How You Get There Matters

Every sin is really the same,
A cheat code for the pattern.

The destination is not in vain,
But how you get there matters.

The man with sudden riches knows,
The power of their shackles.

The one who grows organically,
Is ready the traps to tackle.

Steer clear the oldest temptation,
An offer of the end that flatters.

The end is not the enemy,
But how you get there matters.

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More Experience Should Mean More Questions, Not Fewer

I used to tell new employees that there was no such thing as a stupid question in the first few weeks of their role, and then the percentage of questions which were stupid rapidly grew.

The idea is that, by the end of a month, they should not need to ask people many questions. They should be able to figure out on their own. If you keep asking noob questions too long, you lose the respect of your colleagues.

That’s not wrong, but it’s too simple.

I was asked yesterday what patterns I’ve noticed in the employees who have gone on to the most career success. It hit me that the real home run hitters were people who did ask lots of questions. What they didn’t do was ask me to make lots of decisions for them.

There are two types of quieries:

  1. Asking someone to make a decision
  2. Asking someone for their opinion, ideas, or input

When you’re new in a role, you should do a lot of the first and not much of the second.

Ask your manager whether you should do X or Y, who is best to run project Z, and what the budget should be for A. You’ll start to learn and see how they think and their logic for decisions.

Don’t spend a lot of time asking them their opinion on your crazy new idea, or other open-ended, speculative questions. You don’t yet have the context to ask good ones. Just get stuff done while you learn.

But to really become a beast, these things need to flip. You need to ask your manager to make fewer and fewer decisions for you, and you need to engage them more and more on speculative discussions and brainstorming back and forth.

The more you can say “I did” instead of “Can you?” or “Should we?”, the more valuable you become to your manager.

When you get to that level of ownership, the value of your curiosity and questions increases. You start to use your manager’s time to ask about changes to the business model, the target market, the pricing, the distribution. You begin to work with them as a peer, a sounding board, and a constructive critic of your ideas, and you of theirs.

Fewer decisions, more questions. That’s the progression. You’ve got to earn trust through results to get there. Make it the goal.

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“Those Who Can’t Do Teach” Is Not an Insult

I had a chemistry class at community college taught by a guy who was apparently a brilliant chemist for Pfizer who had patented many products and processes. He retired as a Big Deal in his field, and decided he wanted to teach a class a few days a week to stay busy and near the lab in retirement.

He was the worst teach I’ve ever had for anything.

In high school, I had a half crazy science teacher who could never hold down a job in a lab so taught just about every science to every grade at a low-paid tiny Christian school.

He was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had for anything.

Being awesome at doing something doesn’t make you good at teaching it. And being awesome at teaching something doesn’t always require being good at doing it.

You ever see a fat, gray-haired, 5’10” basketball coach yelling at a 6’7″ muscular toned athlete about hustling more or perfecting their footwork?

I don’t think teaching requires being good at doing, but it does require a lot of curiosity, empathy, and ability to quickly identify the key principles at work.

Sales and marketing professionals know this, because they do it every day. Unless you are selling sales software that you use every day to other sales pros, or marketing marketing tools you use every day to other marketers, you will find yourself teaching potential customers how to do something you yourself don’t do every day.

That’s ok. Or at least it can be. There is a danger of just bluffing everything or pretending to be a know-it-all and making yourself a fool. But if you are curious, ask tons of questions, watch, learn, and tap into those who do the thing regularly for expertise on the finer points, you can do amazing things.

That fat coach may not be able to do a double pump, but he may be better positioned than most players to understand when and how to make a double pump effective if he’s watched a lot of film and is good at observing and asking questions and pattern matching. Sometimes being a little out of the weeds actually makes you better at describing them.

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When the Heroes are Bad People

One of my favorite history books is Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States. The main thesis is that, contrary to classroom tales of great men of principle, most of the things we value in this country were won by degenerates, riffraff, slobs, and generally disreputable people.

It’s sort of like Adam Smith’s “not from the benevolence of the butcher” insight about markets applied to the grand arc of history.

There’s a weird paradox here that, I think, has a brilliant power to protect us from our own arrogance and corruption. How could people displaying traits that are not good or respectable for an individual – traits you’d never want your kids or friends to embody – be the very ones who bring about good things?

I’ve been thinking about this lately in regards to the Puritans.

I’d never want to live like them, and I’d be worried if my loved ones did. What an unhinged and joyless group! When they briefly held power in England, they were severe, and even banned the celebration of Christmas.

Yet they were relentlessly devoted to God, and chose exile or martyrdom rather than be forced to worship according to the state-sanctioned Church. Many fled England to the Netherlands just to be able to meet and worship as they pleased, despite not knowing the language or culture. When threatened there, some sold everything and boarded ships to cross the Atlantic to an uncharted new world rather than submit to worshipping in a way that violated their conscience.

