Category: Commentary

Individuals who advocate welfarism and redistribution are angry at god.

Individuals who chase get rich quick schemes are enamored by the devil.

I don’t say that lightly.

In the first instance, you could substitute for “god” something like the substrate of reality, the inescapable fact of logic, the existence of choice and free-will, scarcity, cause and effect, the truth, or trade-offs.  Failure to make peace with this results in a never ending and bitter quest to shake a fist at reality, envy those who seem not to share this anger, and curse at the mountain.  It requires constant reassurances to yourself and others that you are right and righteous, even while attempting to deny the enduring reality of cause and effect by which that might be judged.  It is a losing game.

In the second instance, you could substitute for “the devil” something like deception, falsehood, blissful ignorance, flattery, or the lie.  Rather than anger at reality, this is denial; an optimists primary method of evading it (vs. the pessimists outlined above).  It’s a perpetual effort to avoid the inescapable fact that progress, growth, and good cannot be separated from work, challenge, and struggle.  It is a losing game.

Self-interest is great.

Self-interest dressed up like charity is a little dangerous.

Self-interest that genuinely believes itself to be charity is deadly.

Most people don’t realize just how much pressure young people feel to be mediocre, monotonous, dull, dependent, unproductive, and unhappy.

They will get unlimited support and praise if they stay on a conveyor belt taking them away from independence, productivity, creativity, and personal success.  If they set out to build a life they want, they will get the opposite.

This is why most young people go to and suffer through college.  Not to learn.  Not even because they think it will help them get a job.  They go because what they’d have to endure from family to do more is a price too high.

Here’s an email (shared with permission, slightly abbreviated, anonymized, and italicized for emphasis) I received from a recent Praxis applicant that describes what so many individuals face:

“I just turned twenty years old. I am currently working two jobs to keep myself afloat in California. I’m originally from New Jersey. I’m out here on my own and it’s great! I am gaining so much independence and learning how to handle responsibility.

I came out here at first to give college a go. I was studying Spanish and business and my whole family was happy and impressed. And I was dissatisfied.

I felt like a baby. My tuition was being paid for by a family member. My rent was being paid for, as well. I wasn’t taking responsibility for anything and more importantly, I was not challenging myself or taking my life into my own hands.

So, I did end up leaving university in search of more independence and maturity. I decided to go all in on developing my skills and value to offer to the real work force. I have been building my website every day after work and it is still a work in progress but I am loving taking it day by day, task by task and learning from my mistakes.

It’s a roller-coaster, and learning to deal with little mishaps to big mistakes is actually really nice compared to a year ago when I felt like I could just coast and still be seen as ‘successful’. Now, I am getting real experience with a real project. I have been reading books on subjects like SEO and social media marketing because these are areas I would really like to be knowledgeable in and use in the work force. I’m inspired and amped up thinking of the freedom, innovation and collaboration that can happen when we utilize the internet to connect, serve and share with each other.

That is how I found Praxis and that is why I kept returning to the blog and finally applying to the program. I want to set out on my own path to creative success and I would like to do it working with other people who can challenge me and I, them. I am looking for an opportunity to learn how to contribute quality and be a respected team player as well as independent innovator.

I really appreciate the opportunity this program provides people like me, who have a lot of drive and passion and just need an environment and the tools to really exceed their potential.”

Notice her life was made materially easy, and she was praised by family so long as she went along with years of dullness.  She knew deep down it was moving her further from her goals, and she wasn’t engaged with the world or creating value.  But the support was strong.

The cost of breaking free isn’t that she’ll struggle to learn valuable skills or build a great career – far from it!  She can do those much better away from college.  The cost was losing that comfy financial support and heartfelt emotional support.  If she failed as a college grad, no one would blame her.  To fail being something more means to fail alone.

She didn’t let that stop her.  You can feel the pride and self-ownership in this email.  And my guess is that, after the initial pushback, her family will end up respecting her more in the long run, and supporting her in healthier ways.

This week on Office Hours, TK and Isaac talk about the popular but misguided approach by most popular “How to get what you want” advice, when is a blog post TMI, and learning how to follow through with ideas.

Questions:

• How do you know if your blog posts are TMI? How do you balance writing about personal topics with writing where coworkers and potential future employers might read it?
• How do I become more than just an idea guy?

Check out the new episode of Office Hours now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

Topics Discussed:

• No one cares about giving you what you want until you are creating value for them.
• All rules are negotiable if you are valuable enough
• What is value creation?
• Value creation isn’t always monetary
• Taking feedback from the marketplace
• There is a price for everything that you say
• How being valuable gives you more flexibility with what you create
• Learning how to implement and execute ideas
• Don’t let FOMO dictate what you work on

Check out the year in brief!

 

I finally compiled all in one place a lot of posts on the morality of capitalism.

You can access the full essay on Yours.org.  Great excuse to setup an account and get familiar with Bitcoin Cash enabled micropayments too!  (You can even email me a link to your Yours profile and I’ll tip you your first little bit of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to get you started, so you don’t have to figure out how to buy BCH on an exchange or any of that!)

Here’s the essay on the morality of capitalism.

