Some Praxis Reflections…

Sara Morrison, our Director of Operations at Praxis, recently reflected on her first year working with us in this awesome blog post.

It got me all nostalgiclike.  Plus, it’s fall, and something about the cold snap and smell of dead leaves always makes me reflective.

I realized just how much Praxis and the people involved change in a single year!  It feels like my life’s work, yet we’re only in our fourth year.

Sara is getting started on a summary report for 2017, something we like to do each year to remind ourselves all we’ve done.  I sent her the reports for 2014, 2015, and 2016, and I couldn’t resist flipping through them again myself.

Wow.

We’ve come a long way.

I won’t give any spoilers, but just wait until you see our 2017 report!  The growth, the product upgrades, and most of all the alumni and participant stories are off the charts from our humble beginnings.

And we’re just getting started.

For the curious…

2014 Praxis Year in Review
2015 Praxis Year in Review
2016 Praxis Year in Review

(Just wait for 2017…and 2018, ’19, and beyond!)

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The Thing About Experiments

Few things are more useful than an experimental approach to life.

It’s hard to adopt.  The thoroughly schooled mind makes it much harder.  Conditioning breeds a firmly tracked mind, where decisions are all treated with great weight, as if once-for-all.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“What’s your major?”

Etc.

Approaching opportunities as experiments, and even creating your own regular experiments in personal growth is a key to success.

But there’s a hitch.

When most people think “experiment”, they imagine sort of timidly dipping their toe in the water.  The Goldilocks approach of a dab of this, a smidge of that to see what suits me.

That might work at the buffet, but it won’t work with bigger stuff and professional opportunities.

Yes, treat everything not as your forever life path but as an experiment.  BUT, you can’t learn or gain or leverage an experiment into something awesome if you half-ass it.  You have to engage each experiment as if it is your one true calling.  Live it.  Own it.  Dive in head first.

Every job or project you do, go all in.  Be the best at it.  Become it.  Then when you find a new opportunity, quit and go all in on that!

You won’t find those new opportunities or learn from your experiments if you half-heartedly engage.

Don’t worry so much about whether something is the “right” thing.  If it looks interesting, experiment with it.  But REALLY experiment with it.  Work your butt off at it.  Be awesome at it.

That’s how you win an experiment and let it take you to the next cool thing.

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132 – Misfit Entrepreneurs with Dave Lukas

Dave Lukas is the Vice President and CSO of Grasp Technologies and the host of the Misfit Entrepreneur podcast. Dave grew up in an entrepreneurial family, and from a young age he was creating small businesses and finding opportunities to create businesses. That entrepreneurial spark has stuck with him as he built a great career and now a thriving company.

On the Misfit Entrepreneur Podcast, Dave interviews top entrepreneurs and explores their non-traditional methods for achieving success.

In this episode, Isaac and Dave follow along with Dave’s entrepreneurial journey from selling flags on Independence day as a five-year-old to selling Cutco Knives in college to becoming VP and CSO of Grasp Technologies.

If you’re young and interested in starting a business there is a ton to learn from Dave’s story.

Topics Covered: 

  • Dave’s entrepreneurial start as a five-year-old
  • Does having kids change the way you see the world as an entrepreneur?
  • Selling Cutco knives
  • Going to work for a Fortune 500 business
  • The value of working sales for an aspiring entrepreneur
  • Starting a business while working a full-time job
  • Deciding to start Misfit Entrepreneur
  • The Misfit Three

Links: 

If you are a fan of the show, make sure to leave a review on iTunes.

All episodes of the Isaac Morehouse Podcast are available on SoundCloudiTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher

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Reputation > Resume

What truly matters for attracting opportunities is your reputation. Your connections, friends, coworkers, and customers who know the type of work you do.

So many young people obsess over making a good looking resume—they go for impressive sounding internships and seek out volunteer experience. This might help with getting through gatekeepers in big companies. But what is a much stronger use of time and energy is building your reputation.

Doing great work, no matter what you do, and then sharing it. Talking to your customers, sharing on social media about what you love about your work, and impressesing your coworkers by kicking ass at your job.

Check out the new episode of Forward Tilt now on iTunesYouTubedirect download and all major podcast platforms.

In This Episode:

  • No one has ever been hired for their resume
  • Why so many jobs go to people who know people at the company
  • Doing your current job exceptionally well is the best way to find new opportunities
  • Talking about what you love about your job
  • Build your reputation, don’t worry about your resume

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

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Wanted: Email Masters

One of the most valuable and least heralded skills is email mastery.

The subtle art of email jiu-jitsu has powers hard to exaggerate.  Most people suck at email.

There are so many valuable email skills: How to reduce an exchange to the fewest possible back and forths, how to make a single, clear, compelling ask, how to convey proper tone, how to nudge, create urgency, yet not push away.  How to email people busier than you and less busy; more connected than you and less; people you want to do a favor for and those you want to do favors for you.  How to revive and email thread.  How to exit an email thread.  How to start a conversation and how to end one.  How to make and respond to email intros.  Emailing when you hold the cards and when you don’t.  Hammering down next steps when multiple parties continue to exchange without getting to an action item. Complaint emails, praise emails, inquiring emails, encouraging emails, fire-under-the-ass emails, etc. etc.

These are some of the most important abilities in any kind of business.

They can’t be taught.

You can practice them, and you can be shown and included in examples from email masters.

But it begins with taking email seriously.  Until I see otherwise, email is far and away the most important medium in the professional world.  Everything else pales in comparison, and lacks the versatility and power.

Get good at email.

