Category: Commentary

Forget ‘how to be a man’.  Forget ‘how to be a freelancer’.  Forget how to be a good conservative, liberal, or libertarian.  Forget how to be a mentor or mentee.  Forget how to be a philanthropist, environmentalist, atheist, reactionary, revolutionary, artist, or entrepreneur.

Forget any effort aimed at your ontological status in the abstract.

Instead, do your damn job.

Your job is whatever activities you’re engaged in and committed do.  Just do them.  Do them right.  Do them now.  Do them with pride.

If you won’t, quit and switch to things you will.

Seeking or giving advice about your state of being is beyond pointless until your state of doing is beyond reproach.

This week’s rec is a timeless favorite – a classic that never gets old!

Link here.

Check it out, and create an account at Yours.org to see more and jump in to the emerging world of content powered by crypto!

On my Momentum dash (Chrome plugin) this morning was a quote:

“Don’t go through life, grow through life.”

My immediate thought was, “That’s cheesy”.

But why?  The sentiment is simple and important.  It’s also pretty deep if you contemplate what happens when you switch your life from a motion metaphor to a growing one.  What’s with my immediate aversion?

It rhymes.

A pithy quote or inspirational phrase is great.  But if it rhymes it moves one notch too far up the cheese ladder.

I thought about why this might be.  Why do I have a bias against rhyming?

What about songs or poems?  Most of those rhyme, and the verses can be profound without necessarily feeling cheesy.

My current theory is this: something profound is memorable.  But when it rhymes, my brain begins to suspect a deliberate effort to make it memorable, which makes me think it might not be profound enough to be memorable on its own.  The use of rhyme has a trying-too-hard vibe.

But songs and poems are formats with baked in constraints, and the use of rhyme throughout doesn’t convey a stretch effort to be memorable (of course some lines might feel contrived just to fit the format).

I often have a dismissive reaction to anything too cute or cheesy.  It’s worth resisting.  I get the most value when I forget the messenger and the medium and take away something of value from everything I can.

Just wrapped up the Forward Tilt Podcast series.

If you enjoyed the podcast are looking to take the first steps towards building a great career, consider applying for our full startup apprenticeship program. 12 months where you will apply the lessons from Forward Tilt and a lot more on a daily basis and get real experience during a paid apprenticeship at a startup.

Check out the final episode of Forward Tilt now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

Also check out:

• Office Hours Podcast
• For a free copy of the book, Forward Tilt: An Almanac for Personal Growth go to discoverpraxis.com/forwardtilt

At Praxis, we’re obsessed with relentless personal growth, for ourselves and our customers.

One of the best, most accessible methods of pushing yourself is to take on small, short-term, daily challenges.

It’s not the size of the task that leads to greatness, but the ability to show up and do it every single day no matter what.

The compounding effect is amazing.

So, starting today, we’ve challenged everyone in our network to write and publish a post every day for 12 days, now through Christmas. The entire Praxis team is doing it, as are many of our participants, advisors, and alumni. You should join us!

I can’t tell you how powerful daily blogging has been for me since my friend and colleague challenged me to do it some five years ago. It has led to the creation of nine books, endless growth and opportunity, and one company!

Here are a few resources to inspire you:

Write for you, not for the audience

Why I blog every day

Ten benefits of daily blogging

What I’ve learned from writing every day

 

 

 

Dive in, commit, deliver.

You will be glad you did!

Every company wants great talent.

Praxis is no exception.

We use the best information we can get to help us determine who will create value as a member of the team.

One of my favorite books of all time, and a rather obscure one…

Here’s this week’s selection over at Yours.org!

(PS – setup a Yours account if you like to blog.  It’s a really fun experiment in micropayments and an easy way to play around with cryptocurrency.)

Ever since my colleague at Praxis, Chuck Grimmett, setup an RSS feed for the 120+ Praxis participant and alumni blogs, I’ve had a steady stream of great posts each day.

