup world, an unspoken hostility exist towards having a family life while trying to grow startups. What’s your advice for how to go about doing both?
Well the first thing is to not worry about unspoken hostilities.
In general, just focus on your startup when it comes to investors, employees, etc. If what you’re doing makes sense and you’re getting traction, they won’t much care what you do outside of work.
If someone pushes or asks, own it. You can say, “It might be harder to do this with a family than without, I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier. I don’t really care. I’m doing it with a family and it’s going to succeed!”
I once heard someone say that if you want to be in startups, you get to pick two items from this list:
Your company
Social life/hobbies
Family/love life
You can’t put energy into all three.
I fully believe this, and I’ve come to believe the trilemma goes further still…
It’s not just that you get to pick two, you have to pick two if you want to succeed.
That is, if you have absolutely nothing outside of your startup, you are likely to burnout, go insane, become a tyrant, lose heart, lose perspective, and lose your edge easier and sooner than if you have one other thing to ground you.
With a family, you’re at an advantage! You have no other hobbies or distracting flim-flam. You have your business and your family. Outside the company, you have but one incredibly powerful, grounding, perspective-granting, efficiency-rewarding, bullshit-cutting, incentive-setting thing that will make every minute you spend on your startup more valuable, and demand that you step outside of it every so often.
Bottom line, startups are really, really hard. There are always going to be challenges unique to you, or reasons you or others think you won’t succeed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a family, a hobby, a personality, a missing skill set, lack of capital, or anything else. Those are the obstacles that prevent everyone else from doing what you’re going to do.
At Praxis, we have an all-remote team, work happening nearly every hour of every day, rapid communication, high expectations, and bend-over-backwards customer service.
We are all pretty independent, confident, and unafraid of conflict. We debate and discuss a lot of stuff, and have little patience for poor performance, delay, bureaucracy, or make-work. We’re competitive, we want to win, and we’re trying to grow every day.
This is a great recipe for startup growth. It’s also a great recipe for stress, misunderstanding, frustration, and tension.
To date, the greatest tool to relieve potentially contentious situations and re-frame things with proper focus is a movie reference.
Slack, Voxer, Zoom, email. Doesn’t matter the platform. When we’re deep in work discussions, a clever, well-timed movie reference always makes everything better. I can’t think of an exception.
Someone finds out another team member was already working on a project they’d been grinding on themselves without telling them? Everyone’s a little miffed, but there’s only one way to reset the mood and restore a proper, productive pace…
Sometimes, I ask two team members to work together to handle something where it might be quicker for just one. A little annoyance at being pulled into an unexpected task can fester and harm culture. But who could let it if it’s followed by this?
I can’t tell you how many times movie or TV references have bolstered morale, broken tension with a laugh, or re-aligned the narrative in a productive way when it could have gone subtly south (and sometimes inspired a mini YouTube binge session…maybe not great for productivity, but good for fun!)
The only things that come close to the power of movie and TV references for the health of the Praxis team are NBA references.
(Hip-hop references appear sometimes too, but those usually require a higher level of background knowledge and aren’t as universal).
I have a lot of conversations like that with young people. They have some ill-defined desires and fears, and they feel pressure to choose a destiny or at least provide a ready answer when someone asks, “What are you doing?” The resolution comes from a label.
Pick from a handful of standard labels deemed understandable and acceptable, and voila! You don’t need to stress so much about who you are and what you want. It might even provide a superficial sense of belonging to a label group. “Marketing”, “Creative stuff”, “Hospitality”, “Outdoors”, “Media”, “Entrepreneurship”, and a few other labels get tossed around.
But these labels make self-knowledge harder, not easier. They provide the illusion of self-knowledge and direction, and distract from the fact that they have no substance. When you ask, “OK, marketing. What kinds of specific activities do you want to do for people?” the illusion crumbles. The dawning realization that, despite the label (partly because of it), you have no idea what you mean by it or what you want.
