It can be hard to keep connected to the purpose of your daily actions. For me, the reason we keep grinding at Crash.co is all about our mission:
To help people discover and do what makes them come alive.
This mission is near and dear to my heart, and animates both Praxis and Crash, the two companies I started around it.
It also anchors into an even deeper mission; that of my own life.
My personal mission is to make people free (starting with myself). Freedom has been my animating principle my entire life, and this mission became explicitly clear when I was around 20 or so.
I strive every day to make myself as free as possible and to help others live free. Freedom is not only a political concept, though that is a major part of it. It begins in the mind.
A mindset of freedom, ownership, and agency unshackles people from guilt, shame, fear, status-chasing, compliance, thoughtless following, and listlessness. That mindset is formed by experiences more than through ideas, though both matter. Most people have been conditioned into accepting an unfree world, starting with school and cementing itself in career.
I want to bust that to bits.
Praxis helps people escape the college debt and mindset trap and realize what they can do when they take charge instead of following norms.
Crash grew out of that as an effort to reach a much larger audience with a much smaller piece of the freedom puzzle. If we can help people realize just a little bit of the power they have at that crucial moment when they are trying to find a job, we can increase the freedom in the world.
If we can wake people up just a little bit with a mindset of ownership, the compounding effect is massive. Going from feeling dead inside in your job or on your job hunt – assuming it’s all just luck and you live at the whims of some resume-scanning HR software – to feeling just a bit more alive has the power to change the workforce and the world.
Individuals who see, for the first time, that they can be alive and find work that makes them alive are individuals who are harder to shackle and enslave. A world full of such people is a freer world.
Drops on a rock, wearing away little by little.