Category: Commentary

Check it out.

https://soundcloud.com/isaacmorehouse/i-escaped-the-libertarian-movement-nicole-sauce-on-living-free-in-tennessee?ref=clipboard

A day is like a rocket without steering. The trajectory on which it begins determines the arc. Small changes in that trajectory matter a lot.

Beginning the day on my terms is important. The challenge is that those terms change and it’s not always easy to tell what they are. What will allow me to feel free and in control of the day, vs. feeling dragged along by it?

Today, it was starting with a walk outside and a blog post. I knew I needed to avoid any screens until I had some protein, got some movement in the morning sun, and sat down with a fresh cup of coffee. When I sat down, I realized I needed a playlist and a few minutes to write before I opened emails or Slack or surveyed and prepared my week or work.

This allows me to create and think independent of any demands as the first activity of the day. It puts me in a frame of ownership. I feel balanced. So when the demands start coming, it feels easier to field them because I feel autonomous.

Some days I get up, hop right on my computer and immediately start checking emails and Slack and reacting to what I missed overnight. It feels chaotic and those days don’t end well.

So consider this post the setting of my trajectory for today. Take charge of yours and enjoy it. I’ll do the same.

If you caught me on the news talking about Crash.co and discoverpraxis.com, welcome!

Crash was experiencing some outages due to crazy traffic, but please come back and check it out again. So sorry about that. Meantime, feel free to browse around here and check out some of my books and podcasts on education and career.

Some resources:

• Career personality quiz.
• Free career guides at Crash.
• Career Crashers podcast.
• Stories of successful careers without college (add yourself and share!)

If you didn’t see it, you can watch the clip here:

 

 

Watch on Streamanity:

https://streamanity.com/video/gWm9BeacgTaba4

On SoundCloud or any podcast app (under the Isaac Morehouse Podcast).

If you must, it’s also on YouTube.

Read it here.

Someone else having a billion dollars does no harm to you.

It very likely makes their life harder – not materially, but emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically – but it does nothing to make you worse off. If you feel less happy because you envy them, that is not caused by their billion dollars, but by your choice to judge yourself in dollars and against another person. That’s an unhappiness only you can fix by changing your orientation.

It is possible that someone obtained a billion dollars through violence. The most likely scenario is via collaboration with government, as it would be very difficult and very rare to do so violently without at least some state cooperation. Gaining wealth via government, which is always backed by the initiation of violence, causes harm to the world. Taxpayers and those prohibited from peaceful activity by monopoly protections are harmed.

But notice it’s the acts of theft and violence that do the harm, not the billion dollars itself. The having of the billion does not by itself cause harm, only if the process of obtaining it did. Then the problem is with that process, not the money.

One could use a billion dollars to do harmful things, like buy weapons to hurt people. But then the hurting of the people is doing the harm, not the holding or spending of the billion dollars.

There is no way in which another person having possession of a billion dollars can harm you. Outside the peaceful free market they may cause harm in obtaining it or use it to cause harm.

But if they obtained it via market means (no violence, just voluntary exchange) and use it on the market (again peacefully), not only does someone else getting, holding, or spending a billion dollars do the world no harm, it does tremendous good and creates value.

The only way to obtain money (absent force) is to take a resource valued at X, do something to it, and exchange it with someone who values it at >X. The > is the profit you earn, and also a measure of the minimum amount of value that was created. Value that did not exist prior to the exchange.

Even those who earn billions by investing in companies and then “doing nothing” while the company gains value are creating value. Not only by providing capital that the company needs to earn profit (create value), but the process of investing itself is so full of efforts and failures that it generates untold new information that makes the market better and better and innovating and creating new value. The billions earned on a few winning investments pale in comparison to the untold benefit created by all the failed investments that pushed ideas and products forward and created priceless info about what works and doesn’t.

So billionaires in a free market are no threat, and their wealth is likely a sign of tons of value created for you and others. This doesn’t make them morally good people or intellectual adept or fun or kind or anything else. It just means their existence is no threat and how they got there created benefit for others, intentionally or not.

Billionaires in an unfree market don’t harm you by mere fact of having a billion dollars, but they way they got it or what they use it for could.

Fight for freedom, not against others having arbitrary amounts of money.

Read it here.

We’re going live with a major update to crash.co tomorrow. This is the beginning of the next big chapter in building the best career launch platform in the world. I can’t wait! Lots more work to be done, but tomorrow’s update will be the foundation we build on. Over a year of user feedback and beta testing has helped us hone it.

I’m mixing it up again, after a year and a half streak of daily blogging, I’m gonna switch my routine. I won’t be blogging daily for a while, but I’m doing a lot of stuff in a lot of other places!

• I write articles and guides at crash.co
• I record a weekly Career Crashers podcast episode
• I am active on Twitter and Twetch
• I talk about bitcoin every few weeks with some friends
• I’m doing some new episodes of the Isaac Morehouse Podcast
• I write a weekly, subscribers-only Inner Game of Startups newsletter

Of course the majority of my time is spent building Crash into the greatest career launch platform in the world and being a husband and dad and trying to maintain my physical and intellectual health. But I work in a lot of other interests as well, and writing will always be a big part.

Who knows whether/when I decide I can’t handle life without daily blogging (it usually happens when I take these breaks), but for now I’m going all in on a new routine.

If brevity is

The soul of wit, well I guess

I am really screwed

(Also available on the Isaac Morehouse podcast)

Read it here.

There is infinite information in the universe. Any time you select a tiny slice of info and focus on it, you are creating a story that is different from reality itself.

Imagine a movie sliced into a million still screenshots. Say it was impossible to watch the movie and your only way of interacting with it was with these screenshots. If someone picked three of them and presented it to you as the “truth” of the movie, they’d be wrong, even if the screenshots weren’t tampered with or substituted for fakes. If the person presenting the “facts” of the movie to you had an ax to grind or wasn’t so scrupulous about accuracy in screenshots, it would be even worse. But the main point is that even if trying to be accurate, any version of the movie selected from a few micro-second still frames will present a story that’s incorrect.

Once you realize this, you can select your own slices based on what helps you achieve your goals. It may be no more accurate in terms of explaining the real movie, but none can be, so you might as well choose slices that help you. Better yet, you can stop worrying about figuring out the right version of this movie from the past and start creating your own story going into the future.

News is a specific view of reality. It’s always wrong. Worse, it’s usually bad for your health and sanity. Choose better slices of reality and your reality will improve.

When opportunity avails itself you’re either ready to big seize it, little seize it, or miss out entirely.

It’s easy to see someone who makes a big move to nab a big opportunity and think it was luck or good timing alone. But it’s not the moment that matters most, but the buildup.

If you constantly make little moves that get you better and better positioned in case of opportunity, you’ll be able to make big moves when it comes. This seems obvious, but it’s very hard to do.

During no-opportunity times you look around and see no great big moves to make. True. Frustrating. But if you keep looking and thinking about future scenarios, you can spot steady small moves that will compound, each shifting just a bit more of your resources into position to take advantage if big opportunity should emerge. Each small move gets max leverage when opportunity comes, and the little opportunity costs of those little moves comes back and a whole lot more.

Don’t worry about how you missed out on big opportunity, or how you don’t see it around you. Make small moves to be in position and get your mind ready. It will come.