Same goes for lifestyle labels like, “Travel”, “Remote work”, “Passive income”, “Work I’m passionate about”, “Social entrepreneurship”. No one is hiring any of those. People are paying money to get specific problems solved that are valuable to them. Which problems do you plan to solve? How will you leverage your skill in solving those problems into a lifestyle you want?
It’s better to eschew labels altogether until you have a lot of clear self-knowledge. When you don’t, they stymie the process of getting it and lure you into thinking the label provides meaning. It doesn’t.
Once you have a good deal of self-knowledge and self-honesty, labels can be handy tools to use when communicating to others. Don’t confuse them with your true identity, but at a cocktail party, it’s nice to have to shorten an uninteresting conversation. I thought I’d have more to say on the usefulness aspect, but I guess that’s it.
The fewer shiny objects that attract your attention, the better.
To be sure, some of those shiny objects turn out to be awesome, big wins. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll find you if you do your work. If you keep scanning the horizon to find and chase them, you’ll never get work done, so even if you catch one you won’t be able to take advantage.
Just do the day’s work, then move on to the next day’s work again and again and again. Never stop, never die.
The compounding effect of making yourself better every day and shipping something will lead to more shiny objects than you could ever hope to amass by chasing them.
Getting ready to move next week. Boxing up my books is a delightful task.
I’m a minimalist and throw away almost everything. Except books. I have a rule for them. If it’s a book I’ll read, or if I’ve read it, good enough to read a second time, I keep it. If it’s a one and done, I toss it. I’ve gotten rid of more books then I’ve kept, still, I have quite a collection. Probably 600-700 books.
I probably won’t read most of them a second time. But I love their presence.
I arrange my books in chronological order on my intellectual journey. It serves as a physical timeline of my mental and spiritual growth.
Just being in the presence of the books that helped shape my thinking does something. It reminds me of the ideas and fills me with a sliver of the magic and illumination I had when I read them.
If I never pick them up a second time, they still make my life better as living furniture.
“My goal is to obtain a job in the marketing department for a tech startup. I really hate college and it costs so much, but I’ve gotta finish my major to get the job.”
No you don’t. Here’s that exact job right here. It already pays more than average college grads make and you can start immediately.
“Oh wow, that is such a great opportunity. Unfortunately, I’ve got to finish four years of college and hope to get that same job then!”
The above is not an exaggeration. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had variations on this conversation at Praxis with young people exploring their options.
It always reminds me of the scene at the end of Dumb & Dumber, where Lloyd and Harry are destitute and a busload of super models rolls up…
I don’t know about Lloyd and Harry, but I’ve come to a realization about what’s going on in the cases of young people.
They don’t want their stated goal.
Well, they do, but not as much as they want something else. All else equal, they’d like that job. But if getting the job meant owning their decisions and being held responsible for their success and failure, they’d rather pass. What they want above all is to maintain the illusion that they are not responsible for the outcomes in their life. They want to avoid the fact of their own agency.
The reality is, every individual has inescapable agency. But oh how hard we work to persist in the illusion that we don’t!
If you follow the dominant path, those around you will support the illusion that you’re not really responsible for your life. Stay in school, though you hate it and know it’s a waste. Get the degree. If you fail to find a job, those around you will say you did the right thing; indeed, you did all you could! Good for you sticking it out! But the economy or some other external force just happened to make things tough on you.
No one will judge your mediocrity or unhappiness harshly if you do the things everyone wants and expects of you.
But if you break the mold and go your own way, watch out. The illusion that you lack agency will be shattered. Those around you will hold you accountable for every outcome in your life. “I told you you never should have moved away/started a company/opted-out of school!” You won’t be able to absolve yourself, or meld meaninglessly into the phony blob of collective responsibility. You will be fully aware that you own you.
Good.
The lie is poisonous.
The sooner you can strip away the things that make the illusion of lack of agency easy, the better.
