Month: November 2017

I love escapism.

But there’s a good kind and a bad kind.

The good kind is when you escape from a narrow world into a broader one.  You allow your mind to take you where your body, for whatever reason, cannot go.  You refuse to accept the shackles of external circumstance and exogenous suffering, and you cultivate freedom and adventure in your own heart.

The bad kind is when you escape from the possibility of a broader world into a narrower, “safer” one.  You live in your mind as a way to avoid taking the difficult action your body could.  You refuse to acknowledge that your shackles are the result of internal issues and self-imposed suffering, and you feed delusion and distraction in your heart.

The first kind helps us ascend the pain of this world.

The second kind prevents us from doing the hard work necessary to grow.

Escaping pain outside your domain of control is elevating.  Escaping the pain inherent in self-betterment is debasing.

Most of the time, the simplest answer is correct.  No need to overcomplicate, especially when it delays action.

But there’s an internal sleight of hand where “simple” gets swapped with “easy”.

A simple answer is one that doesn’t require mental gymnastics to understand.  An easy answer is one that doesn’t cause discomfort or challenge.

Let’s say you create a product no one buys.  The simple answer is that people don’t value it.  But that’s also a hard answer.  The easy answer is that people are idiots who don’t know good stuff when it smacks the in the face, or that big companies stack the deck in their favor and you can’t possibly compete, or that Facebook’s algorithm is unfairly punishing you, or that if you only had the advantages of others you’d succeed, or…

I’m incredibly bullish on simple answers.  I try to reduce all answers to their simplest form as quickly as possible.  Simple is cold, clarifying, and enables understanding and action.

I’m incredibly wary of easy answers.  Their siren song is powerful, and can lull me into a flabby stupor, mumbling about and blaming all the things that stroke my ego and feed vices like envy and anger.

Easy answers are all around us.  They constitute most of what passes for discussion on social media.  New iPhone price is really high?  Easy.  Greed.  Stock market lagging?  Easy.  Politician you don’t like.  Celebrity tweeted something offensive?  Easy.  They’re a braindead lowlife and you just need to re-enforce your rage with a quick mention.

Not only can easy answers obscure the truth and muddy clear thinking, not only do they feed dangerous and regressive emotions, not only can they create volatile moblike groupthink, they’re also boring.  They tend to lead to less fun, enlightenment, and playful encounter with the ideas and people that populate the world.

What if there’s something more?  What if you weren’t allowed to take the easy route?  What if you had to assume rational choice and charitable interpretation?  What else might be going on?

The world begins to unfold in amazing ways.  New mental models become possible.  Easy answers start to look startlingly complex compared to the simple, but harder to swallow truth.

If it feels easy, time for a gut-check.  Look for simple, not just easy.

It’s the small stuff.

I’ve never been good at massive, long-focused, epic tasks.  I’m impatient, bore easily, and prefer ‘done’ to perfect.

I’m restless too, and easily discontented.  I’m a fan of discontentment in general (see here), but in a given day, it’s hard to get as much good work done if you’re unsettled from the word ‘go’.

These traits combine to create a useful pattern.  I need to notch something meaningful off the list to begin a day, but it can’t be too big.  That’s why daily blogging works best when I do it in the morning, before checking my phone or any other major cognitive input.  Just sit down, face the blank screen, and hammer out a post.

Clicking “publish” is like shooting myself out of the gate.

And I’m telling you, this little good feeling – writer’s high I guess – makes a massive difference to the rest of my day.  Massive.

It’s not just writing.  There are several ways to get that small feeling of accomplishment when the day’s starting to suck.  Just getting some work done, anything small and complete-able, pops me out of the doldrums and turns the jets on.

Minds are complex things.  Too complex for their owners sometimes.  We don’t always know how to get to the bottom of our frustrations, anxieties, fears, depression, or listlessness.  The harder the conscious mind tries to unearth its subconscious sibling, the deeper the disconnection from good feelings gets.