• I’m using a series of Trello boards again.  Tasks, Creative, Ideas, Done, Dead.  Simple, clean, every day check in on running lists for both deep work, and to fill those in-between times I was previously filling with a social media checkin here or there.
• Less social media.  I pulled way back in 2017, down to about 10 mins/day on Facebook, and 20 on Twitter.  Tightening even more.
• Writing daily, not publishing to the blog daily.  I’m working on a lot more Praxis product/curriculum content, and focusing my daily writing on that this year.
• Podcast focus narrowed.  I’ll be sporadically recording new podcast episodes rather than regularly, focusing the regular recording on Office Hours with my man TK.
• Office.  Yes, a physical office in downtown Charleston for Praxis next stage of growth.  It’s badass.  Coming soon.
• Alarm clock.  It had been a life goal of mine to never use one.  Achievement unlocked.  Less interesting than I thought.  I didn’t use one for most of the past three years.  Now I want to again (especially since not working from home anymore, to get my daily walk in, I’ve got to adjust my schedule earlier).
• Praxis, Praxis, and more Praxis.  As CEO, my three areas of focus are money, talent, and vision.  I want to double everything this year, including my own productivity.

A bundle of 7 books for $7.

Check it out over on Yours.org.

Today’s might be my all time favorite book.

Check it out.

I logged in to WordPress this morning to compose my daily blog post, and it notified my that my theme (previously Blaskan) had an update available.  Accustomed to software updates that generally only make things better, I clicked “Update”.  It replaced my theme with something awful, and completely destroyed the look of the site.

I just spendt an hour picking a new theme and getting all my stuff back.  Grrr.  I like to keep it simple, and I don’t like to mess around with design stuff on this site unless it’s truly dire.

Oh well.  A new year, a new look.

Here’s another reason to get your work done fast (yep, even (especially!) deep, creative work):  you’ll get less scrutiny and fewer requested edits.

If you crank out a design, page, or product FAST – on or ahead of schedule – the momentum bleeds into the perception of the work by the recipient.  They’ll like it more, and be less focused on changes because they’re so happy with the speed.  They’ll respond to speed with speed: you got it to me fast, I’ll approve it fast with little deliberation.  Let’s launch this baby!

Take longer than you told them?  Get ready for them to respond in kind with long, drawn out, deliberative decisions over tiny details, lagging last minute tweaks, etc.

Every day past expectation the project takes, the expectation for perfection ratchets up.  From your customer’s perspective, it goes something like this: “I’m waiting so damn long for this thing, it’d better be perfect.  Is it perfect?  I don’t know.  Maybe we should tweak this one more thing…”

Creative types are notorious for delivering later than the expectations they set.  Then they get frustrated when people want to make changes and get picky.  When you kill momentum, you turn an otherwise big, excited greenlighter into a slow, skeptical analyst.

Tired of lots of late change requests?

Work faster.

“Meet my friend/husband/sister/coworker.  Can you tell them about how awesome X is?”

I get this from time to time.  I hate it.

X can be unschooling, writing, economic freedom, cryptocurrency, podcasting, or any number of things.

It’s not that I don’t like discussing stuff I’m interested in, it’s that I don’t like doing it with unwilling audiences.  (This is one of the reasons I could never be a professor.)

If you drag someone to me kicking and screaming and ask me to get them interested in something you haven’t been able to sell them on, I’m gonna politely pass every time.

I only like preaching to the choir.  They came for the sermon.  I’m not interested in hounding poor souls just trying to go about their day.

I just saw a Tweet by someone divesting themselves of all their crypto holdings in a particular coin because they were tired of being accused of conflict of interest and wanted to prove their unbiased commitment to the project.

This is a losing game. And backwards.

If you run around appeasing every accuser, you become a slave. And they never stop accusing.

If you keep your skin in the game and ignore their talk, you won’t ever have to worry or engage self discipline to stay committed to the project.

Incentives are better than opinions.

I’ve been playing around posting to the platform Yours.org lately, and I noticed something funny.

Actually, my colleague Derek Magill pointed it out, and the minute he said it, it rang true.

Yours allows you to post content for 10 cents, and then people can pay you for the content, to comment, etc.  It displays how much each author has earned on the piece of content right at the top.

If I post something there and it only earns 10 or 20 cents, my immediate subconscious reaction is to feel kinda crappy and not really want to post more.  It feels like failure.

Yet at the same time, I happily post to my WordPress blog every single day without earning a dime and it doesn’t feel like failure.

Why would earning money for a post feel worse than not earning any at all?

The comparison trap.

The feeling of success is subjective and contextual, often more about our perceived standing relative to others than to our own stated goals.  On Yours, it’s easy to see all the top posts with 5, 50, or 500 bucks.  Next to that, 20 cents feels lame.  On WordPress, nobody’s content has earnings, and traffic numbers aren’t publicly displayed, so there’s no threat of being perceived as a failure.  If WordPress emailed me out of the blue and said, “We’re sending you 20 cents for your post today”, I’d feel like a badass.

If you can overcome this external definition of success, you’ll be unstoppable.  You’ll create a life of untouchable wonder and fulfillment.

It begins by asking what your goals are, being honest, and sticking to a definition of success that only measures progress against that internally chosen standard.

I blog because it changes me.  I blog because I enjoy it.  If I pay attention only to my goals with blogging and forget the good opinion of others, earning a few cents can only ever make me happier than earning nothing.