Here are a few of my favorites over the past week:

The best story in the world that no one’s ever heard – Byron Chiado

How to exploit being (or looking) young – James Walpole

Being remembered isn’t worth it – Ryan Ferguson

Why businesses hire – Ryan Ferguson

Go long on yourself!

I wrote two posts for the Praxis blog today (scheduled to go up there over next week), so I’m not going to pen a third here today.  Ain’t nobody got time be be writing three blog posts in a day!

I found this written in a notebook of mine from fourteen years ago,

Reality is the sum of people’s dreams.  By putting your dreams into the equation, you will increase the value and magnitude of reality.

It sounds fluffy at first, like it needs to be superimposed on a picture of a rainbow.  But there’s nothing far-fetched or silly about it when you think on it.

Every creation in your world, from your iPhone to your T-shirt, to your coffee grounds, to that song on Spotify, is the result of someone’s idea or dream.  There’s a Latin phrase I love,

Agere sequiter credere

It means, roughly, “Action follows belief.”  This isn’t aspirational, it’s a logical necessity, baked into the structure of reality.  My favorite economist, Ludwig von Mises, defines the preconditions for all purposeful action:

• Discontentment with one’s present state
• A vision of something better
• Belief in the ability to get there

Every element of our experience – from norms and traditions, to languages and laws, to eggs and bacon – came about as a result of discontentment, vision (or dream), and belief.  Someone had to dream of crossing an ocean as a precondition to building a ship.  The city your were born in is likely one outgrowth of that dream.

In a very real sense, reality is the sum of people’s dreams.  In a very real sense, when you expand yours, and have the boldness to pursue them, you add them to the sum and expand reality.

My good friend TK Coleman likes to say that reality will expand to accommodate your dreams.  We might also say that reality will expand as a result of them.

Advice-seekers sometimes betray answers they already know by the questions they ask.

Quora is a good place to witness this.

A good rule before you ask a question of others is to start with yourself.  Obviously, asking yourself the question you want to ask doesn’t do a lot.  You’ve probably already done it and not found a definite answer.

Instead of asking yourself the question, ask yourself why you’re asking the question.  And be really honest.

Sometimes the true reason you’re asking is to impress someone, or to get attention, or because you want shared responsibility for your choice, or because you already know the answer but you don’t like it so you want to fish for a way out.

Learn why you’re asking the question and you’ll often answer it.

Why do people get bored?  I’m really asking.  That’s not rhetorical.

It cannot be lack of access to interesting ideas.  The world is pregnant with wonder.

It cannot be lack of engaging activities.  There’s an infinite number of things to do at any given moment.

I’ve been bored before.  Not often.  I can’t really understand my own boredom.  How was I bored?  There are so many thoughts to think, questions to ask, skills to practice, jokes to tell.

What’s the fundamental fact that leads to boredom?  Is it fear of newness?  Laziness?

I guess if you get bored, you can spend some time on this question.

————————-

UPDATE: one great answer, emailed to me here.

I’m trying a new thing.

Every Sunday, I’m going to post a book recommendation on the platform Yours.org.

I love exploring new platforms, and the cool thing about Yours is you have to pay to post an article (10 cents in Bitcoin Cash), you have to pay to vote (similar to a “like” on Facebook), and the author can set up a paywall for the content and comments.

Book recommendations are funny things.  The more generously you make them, the less valuable they are to people.

An unsolicited list of good books is likely to get ignored.  A single book maybe a little less so (less cognitive overload).  A recommendation with some context and a review might do a little better.

Actually buying the book for someone might help, but it often backfires…”free” is easy to perceive as “not that valuable”.

What if you had already paid a few cents to get the recommendation?  You’d feel invested.  You’d feel like, since you paid for the rec, it only makes sense to buy the book now, right?  It was worth learning about, so it’s a small step to assume it’s worth reading.

Anyway, we’ll see!

Check out today’s recommendation on Yours.

If nothing else, it’s a good excuse for me to get more people comfortable using cryptocurrency!