Ignoring analysis and getting some tasks done is better for short-term happiness and long-term discovery, nine times out of ten.

If you’re in a funk, forget the big gnarly psychological obstacles and just finish some small work to get that little good feeling.  The rest tends to take care of itself.

Do the stuff you feel in your gut.  Do it well.  Do it all the way.  Do it every day.

Let the data say what they say.

I love Bitcoin and all things crypto/blockchain.

One of the most amazing things is happening before our eyes.  Not just a new form of money, contract, and digital scarcity, but a new process of solving disputes.

Bitcoin split into two different versions back in August, after years of debate between insider experts, outsider novices, businesses, hobbyists, tech-types, ideological types, investor types, and everyone else you can imagine.

From the outside, the fight looked chaotic, confusing, sometimes childish.  The hard fork appeared like the ultimate failure of “civil discourse”.  Good.

A failure for one-size fits all zero-sum decision processes is a win for Bitcoin and the world at large.

Consensus or majority agreement aren’t needed in the market.  Choice and open process are.  They allow the best problem solvers to outlive the less valuable.  No one needs to “win” a debate.  They just need to please customers.

Currently, both forks appear to be viable technologies.  Much is to be determined for their respective futures, but this much is certain: open-source, decentralized blockchain tech and the forking it allows is a massive winner over stupid, corrupt political processes.

I love it.

There has been a trend recently of popular content creators online talking about how there are too many blogs, too many podcasts, and the world doesn’t need more.

Apart from the obvious irony, they miss the most important value creators get from creating content. Sure there is a chance to grow an audience and monetize it, but much more powerful is the learning, signaling, and social capital value that you get from consistently creating content.

Check out the new episode of Forward Tilt now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

Discussed in this episode:

• The amount of content on the internet is doubling each year
• Three values to creating and sharing content online.
• Creating to learn
• Creating to signal
• Creating to build social capital

For a free copy of Forward Tilt: An Almanac for Personal Growth go to discoverpraxis.com/forwardtilt

A Praxis participant recently asked what to do if you feel you’re putting too much pressure on yourself to succeed.

This isn’t the only or full answer, but the first thing that came to mind was this pressure-relieving technique that unleashes “self two” (to borrow from the book The Inner Game of Tennis) to achieve without desperation:

First I make my peace with failure. I envision and accept the worst possible outcome until I feel fine about it.

Then I push myself to achieve the best possible outcome with everything I’ve got, never satisfied.

Feels like playing with house money. I can be relentlessly discontent with anything less than perfection while already having made my peace with failure.

A longish series of blog posts has been turned into a book!

Buy it.  You know you want to.

11 Lessons from Bootstrapping a Non-Tech Startup

Be the best employee at your current job.

Seriously.

If you half-ass one opportunity, no one will want to hire you for another.

Don’t stress that your current work isn’t your life’s dream.  (Nothing will be, because it shifts and changes all the time).  You won’t get stuck there if you’re so good everyone notices and wants to hire you elsewhere!

Me and TK take on this and a few other career and life questions in today’s episode of Office Hours.

Check it out.

Last year, the Detroit Lions broke an NFL record.  Of their 9 wins, 8 were fourth quarter comebacks.

They just kept making epic comebacks an delivering in the clutch.

Much praise was (rightly) heaped on the team, and QB Matt Stafford.  No matter the spot, Stafford worked magic and pulled a win out of the hat.  His skill delivered.

It was fun to watch as a fan, but it also revealed a major flaw.  You don’t win Super Bowls (or even playoff games) with magic fixes.  You win them by being the kind of team that doesn’t need magic…at least not every week.

Building a business is like this.  The problem with all-nighters and trench warfare to pull victory from the jaws of defeat is that it doesn’t produce consistency or scale.  The real growth curve starts when you can turn magic into a system.

The book, “The E-Myth” is sort of a classic blueprint for how a small business can turn into an empire by taking what they do best – and what the founders and leaders do best – and turning it into a system.

