Category: Commentary

The first time I picked up Robinson Crusoe, I was in love.

This guy is stranded on this island, and he doesn’t just survive.  He builds.  I absorbed every detail about his daily accumulation of objects, his development of processes, his constant improvements to his shelter-turned-fortress.  It felt so good, and so right, how every day he made more of what he had.  His own little world was forged from this desolate place.  He was a king.

I took personal pride in what he built.  As the book described the trees he planted being bent to grow around his structures, and the multiple layers of protection, backups, emergency stores, and contingencies, I felt the same way I do crossing an item off my to-do list.

I never understood why I loved that book so much.  I still don’t fully understand it, but I think it has to do with independence, progress, and control.

Two decades after my first encounter with Crusoe, I found myself addicted to a new piece or creative content.  When things with my business or family got really stressful – and stressful in ways that felt largely outside of my control – I’d gravitate to my phone and immerse myself in my new addiction every spare minute waiting for the microwave to beep or the kids to brush their teeth.  Clash of Clans on the iPhone.

I started from scratch and built a village, piece by piece.  Raids were buffeted, resources obtained, and every day, despite attacks and setbacks, progress was made.  Walls became stronger, buildings larger, extraction devices more efficient, armies more powerful.  I felt the same elation that reading Robinson Crusoe generated.  I was methodically conquering the environment to build wealth.  It was all in my hands, stoically fulfilling daily tasks and watching capital accumulate, which made the tasks more efficient and the accumulation greater, over and over until a shack became a castle.  And then a better one.

The catharsis provided by the book and the app felt the same.  A place I get could lost in.  A place where my efforts and persistence alone allowed a steady growth in stores.  It’s the opposite feeling of a traffic jam, where progress is entirely out of your control and feels completely up to chance.  Sure, raids or bad weather could set back my clan or Crusoe’s efforts, but these could be factored in as known risks, and made the game of building with them in mind all the more fun.

I never got excited by Crusoe enjoying the fruits of his labor.  Just the building itself.  I never had a goal with Clash of Clans to gain social approval or win some tournament, I just wanted my village to get stronger.  When I played LEGO as a kid I never wanted to do anything with my buildings and cities, I just wanted to keep building and upgrading them.  I never understood friends who wanted to “play” with them.  They are for building!

There’s something cathartic for me in gradual, steady, individual progress, notched every day.  I guess that’s part of why I blog every day.  I’m amassing a wealth of posts, and no one and nothing can stop me.  It’s my project, and it will steadily grow.

Building is my happy place.

When you pursue an opportunity sometimes you meet resistance.  You can push through it or quit.  Both are acceptable and there’s a right time for each.

Here’s my theory: If the resistance is enough to make you quit, you never should have pursued it in the first place.

If I’m going to start something, I try to ask myself, “Am I willing to stick with this even if I face resistance?”  If not, I don’t start.  If yes, I remind myself of this little internal conversation later when I meet the resistance.

Few things make you look worse than to go after something only to take your first ‘no’ for an answer.  And few things are worse for your confidence and focus.  The answer is not to persist in everything – a great many things should be abandoned.  The answer is to learn from the fact that you didn’t care enough to persist, and try to foresee that before you begin the next time.

If it’s not worth a big effort, don’t put in a small effort.  That smaller number of things you go after will get a more intense stream of your attention, be more fun, and succeed more often.

Envy is the most socially and personally corrosive sentiment. 

Universal basic income is rooted firmly in it.

The state is the most destructive and perverse institution in history. 

Universal basic income expands its scope.

Apples to apples comparisons aren’t much better than apples to oranges.

Size, season, ripeness, and an infinite number of other factors make each apple unique.  You can’t really say which is better in an overarching sense, only which gets you more of a particular quality given its other attributes.  You can decide which apple has the most surplus upside after the downside is subtracted.

Your narrative is your apple.  All that matters is how it compares to what you desire of yourself, given your traits and preferences.  Did you get the most out of what you had?

Forget the other apples.  Compare yours to what it can be (hint: it can be a lot juicier than you think, so don’t aim low).

One of my favorite insights is embedded in the heart of economics.  Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Bernard de Mandeville’s grumbling hive, Bastiat’s “Paris gets fed”, Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil”, and F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order all describe the phenomenon.  Order isn’t always planned, and planning doesn’t always generate order.

How can we resist our impulse to control, and instead harness the power of emergent patterns?

I had an amazing dream last night.

I was in a CVS in New York City (seems more likely it would have been a Duane Reade, but it was a dream).  For some reason, people congregated around the checkout counter.  I think I was working there at this point, though it changed throughout the dream.  One guy made an offhand comment about how socialism is a nice idea and he wishes the word didn’t have a bad rap. 

He picked the wrong lane. 

I politely disagreed, and explained why socialism is doomed to cause unnecessary pain and suffering always and everywhere, since it cuts off the life-giving signals of the market price system.  This persuaded him. So much so that he gathered everyone else around and asked me to explain further. 

Like I said, it was a dream. 

I gave an impromptu nine-minute speech on the price system and the beauty of markets.  I have no idea why it was nine minutes, but it was.  I described why political allocation of resources will fall far short compared to free flowing markets every time, good intentions or not.  I have historical and hypothetical examples. 