It starts with self-honesty. “My parents won’t let me do this, so I can’t” is a lie. The truth may be something like, “I want to do this but I’m unwilling to unless my parents keep funding my life.” The sooner you can admit to yourself what you’re really going after, the better. Often, examination reveals that you’re going after nothing deeper than prestige and external approval. You’re likely to be (rightly) disgusted by this revelation. That’s the beginning of finding something deeper to pursue and owning your decisions.
Don’t choose the path that brings least scrutiny and maintains the illusion of external control. Choose the path that awakens you to the inescapable fact of your own agency.
Whether you’re running a business, producing a podcast, selling a book, or writing for a blog, here’s a weird paradox:
Audience stats are more helpful when they’re more boring.
If something you do takes off and “goes viral”, that’s when you’re most tempted to watch the numbers like a hawk. It’s also when those numbers are the most dangerous. They can lead you astray, cause false conclusions, and most of all, mess with your psychological and emotional wiring by getting you hooked on the dopamine hit of lots of attention and traffic. Sure, you can learn from the data in high times, but it’s better to look back on the spikes a little later than risk getting pulled in during the frenzy and forgetting to keep your head down and do the work.
If something crashes and you take a massive dip, that’s also a time to discount the data and delay the deep-dive a bit. It can induce panic, fear, bad judgement, and depression too easily. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to gain or that you should put your head in the sand, but again, you can’t let the bad news keep you from doing the work that day and the next.
When things seem business as usual; a steady flow of attention without a lot of spikes or dips, that’s when data are often the best to assess. Dive deep and try to understand the source and insight into your audience. Look back to previous highs and lows and compare to the steady times. Imagine future dips or spikes and what might cause or prevent them.
The world of instant access to attention stats is amazing and allows for to-the-second agile adjustment…but this is dangerous for emotional attention-seeking creatures too.
When really high or really low, tune it out a bit and focus on the work. When the data are boring, dig in and learn a much as possible. It’s the opposite of what the gut wants, but helps a lot if you can do it!
Peter Leeson is no stranger to explorations and explanations of bizarre behavior, nor to making the power of rational choice theory and economic thinking accessible to laypeople. His academic papers on odd rituals and his books like “The Invisible Hook” do a bang-up job of both.
As far as content, the book combines eight real world behaviors that make you say “WTF?!”, derived from Leeson’s research and published papers. Everything from shaking a poisoned chicken to settle a slight, to convicting insects and rodents of crimes in a court of law are examined, revealing sensible, even brilliant logic. The theme over and again is simple but profound: given the constraints (beliefs, resources, etc.) they face, people behave in rational ways to seek their ends. Yes, trial by combat and wife sales are rational actions in context.
But what makes the content in WTF?! really stand out is the form. Leeson’s academic work is accessible, but this book is downright fun. It’s like Ripley’s Believe it Or Not; enjoyable as much for entertainment as enlightenment. Acting as a tour guide, Leeson describes strange phenomena and their rationale, while engaging colorful characters on the tour who ask many of the questions readers are thinking. The guide pokes fun at them, and himself, shares barbs and insults, and connects to stories from his own childhood.
You don’t need to care one bit about economics or social theory to enjoy this book. Conversely, if you hate fun and frivolity and care only for social science, you’ll find serious economic theory in WTF?!
If you don’t find the world more fascinating and enjoyable, and people more ingenious and clever, after reading WTF?!, something might be wrong with you!
Whether its a church, a workplace, or a college campus, the status you have in any small setting is different than your status in a larger context.
It is easy to forget that though and get stressed about your lack of status in a specific environment. This is especially common for young people at school and at work. They get wrapped up in small games to win favor in small contexts, even when it comes at the expense of their long-term goals.
It’s important to remember the world outside of your workplace, school, or community so that you can decide to win influence when it serves your long-term goals and avoid the game entirely when it doesn’t.
This week on Office Hours, TK and Isaac discuss contextual currency and answer your questions about relationships and relationships to work.
1) “How do I find smart friends?”
2) “How can I become more of a self-starter at my job?”
3) “How do I respond when my employer makes me do something that isn’t my responsibility?”
Check out the new episode of Office Hours now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.