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It’s Times Like This That Make Me Love ‘Merica

I’m stuck in a low-grade hotel in Corbin, KY.  The coffee tastes like burnt water.  But it’s free.  So is the surprisingly fast WiFi.

Corbin, I discovered from a roadside sign, is the home of “Colonel” Harlan Sanders and his famous fried chicken.  The town makes quite a celebration of the fact.

I love it.

How cool is it that a guy born in 1890 who built a restaurant chain that sells one of the humblest foods imaginable is honored like royalty?  Don’t get me wrong, he was a total baller.  He was the closest free-markets get to royalty; someone who created tons of wealth by making other people happy.

Most honorifics are reserved for pompous, often murderous asshole politicians.  I don’t know anything about the Colonel’s personality or integrity as a man, but I know he sold a ton of tasty, cheap chicken.  I prefer monuments to that over anything any politician ever did, every day of the week.

Oh, and I found this to add icing to the Americana cake…apparently someone in real life dressed up like the Colonel and pretended to beat up someone who dressed up like a chicken…and people paid to watch it.

It’s enough to give you chills.

via GIPHY

*Double bonus!

I flipped on the hotel TV, and after finally figuring out how to exit the hotel promo channel, stumbled upon the classic film, “The Waterboy”, right at the scene when Adam Sandler’s character screeches like a wild pig and tackles a professor that he calls “Colonel Sanders”.  Coincidence, or fate?

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I’ll Never Make a Book List Again

Yesterday, I published a list of some books that have provided useful mental models.

It was a huge mistake.

I edited it at least six times after publishing, and felt stress ever since, even waking up at night thinking of titles I forgot, or knowing there are still more I forgot that I forgot.

It feels wrong and inaccurate an unfair to post an incomplete list. But a complete list is not possible.

I’m done trying to document all the great books. I’ll just reference them individually when they come to mind.

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Some Books that Have Expanded My Mental Toolkit

The Inner Game of Tennis

The Act of creation

‘Till We Have Faces

Finite and Infinite Games

Breaking Smart Season 1

The Great Divorce

Paradise Lost

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Human Action

The Gervais Principle

That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen

The Optimistic Child

Punished by Reward

Dumbing us Down

A Timeless Way of Building

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Free to Learn

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

Flatland

Zero to One

The Scapegoat

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Future and Its Enemies

A Conflict of Visions

Theory and History

Abundance

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Principles of Economics

A Renegade History of The U.S.

Beyond Politics

The Not So Wild, Wild West

The Fourth Dimension

A Secret History of the World

The Myth of a Christian Nation

That Hideous Strength

The Book of the Dun Cow

Siddhartha

The Ultimate Resource

The Most Dangerous Superstition

Crisis & Leviathan

The Divine Conspiracy

Outwitting the Devil

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A Profoundly Optimistic Statement

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

That is an incredibly optimistic statement.

The sophomoric reading is that you are a bad person who should feel bad.  There is little optimism there.  To better appreciate what this statement can do for you, consider it in light of another Biblical statement,

Have I not said ye are Gods?

You fall short of your own potential.  In other words, “All have sinned” is an acknowledgement of the simple fact that you are not who you want to be and who you are capable of being.  The optimism is the possibility nested in this statement; that improvement toward your divine potential is possible.

It needn’t be read religiously if that distracts you.  Your own divinity can mean simply your ideal version of yourself; the best you can imagine being and desire to become.

If you have godlike potential and want to move toward the ideal form of the person you want to be, you must begin by acknowledging you are not there.  Progress requires discontentment with your current condition.  Then you can move to the optimism that says, “Which is precisely why I am constantly taking action to move towards what I am not yet.”  To see the possibility of your future potential requires accepting your current distance from it.

In Christian language, this is the process of salvation.  You could call it self-improvement, enlightenment, or progress if you like.

The first instinct is to think “Ye are Gods” is the optimistic statement, but it’s not.

It forces you to confront the reality of your own lack of divinity.  The fact that you can imagine a self better than who you currently are reveals inescapably that you are not yet Godlike.  “Ye are Gods” by itself can cause cynicism or depression: either the statement is a delusional sham because I can see I’m not Godlike, or I’m a sham for my failure to be so.

Hope is found in first owning the fact that you fall short of your potential and desire.  This leads to the discontentment necessary to drive action and the optimism that action can move you closer.

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How to Win

Create value for your customers before they’re your customers.

Create value for your customers when they are your customers.

Create value for your customers after they are your customers.

Who are your customers? Anyone with whom you want to exchange anything.

What if you have no identifiable customers?

You are your first and last customer. Create value for yourself every day.

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Office Hours: Asking for a Raise and More

This week on Office Hours, we talk about the power of daily challenges and answer four listener questions:

  • How do I get a job after a failed startup?
  • How do you answer a question about weaknesses in an interview?
  • I’ve been at my job for three years and my boss has never brought up a raise, is this bad?
  • I have so much to do and I feel overwhelmed and don’t get started. How do I start working towards my goals?

Check out the new episode of Office Hours now on iTunesYouTubedirect download and all major podcast platforms.

Topics Covered: 

  • Non-zero days
  • Daily challenges vs. a big end goal
  • Going from a startup failure to finding a job
  • What are employers looking for when they ask applicants about interviews
  • “Learning is the process of doing what you don’t know how to do, while you don’t know how to do it”
  • Do you really want to ask for a raise?
  • Taking responsibility for assessing your own worth in a job
  • Getting overwhelmed by wanting to do too many things
  • “What you choose and how you do it matter a lot less than that you choose and that you do it.”
  • Hypothetical overwhelm

Links: 

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