As I said, I don’t agree with Puritan theology or practice and wouldn’t advocate it. Yet for a particular epoch in history, it’s hard to not see them as heroic. Many of the best things about modern culture, especially in America, can be attributed to them. Weirder still, many more great American traits can be attributed to the very type of sinners the Puritans would’ve most despised. How can we make sense of this?

The Kingdom of Heaven has room for both the devout Apostle John and the criminal next to Christ on the cross. It includes crazy people wearing Camel hair and eating bugs in the desert, those who murdered Christians, those who denied Christ, fishermen, carpenters, tent-makers, generals, priests, and kings.

Not all of these people were good in all their deeds. Many were awful much of the time. But all played a part in bringing about the good of the Kingdom. Meanwhile, others that did good in Christ’s name are apparently told, “Get away from me, I never knew you.”

This is astounding precisely because it’s not an inversion of good and evil. These examples do not prove that being bad is good, or being good is bad. Yet we are forced to acknowledge that God can use any vessel in many ways, that all have a chance at redemption, and that we can never be quite sure where people rank in God’s eyes.

All we can do is try our best to live rightly and be exceedingly cautious about judging or assuming we know where others stand or what role they play, while simultaneously being resolute against sin.

If that doesn’t keep you humble and filled with wonder, I’m not sure what will.

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Negative Lessons are Better than Positive Lessons

I don’t like most business books.

Written after success, they attempt to look back on the (sometimes fuzzy) facts and construct a formula that caused it. But success is bad at following formulas (evidenced by the fact that the millions of readers don’t succeed by following them).

I’m not saying it’s all luck and success has no discernible causes. What I’m suspicious of is our ability to discern them, especially in detail. There are so many variables, and we are really bad at knowing which are causal after we’ve already won. It’s too easy and satisfying to look back on success and say, “These were the three reasons” – reasons that always seem to make the story more convenient.

This is why we learn more from failure than success. It’s true, the same number of variable exists and causality isn’t always clear, but the ability to tell the story we wish was true is reduced. Ego is muted. We are humbled and have to face the fact that what we did didn’t work.

Even for success stories, I think the most valuable and applicable lessons are the negative ones. Less, “These were the keys to success,” and more, “These were the keys to avoiding failure”.

I’m reminded of Barry Sander’s answer to how he had such creative and elusive moves on the football field. “I don’t like get get tackled. It hurts.” Instead of, “These three techniques are the keys to my success”, Barry simply explained what he didn’t want to do; get hit.

If you know what to avoid, everything else is fair game. The paths to success are many. Avoid the pitfalls (which are surprisingly attractive) and you might find a way to win that breaks all the other rules.

I’d like to see more business books about companies that failed, and more books about those that succeeded focusing on what they didn’t do rather the genius of what they did.

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The Conviction from Kids

Kids have bad poker faces. They try, somewhat ridiculously, to hide what they’re feeling, but it’s obvious to a parent.

This can result in one of the hardest forms of censure a parent can experience. If your kid is mad at you and tells you they think you’re doing something wrong (when you actually are) it stings. But far worse is when your kid doesn’t tell you, but you can read it on their face.

I’ve had moments where I glance at one of my kids and realize by the look on their face that I’m being too grumpy, impatient, or indifferent. When they’re little, kids think you’re a hero. The look on their face when their hero disappoints them cuts to the bone.

There’s nothing to do but take it, apologize, and work on getting better. There is always an urge to try to talk them in to not being disappointed, or do something really nice for them hoping it cancels out that moment when they saw your flaws. It won’t do. You’ve got to take the pain and resolve to get better.

You don’t know until you have kids just how convicting in can be to be around little humans who look up to you every day.

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Good Disease

Many families, businesses, neighborhoods, churches, and cities have a diseased culture.

Gossip, squabbling, rudeness, passive aggression, cliques, manipulation, control: these are the symptoms of the disease.

If you find yourself in one of these the first instinct, if you cannot easily flee, is to eradicate the disease. You want some kind of strong medicine to kill it. Or to get rid of those most infected. This doesn’t work well.

The thing about culture is that’s it’s always infected with something. You can’t sanitize it and leave it alive. The only cure for bad disease in a culture is good disease.

Good disease can’t be prescribed or mandated. It has to spread, one person at a time, just like bad disease.

If you find yourself in a badly diseased culture, complaining about it will only increase the symptoms. Your only option is to begin infecting others with something good.

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Aligning Self-Interest; or Why You Should Marry a Hedonist

My wife makes delicious meals almost every night. She insists that it’s not out of her desire to please and care for her family with quality food as much as her own desire for something tasty.

I believe her. Not because I think she is a bad or selfish person. But because I know from personal experience that, no matter how good I try to be, my own interest is a better driver of behavior than anyone else’s.

One of the best ways to have harmonious relationships is to align your interests with those of the other person. That way, you don’t have to rely on either of your goodwill too much. If the other person acting in the way they want to act anyway is also what you would like, it will be an easy relationship. If they have to practice tremendous self-control and discipline and become a much different person than they are to keep things copacetic, you’re likely in for a lot of pain.