A TV monitor near the ceiling began showing imagery corresponding to my arguments. It was a full scale production. At the end, everyone clapped, then chattered excitedly amongst themselves about the wonders profit, loss, and freedom.

There was a brief Q&A, and the only question I remember was from a woman with a Russian accent. She said, “Maybe not everyone needs free market capitalism”. I said, “Like not everyone needs electricity”. It seemed brilliant at the time, and a wave of enlightenment swept over the gathered hoard.

The oddest thing about the dream was the speech, because I remember giving the full monologue and being very aware of the arguments – even working to string them together in my head and put them to words. It wasn’t a foggy bunch of impressions the way dreams usually are.  It was a clear delivery of carefully considered prose.  I actually felt the same kind of tired afterwards that I do when I give a talk in real life.  I woke up feeling like I’d actually given an impromptu nine-minute speech. 

Maybe somewhere on another dimension, the good people of New York got an earful about why freedom is better than force.

Not long after Praxis launched, a handful of self-described free-market professors attacked it.

These weren’t strangers.  These were friendly acquaintances and colleagues.  In fact, they were people who shared lots of ideas and interests, and to whom I’d paid stipends and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for in my previous job.

They espoused the virtues of liberty, entrepreneurship, voluntary exchange, and markets.  Yet from behind their government-funded, cartelized institutions, they lobbed criticism when I launched a market alternative.  They didn’t like it.  Not one bit.

There were a handful of blog posts and a steady drip of subtle and not so subtle digs on social media.  There were a few conniving backroom arrangements intended to hamper young people in their non-profit programs from joining my for-profit company.  There was even one public shaming and mocking of a Praxis applicant.

None of this is a big deal, and it’s funny now that it bothered me then.  But bootstrapping a business is mentally and emotionally demanding, and in those early days, unexpected resistance from would-be allies felt tough.  It takes a while to realize how important it is to ignore non-customers.

My favorite criticism was a long Facebook rant warning young people to look out because, *gasp*, we were trying to sell you something! (Queue ominous music).

Better yet, it accused us of being “ShamWow salesmen”.

The irony of this criticism is so layered I hardly know where to begin.

It’s an odd insult when a taxpayer subsidized professor says you’re like one of those dirty people who try to earn voluntary customers by touting the easily examined benefits of a product.  Say what you will about ShamWow, nobody was taxed for it.  Their claims are pretty straightforward, and if incorrect, they’ll lose market share fast.  Oh, and you don’t need Federally subsidized loans to afford it.  You can probably get refunds too.  And a shower squeegee and fridge magnet if you order now!

The depth of depravity in the college system is so great that a professor is more worried about a one-year program with a net cost of zero that gets you working directly at a startup with a 98% employment rate at an average $50,000 starting salary than a five year sentence in classrooms bearing an average $37,000 in debt where 62% of grads have no job or one that doesn’t require a degree.

Praxis participants – especially when we first launched – face a mountain of skepticism from parents, teachers, and mentors.  This makes them highly informed customers.  One early participant spent an entire summer researching the costs and benefits of college vs. alternatives like Praxis and presented her parents with a full D-ring binder to make her case before winning them over.

Meanwhile, hapless 17-year-olds are being pressured into six figure colleges, saddled with inescapable debt, and sent packing on an experience that fewer than half of them will complete, and fewer than half who do will get a job they couldn’t have gotten first anyway. (In fairness, the graduation rate rises a little above half…if you give six years to complete a four year degree).

Colleges face no market discipline, something these free-marketers are usually keen on, and enjoy countless advantages from billions in direct state and federal spending to subsidized debt to licensing regimes that require degrees to a K-12 system run by people dead-set on prioritizing and preaching college above all.

So here’s this startup, fully transparent, operating on revenue earned directly from voluntary customers, saying check us out for a year, we’ll give you experience and skills and a network and curriculum and community and coaching and the cost is zero.  Sound like something out of a libertarian professor’s nightmare?  I didn’t think so, but apparently I underestimated how much ideology can be separate from lifestyle in the Ivory Tower.

Anyway, I never responded.  Instead, it became an inside joke, so much so that one of our advisors created the image above with my face on the ShamWow commercial.

It’s been several years, but for some reason I started thinking about this whole thing today.  At the time, it seemed like it mattered.  Now it’s completely irrelevant.  The success of Praxis doesn’t need one iota of tenured professorial support.  It only matters today to the extent I choose to remember it and use it as a source of humor and inspiration.

Customers matter.  Nobody else does.

I don’t revel in criticism.  I have no interest in picking fights.  I don’t like it that some random people who have never been customers have given us one-star reviews on Facebook.  I don’t like it when people get personal or irrational or angry at us.  But I don’t care either.  If I can get a laugh out of it, I will.  If I can manufacture a chip on my shoulder from it, I will.  Mostly, I ignore it.

Bonus, I get some fun stories to share.

I like to tie up loose ends quickly.  I like to resolve things.  But the more complex the problems I deal with, the more valuable discomfort becomes.

