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Month: February 2018
Why You Should Create a Personal Pitch Deck
I shared this with Praxis participants and alumni today.
Every single story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Including the story that is your life.
Learning to see, understand, and articulate your story is of incalculable value.
Where have you been? What is the meaning or theme of the events leading up to now?
Where are you? Who have you become through this process and how/why did it lead to here?
Where are you going? What’s the trajectory, or arc that makes sense out of your past to present journey, and what kind of evolution is expected next?
This is why we have you create a pitch deck. It’s not just a piece of personal marketing collateral, or a way to impress a business partner. It’s a way to examine and describe your own story to yourself.
Your story will evolve. Not just the present and future plot points, but the past too. You’ll learn to rewrite it as the arc unfolds and different elements become more and less key to the evolving plot.
This exercise in self-knowledge and self-honesty is hard. It should be hard. Much of our experience has been life just happening. But deliberate effort to see your agency in the drama, and describe the events, and see the narrative arc, and take creative control of what it’s led to and where it’s going is mentally exhausting, but infinitely rewarding.
I recommend getting a copy of the book, Get Backed, as a guide to pitch decks, reading it, and using it to create one for your own life.
Why I’m Bullish on the Future of Capitalism
Why am I not worried that some group of people or the entire world are ‘moving towards socialism’?
Because I have eyes.
Everywhere I look – every state, country, city, or region in every culture and tongue – everywhere I have ever been or heard about consists of people who daily reveal their love for markets. People the world over love free trade and the fruits thereof. They seek it. They find it even when governments try to stamp it out. It cannot die.
People love to create, exchange, produce, consume, innovate, improve, and seek material and spiritual progress, happiness, and comfort. The remotest place on earth, if humans live there, will have shops and markets and trading of some kind.
Everywhere capitalism has an ounce of oxygen or an inch of space it explodes with a force untouchable by any do-gooder scheme of violence and control.
Show me a protester and I will show you his closet full of the fruits of capitalism. Show me an advocate of redistributionism and I’ll show you her interest-yielding accounts. Show me an unruly mob and I’ll show you a group of consumers and producers who jump at every chance to engage in peaceful, self-interested trade.
I don’t listen much to what people say. People say they love many things that, when the lights go out, they completely ignore. They say they hate many things that, when behind closed doors they delight in. One of the great lessons of social sciences is that people’s labels and protests and pet causes and speeches and tracts do a piss-poor job of revealing their preferences compared to their actions.
People say a great many things about markets with words. Yet they speak with remarkable simplicity and uniformity with deeds. That voice cries out, the world over, that humans love nothing more than the freedom to peacefully pursue their own self-interest and enjoy the results of that pursuit.
Listen to their actions. Give them more of what they want. The greater the extent of freedom experienced the harder it is to lose that ground later.
Don’t just tell people what markets can do. Show them.
Imagine. Create. Build. And see that you are not alone. All of humanity supports you, though many lack the clarity or sense or humility to admit it in words.