This doesn’t mean people can’t or shouldn’t change or improve or work on good habits and discipline. It means you need to be honest about yourself and others, and know what you really want and are likely to do when push comes to shove. If doing what comes easiest to you, and the other person doing what comes easiest to them, still leads to an acceptable outcome, you’re in a pretty solid spot.

It’s about recognizing your own and others weaknesses and tendencies and trying to put yourself in fewer positions that require you to be your very best. King David might’ve avoided adultery and murder had he led his men to battle instead of staying behind with all the women. It wasn’t just about lack of self control in the moment. It was also about allowing himself to be in a moment that demanded so much self control in the first place.

So if you want a wife that cooks great meals for your family, your best bet is to find a woman who loves to do that for her own enjoyment already.

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The Paradox of Striving for Contentment

There’s a lot of appeal in the ideal of Zen-like contentment. True detachment, ability to be at peace in any situation, rest.

But it’s not quite right.

If followed to its end, it dissolves into nothingness. That’s weird, because the notion of following something to it’s end, or pursuing contentment is the opposite of being content. It demands recognition of what you are not yet, and an effort to reach it. It demands striving. You become what you practice. How could you, by striving your whole life, finally become one who never strives?

I think nothingness, or ever greater levels of detachment, are not the right goal. They may be useful salves to calm us along the journey, but they are not the end.

We are created to create. We are created to grow. We are created to progress. It is wired into us to build and make and love, as we are reflections of the God who built and made and loves us.

This requires discontentment. As Mises so clearly points out, to act at all requires dissatisfaction with the status quo.

But that need not be the same as anxiety, frustration, grumpiness, anger, or blind ambition.

Can we lay down our cares, surrender our stress, and overcome fear while still striving to be and do better?

The answer of course is yes, it is possible, and no, we have not reached it.

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Can You Define Your Left Hand?

Imagine trying to explain to someone who’s never heard of them which is the left hand and which is right without pointing or touching.

The human body is (on the surface at least) symmetrical, and as such there is no way to define left and right.

Yet left and right are objective.

And they are also relative.

In order to communicate left and right, unless you are facing the same direction, you can’t appeal only to your own orientation, but have to put yourself into the eyes of the other person and indicate whether you mean their left or yours.

An indefinable concept which is both objective and relative sounds very problematic, likely to be the cause of much debate and confusion. But quite the opposite is true. There is no disagreement about left and right, everyone uses them every day, and the ability to coordinate around them is relied on for everything from open heart surgery to highway driving.

We educated types tend to think that anything important must be defined, and that to have harmony in the world, definitions must be agreed upon in conscious, explicit ways. Like all the things that matter should be written down in precise language and everyone sign their name next to it indicating they agree.

“If we can’t even agree on what things mean, and we can’t even define them, how can we ever have peace?”

Yet all around us, most of the things that maintain peace, order, cooperation, and value creation between humans are happening without definition or thought.

We all orient ourselves and others with left and right in low and high stakes situations, and no philosophers are needed to stop and ask for a definition, or demand we prove we know for sure which one is which.

Maybe we could use less argumentation and more interaction. Perhaps games, commerce, music, art, and worship with our fellow humans are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to societal harmony and efforts to come to agreement about terms, concepts, and definitions is doing the opposite.

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Self Knowledge and Self Honesty

Self knowledge and self honesty.

The two most important foundations for long-term success in anything. And a lot harder than they sound.

Self knowledge means figuring out who you really are, what really motivates you, what you excel at, what you suck at.

Self honesty means not lying to yourself about what you discover.

We have stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. These are necessary. We need to fit into a narrative. And they don’t have to be merely descriptive – they can be aspirational as well.

But they can’t be false. They have to be true, either currently, or in line with a possible trajectory. They can’t be contrary to who you are and what you want.

It’s hard enough to know ourselves. But harder still, if what we find is something not like what we wish or imagine, or what others approve of, is to be honest about it.

Self honesty doesn’t mean accepting or being OK with failings or shortcomings, it means being real about them and deciding what you want to do about it. Even if the answer is “nothing”.

A scoundrel who’s honest about being a scoundrel is preferable to a saint who is secretly a scoundrel.

The process of self-knowledge and self-honesty never ends, because we always change.

Keep at it.

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The Necessity of Sports

Sports are a great civilizing force. They also provide an image and example of many human virtues in a way few things can.

Humans are tribal. We are competitive. These can be incredibly destructive forces if not channeled properly. Sports are a sort of simulated combat that does just that. They allow our warlike tendencies to play out peacefully.

Virtues like courage, hope, perseverance, loyalty, sacrifice, and cooperation are demonstrated through sports in a way even a child can understand. Their opposites are also demonstrated. The entire drama unfolds and lets us see truths about the human condition that would require lectures and syllogisms without the animating contest of sports.

It’s good to sometimes lose ourselves in the agony and the ecstasy of sports.

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