It’s the Bill Belichikification of business.

If you don’t know anything about coach Belichick and his New England Patriots, you’ve been sleeping under a rock and need to wake up.  They are a winning machine.  Sure, they get great play out of amazing players like Tom Brady, and they enjoy a little magic once in a while.  They’ve also lost two Super Bowls at the hands of pure, unsystematic magic.

Then again, they’ve been seven times and won five of them in a decade and a half.  An unprecedented feat in a sport with massive incentives to keep teams equal.

They have less raw talent and fewer high draft picks on their roster than anyone.  But it doesn’t matter.  They don’t need magic talent or magic plays.  They have a system that has turned magic into a repeatable, scalable process.

It feels good to get a big win.  When you jump on the field of battle and slay the dragon with great aplomb everybody feels great.  Every so often, it’s needed.  But what kind of Kingdom is so situated as to face dragons only the great Knights can defeat every single day, week, or month?

Turning an all-star, magical performer into a system is the real alchemy.

At Praxis, our team is amazing.  They perform unreal feats daily, and overdeliver in the clutch for customers and business partners all the time.  That’s a constant source of excitement and concern for me.  I want them to win, but I don’t want company success dependent on individual magic.  I want magic baked into the very bones of the place.

When you perform magic for the win, take a minute to enjoy.  Then step back and ask what made it possible, and how you could achieve the same results, or even avoid the necessity for magical intervention, by building a system that embodies those traits day in day out without even thinking about it.

I’m like a kid in a candy store when it comes to the burgeoning world of cryptocurrency.

One of the coolest parts is the ease with which crypto enables markets in areas previously difficult to monetize.  True, many of these applications don’t technically necessitate the blockchain, but it makes them easier and faster in many cases. (Plus, “tokenizing” things just feels kinda fun).

Micropayments alone – the ability to exchange fractions of a cent since fees are so low – open a world of possibility.  Ideas I’ve dreamed about are being launched and beta tested now.  Things like paying people to open/respond to emails, paying to post/share/comment on content or getting paid for the same, paying sites you visit directly instead of paying in the form of suffering through ads that lag pages and are generally terrible, etc.

Really, there are already markets in all these things, they’re just less efficient because they have to ration with things like time, availability, and random luck.  Monetizing these markets means gaps between supply and demand can adjust faster for more value all around.  If you can put a price on something, you can make it more efficient!

If you want to test a few of these out, you can check out Yours.org, a content platform I’ve been playing with and posting to.  Or you can email me via Earn, where a $1 payment guarantees a response (I normally respond anyway, but fun to play with this).

Who knows which versions of these applications will succeed and in what ways, but there’s no denying that markets in everything are getting better every day!

Parents: don’t contact employers to put in a good word or fight for your kids to get a job. You’ll decrease their chances of getting that job and every other job.

Young people: don’t let your parents contact employers to put in a word for you or to complain if you don’t get the gig.

People want to hire you, not your family.

In this episode, TK and Isaac break down three common professional challenges–how to talk with your employer about the salary you want, sending follow-up emails, and the professional way to move on from a job.

Questions:

• My employer wants to hire me full time and is asking me for a salary requirement, how do I answer?
• I have two podcast guests, that have agreed to interviews, but aren’t following up on my messages about scheduling, should I take the hint, or keep following up?
• I’m not satisfied with my job and I plan on leaving as soon as I find a better opportunity. Since I know I’m ready to move on, I was set to inform my employer of my plans. Do you think that is the best way? Is it unprofessional to tell your employer that you’re leaving?

Check out the new episode of Office Hours now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

Topics Discussed:

• Learning Spanish
• Working out loud
• Why are people only afraid to share learning stories and success stories
• How to answer a question about your ralary requirement
• Following up to get what you want
• How to leave your job in a professional manner
• Thinking about how you want to tell your story when you are making decisions
• Making the transition as easy as possible for your employer when you leave