If I resist the urge to immediately alleviate the pain point, hours, days, or weeks later I might get deeper insight and better solutions.  Early in my career and life, this wasn’t true.  The problems I faced were simpler, and direct, impatient action was better 99% of the time.  As I level up, the source and nature of problems get more varied and complex, and the better I am at living with some unresolved thorns in my side, the better I get at not just removing them, but eliminating the thorn bushes. (I almost wrote “from whence they came”, but realized how needless and dumb it sounded).

It’s hard to live with open problems, but I’m getting better at it.  When you own a business, you have to.  If you ask me what’s going on with the company, I’ll think of ten things we need to improve.  We are always improving, but there are always more weaknesses and vulnerabilities and opportunities to consider.  Always.  It’s not like an artistic project or science experiment that gets finished.  There’s no right or wrong.  There’s just better.  And better always beckons, day and night.

I used to get stressed by it.  Then I got used to it.  Now I kind of love it and thrive on it.

There are tons of smart people when it comes to just about any topic.  Yet everyone but me is an idiot when it comes to me.

I’ve never once regretted ignoring everyone else when choosing how to live my life.  That only sounds arrogant if you’re in denial.  The truth is, you are always the only one who can choose, and you always choose based on your own internal compass.

To not choose is to make a choice.

To do what others tell you is to choose to value their opinion.

No matter how you slice it, it’s you choosing, and you can only choose based on your own beliefs and preferences.

The only difference is between knowing it’s all you and pretending it’s not.  Once you embrace your inescapable autonomy, you’ve got to confront your true beliefs and preferences.  The person you wish you were, the person others think you are, the person you want to be, and the person you are must square off.  No escape.  Stop trying to find one.

When you arrive at this point, everyone else is an idiot on the matter.  Only you know what’s really what (and even knowing that is damn hard).  Stop looking to them.  Stop being falsely humble and falsely wise.

You are right.  You just have to decide what you’re right about.

Mass adoption of the internal combustion engine is about a century old.

Think about what it did to the world in ten decades.  The entire structure of cities, suburbs, cultural enclaves, and population patterns are based around roads built for engine powered objects.  Modern maps have a vehicle-centric perspective, which shapes our mental models of our environment, time, and space.

Commutes are a thing. With them morning shows, podcasts, audiobooks, gas stations, fast food, and convenience stores. Road trips are a thing.  Diners, hotel chains, fireworks warehouses, scenic overlooks.

People who don’t live on water can own boats and tow them to lakes. People who live in cities can RV to the wilderness.

The entire retail industry as we know it is possible only with trucks and container cars.

Air travel exists, shrinking the globe, proliferating styles and ideas, and making one day business across countries possible.

Modern excavation needs no shovels, opening opportunity for projects of massive scale in no time with few workers.

The petroleum industry exists, accounts for large portions of GDP, and makes many people’s retirement accounts capable of providing a home in Florida.

Entire genres of food and film are based on engines and their outgrowths.

That’s just a top of the head start.  If you thought about it for five minutes, you could list twenty more radical transformations.

Now consider: The internet has only been widely adopted for a few decades.  Imagine what it will do given just 100 years?

There’s a saying that goes, “If you want to know who controls you, ask who you’re not allowed to criticize.”

That may be roughly true in terms of who’s trying to force you into something, but that’s not the same as knowing who has power.  In fact, when it comes to finding out who is powerful, I think the opposite is true.  I say,

If you want to know who has power, ask who you can criticize freely and openly.

If a person or group has to force you to withhold negative opinions, they lack power.  It may be that they incorrectly perceive themselves as powerless, but believing you are powerless is self-fulfilling.

The truly powerful aren’t threatened by criticism.  The fearful and powerless are.  The weak and panicked seek the use of force and control to protect their fragile identities.  The powerful don’t care.  Your good opinion isn’t required for their success.

It’s easy to see people, groups, and ideas protected by strong legal or cultural controls and conclude they are the power brokers.  If you’re not allowed to criticize the priest, professor, or politician, they must be the puppet-masters.  This conclusion is false.  Their fragility drives them to violence, threat, and manipulation.

Meanwhile, those with genuine power are comfortable being lampooned.  They are as likely to laugh at satire at their expense as to ignore it.

When an opinion is shut down by force, weakness hides behind the threat.  When criticism is free to fly, power hides behind it.

If you want to know who has power, ask who gets poked fun of and criticized with abandon.

*I am referring in this post to power in a general, value-neutral way.  Power can be used for a great many things, but true power doesn’t require force, threat, manipulation, control or propaganda.  The powerful are not always who they seem.

Anyone who knows anything about sports, check the date of this article.  Then read and remember: It’s not over until it’s over.

When you say it’s over.  Not them.

You have less to lose than you think.  You have more to gain than you can imagine, even if it fails.

We tend to over-scrutinize action, change, and unknowns, and under-scrutinize our current situation.  Most change happens at the margin anyway.  How precious are those marginal perceived benefits of known mediocrity versus the marginal risks of unknown potential greatness?

It’s not about the great feeling of reaching the summit.  That won’t be as great as you think.  It’s about the new summits that come into view when you get there.