Month: May 2018

I like being underestimated.

My sports fandom tends to strongly favor underdogs, overachieving gritty teams, under-the-radar greatness.  Narratives of quiet, background revolutionaries inspire me.  I always prefer the overlooked-but-making-steak-while-everyone-else-is-talking-about-sizzle position.

This orientation works well, except it gets hard the more you start to succeed.  The underestimated but hard working person will always eventually yield fruit that reveals to the world the previously hidden value.  The world is likely to respond by over-correcting in the other direction, piling on hype, looking for a savior, turning the previously quiet work into a movement.

That’s when it gets weird and difficult.

Embracing the attention is dangerous.  It will always lead you to overestimate your value and position.  After always having more substance than attention, if they level off or the relationship reverses and you embrace the attention, you might forget the substance.  It’s always safer to have more substance than style, but sometimes style runs ahead before substance can catch up.  That’s the danger zone.

What to do in those moments?  Downplay it?  Run from it?  That doesn’t seem to work.  You’ve got to rise to it while at the same time not care about it.  You’ve got to keep your mind above it while your work is firmly grounded.  You’ve got to re-cast your narrative and find a way to stay the hungry, humble, confident hard-worker with a chip on the shoulder.

Personal narrative drives and regulates emotion and psychology.  When big external shifts happen, you’ve got to re-center that narrative so it remains grounding and inspiring while fitting truthfully with the facts.  If your narrative gets pulled by external circumstances, you become a slave to the world.  If your narrative ignores external shifts and pretends nothing has changed, you become trapped in your own delusions.

You’ve got to own the narrative even while you adapt it to things out of your control.

I had a calendar reminder this morning that said “10 years of blogging”.  I don’t remember setting that reminder for myself, but I went and checked and, sure enough, this blog was created 10 years ago.

A lot has happened since then.  When this blog launched, I didn’t have an iPhone.  In fact, I had a little blue Nokia flip phone that was cool because it had a camera.  I had only been on Facebook a little over a year.  I lived in Michigan and had just one kid (now I live in SC and have four).  I had no idea I’d start a company and Praxis wasn’t even an idea yet.  I’d never published a book or recorded a podcast (I did listen to EconTalk though!  Downloaded episodes onto a little Mp3 player with no screen).

For the first several years, I posted here only occasionally, as my early blogging was done on third party sites like Students for a Free Economy, the Mackinac Center, The Western Standard, The Mises Institute, and the Prometheus Institute.  Things didn’t really get going until TK Coleman challenged me to blog every day for 6 months.  I did.  And I haven’t stopped, except for a few experimental spans until the withdraw symptoms got too bad.

I’ve never made it a point to get traffic here.  This is a place for me to organize my thoughts and structure my day.  It’s a personal challenge and motivator.  I’ve had a few posts that took off and got tens of thousands of views.  It makes little sense to me why and which posts.

I pulled up a list of the higher traffic posts just for fun.  Of the 1,123 posts over the last 10 years, here are the top 30.  I don’t know if they’re any good.

Playing with Legos is More Valuable than Learning Algebra

Every Industry Gets Worse When Government Gets Involved

Three Types of Racism

Praxis

Being Liked vs. Being Respected

Podcast

Why Government Fails – Public Choice for Everyone

How My Son Learned to Read When We Stopped Trying to Teach Him

Why I Don’t Care About Income Inequality

103 – GlockStore Founder Lenny Magill on Sales and Why Problem Solving Beats a Resume

Praxis Customer Reviews

Doing Work You Love and Being Happy Are Not Necessarily the Same Thing

Books

Liberal Collectivism, Conservative Collectivism, and the Libertarian Answer

If You Did Vote, Don’t Complain

Are People Who Don’t Smile Unhappy?

Why Is It So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation?

Five Great Economics Books

The Education System Isn’t Broken, It Just Sucks

Your College Degree is Worthless

Stop Doing Shit You Hate

The Absurd Assumption Behind Schooling

Education and Bike Riding

How I Learned to Get a Lot Done Without Being Busy

Alexa the Speech Pathologist

Why Most Homeschooling Systems Devolve (you can’t overplan a startup)

The Limitations of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Four Visions of the World: Constrained, Unconstrained, Stasist, Dynamist

The Obedience-Entitlement Matrix and Generational Differences

My Kid Learned More from Mario Maker than I Did from a Marketing Major

What if Everyone Was Forced to go to Auto Mechanic School?

Anyway, it’s been fun.  Miles to go before I sleep!

Not what or how many, but when.  Not when in time necessarily, but when in the feel or flow of the game.

Professional team sports are about emotion and psychology.  They’re about runs and momentum.  30 points in a casual back and forth game flow isn’t deadly.  2 points at the precise moment the opponent cut a 15 point deficit to 6 and was feeling some magic begin to build is.

Like all endeavors, sports have the Pareto thing going on.  5% of plays get 95% of the results.  The response, the stare down, the “everything’s ok”, the “I’m back”.  These are the plays that matter.

Run stoppers, run starters, responses to big emotion swings, creation of big emotion swings.  Just a few plays determine a game.  You can see it and feel it.  Great players make those plays consistently.  Killers.  Assassins.  Cold blooded.  Ruthless.  Heartbreakers.  Daggers.  When that kind of player is on the floor against your team, you fear them.  You know some magic is about to happen.  Their stats and FG% don’t matter.

MJ had it more than anyone in history.  Kobe had it.  Dwayne Wade had it and still does even though his body doesn’t cooperate.

LeBron doesn’t have it.  Westbrook doesn’t have it.  They are stat guys.  Perfect in this era of stat worship.  They’re guys who get praised for triple doubles when they turnover or miss on the last three possessions of the game and lose because of it.  For them, what they rack up is more important than when they do it.

You don’t fear them in big moments against your team.  You want them on the floor in those moments.  That’s when they brick, or make weird decisions, or turn it over.  Their style of play looks greater than all the greats in stat sheets.  If timeliness weren’t a factor – the predominant factor – in determining victory, they would be great.  But they’re not.

Great players often surprise you when you watch them play and then look at their stats.  The stats always seem smaller than you’d expect, because the impact on the team, the timeliness, the way they seized and clearly controlled emotion throughout was so much bigger.  Good-not-great players are the opposite.  You watch, you see nothing that gives you chills, then you check and their stats are massive.  You can’t for the life of you figure out how what you just saw translated into those big numbers.

Highlights don’t do justice either.  Everyone has a few posterizing plays.  Great players have them more often, but that has nothing to do with their greatness.  Young Blake Griffin made posters, but was anti-great.  Highlight reels show amazing plays in isolation, devoid of the only thing that matters; the context of the game and the moment.  Dunking on a guy is cool.  Dunking on a guy who just hit back to back threes tying the game and made your team start to worry is great.  If it turns the game.

Everyone knows this.  Everyone who watches feels it in their veins.  You’re better at seeing it (or its absence) in your own team.  They either have or don’t have that thing.  But everyone tries to be smart and overthink and use a bunch of convoluted stats and end up sounding like idiots when they discuss greatness.  Greatness doesn’t inspire mathematical comparison.  Greatness inspires fear.  If you watched Jordan play, you never question whether anyone is greater due to some statistical shenanigans.  Be serious.  Jordan scares you in a way stat packers never do.