Month: December 2017

One of my favorite books of all time, and a rather obscure one…

Here’s this week’s selection over at Yours.org!

(PS – setup a Yours account if you like to blog.  It’s a really fun experiment in micropayments and an easy way to play around with cryptocurrency.)

Ever since my colleague at Praxis, Chuck Grimmett, setup an RSS feed for the 120+ Praxis participant and alumni blogs, I’ve had a steady stream of great posts each day.

Here are a few of my favorites over the past week:

The best story in the world that no one’s ever heard – Byron Chiado

How to exploit being (or looking) young – James Walpole

Being remembered isn’t worth it – Ryan Ferguson

Why businesses hire – Ryan Ferguson

Go long on yourself!

I wrote two posts for the Praxis blog today (scheduled to go up there over next week), so I’m not going to pen a third here today.  Ain’t nobody got time be be writing three blog posts in a day!

I found this written in a notebook of mine from fourteen years ago,

Reality is the sum of people’s dreams.  By putting your dreams into the equation, you will increase the value and magnitude of reality.

It sounds fluffy at first, like it needs to be superimposed on a picture of a rainbow.  But there’s nothing far-fetched or silly about it when you think on it.

Every creation in your world, from your iPhone to your T-shirt, to your coffee grounds, to that song on Spotify, is the result of someone’s idea or dream.  There’s a Latin phrase I love,

Agere sequiter credere

It means, roughly, “Action follows belief.”  This isn’t aspirational, it’s a logical necessity, baked into the structure of reality.  My favorite economist, Ludwig von Mises, defines the preconditions for all purposeful action:

• Discontentment with one’s present state
• A vision of something better
• Belief in the ability to get there

Every element of our experience – from norms and traditions, to languages and laws, to eggs and bacon – came about as a result of discontentment, vision (or dream), and belief.  Someone had to dream of crossing an ocean as a precondition to building a ship.  The city your were born in is likely one outgrowth of that dream.

In a very real sense, reality is the sum of people’s dreams.  In a very real sense, when you expand yours, and have the boldness to pursue them, you add them to the sum and expand reality.

My good friend TK Coleman likes to say that reality will expand to accommodate your dreams.  We might also say that reality will expand as a result of them.

Advice-seekers sometimes betray answers they already know by the questions they ask.

Quora is a good place to witness this.

A good rule before you ask a question of others is to start with yourself.  Obviously, asking yourself the question you want to ask doesn’t do a lot.  You’ve probably already done it and not found a definite answer.

Instead of asking yourself the question, ask yourself why you’re asking the question.  And be really honest.

Sometimes the true reason you’re asking is to impress someone, or to get attention, or because you want shared responsibility for your choice, or because you already know the answer but you don’t like it so you want to fish for a way out.

Learn why you’re asking the question and you’ll often answer it.

Why do people get bored?  I’m really asking.  That’s not rhetorical.

It cannot be lack of access to interesting ideas.  The world is pregnant with wonder.

It cannot be lack of engaging activities.  There’s an infinite number of things to do at any given moment.

I’ve been bored before.  Not often.  I can’t really understand my own boredom.  How was I bored?  There are so many thoughts to think, questions to ask, skills to practice, jokes to tell.

What’s the fundamental fact that leads to boredom?  Is it fear of newness?  Laziness?

I guess if you get bored, you can spend some time on this question.

————————-

UPDATE: one great answer, emailed to me here.

I’m trying a new thing.

Every Sunday, I’m going to post a book recommendation on the platform Yours.org.

I love exploring new platforms, and the cool thing about Yours is you have to pay to post an article (10 cents in Bitcoin Cash), you have to pay to vote (similar to a “like” on Facebook), and the author can set up a paywall for the content and comments.

Book recommendations are funny things.  The more generously you make them, the less valuable they are to people.

An unsolicited list of good books is likely to get ignored.  A single book maybe a little less so (less cognitive overload).  A recommendation with some context and a review might do a little better.

Actually buying the book for someone might help, but it often backfires…”free” is easy to perceive as “not that valuable”.

What if you had already paid a few cents to get the recommendation?  You’d feel invested.  You’d feel like, since you paid for the rec, it only makes sense to buy the book now, right?  It was worth learning about, so it’s a small step to assume it’s worth reading.

Anyway, we’ll see!

Check out today’s recommendation on Yours.

If nothing else, it’s a good excuse for me to get more people comfortable using cryptocurrency!

I love podcasting.  Probably too much.

I’ve got a bi-weekly long format interview podcast on tons of topics, am wrapping up a yearlong once a week 5-10 minute take podcast on career tips, and TK and I are in the middle of season one of the career/life Q&A format “Office Hours” show.

A few new items from this week…

Office Hours

Cohost TK Coleman and I chat about quitting a job and how to get better at sales.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

Topics Discussed:

• Saying it’s easy raises expectations
• The challenge of completing something you have the skill to do
• Measuring value from difficulty
• Your boss/manager always wants you to succeed
• Modeling other peoples success
• Feeling dissatisfied with your current work, vs. feeling excited about new opportunities
• The value of seemingly
• If you want to get paid to do something, you’ve got to do things like your getting paid, before your getting paid to do them.

Forward Tilt

A quick thought on the irony that babies don’t take “baby steps”, but big, risky leaps…maybe we should too?

Listen to the episode on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

In this episode:

• Babies take risks, not guarded steps
• When you start anything, don’t ease your way in
• The power of taking big swings
• We learn by taking “real” baby steps

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

Isaac Morehouse Podcast

In this episode, I interview my 12 year old unschooled son about a random assortment of stuff.

Listen to the episode on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher

Topics Discussed:

• Why did NL decide to celebrate Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead)
• Celebrations from other cultures
• Why has Marvel been so successful with bringing comic book heroes to movies, when DC hasn’t
• Pop culture trends
• Professionals trying to be unprofessional
• NL’s book
• Dire perfume names
• Starting to use Facebook
• Unschooling & Creating your own structure
• Starting a sandwich business
• The biggest differences for in life as a 12-year-old today vs. twenty years ago

Links:

• IM Podcast Episode 17 What It’s Like to Be an Unschooled with NL Morehouse
• Star Wars Review Episode with NL Morehouse
• Interview with a Nine Year Old 
• Interview with an Eight-Year-Old
• blogofnl.wordpress.com

There is nothing more unholy than divided time.

A unit of time where you are doing something while wanting to do another; begrudgingly wiling the hours and half-heartedly being pulled along.

It doesn’t matter what the thing is.  It matters that you do it undivided.  If the least bad option is to shovel shit, do it.  But do it wholeheartedly, with single mind, without regret.

You own your time.  Act like it.

You have to decide how to spend it moment by moment.  Do not let yourself be cajoled, guilted, or bullied.  You will end up doing one thing while pretending you have no choice and bitterly wishing you were elsewhere.  Your mind will be in two places, neither of them powerful enough to make a dent.

It’s your time.  No one can use a unit of it but you.

Make your choices clearly and definitely.  Be ready to alter them when information and incentives change.  But never let anyone but you do the choosing and altering.

And own it.  Fully.

When you make the choice, don’t look back and don’t pretend you didn’t.  A unit of time lived in a way you don’t want is a unit of time unlived.  You can’t get it back.  You’re weaker because of it.

Oneness between intention and action creates desired outcomes.