Category: Commentary

My son does a rock climbing class every week. Today, he remarked how funny it is to hear hardcore climbers talk, because their lingo is like a foreign language. 

I just watched a recap of the Kentucky Derby, and had the same thought. The world of horse racing has a language as comfortable to its participants as 80’s power ballads are to me.

Technically, these all share the same language.  But practically, they are as inaccessible to an outsider as a conversation in Spanish or Cantonese to an English-only speaker.

It makes me think about the definition of a language. How many are there?  Is it infinite?  What’s the line betweeen accent, jargon, dialect, and language?

Some games you can hack and bump with no fouls. Others get ticky-tacky and call every touch. Still others are inconsistent and make calls to stop and start runs and momentum swings to make it feel balanced.

The point is that it doesn’t matter how the game is called. Greatness can adapt and win under any conditions. What matters is knowing how the game will be called so you can exploit it.

The longer you complain about how it should be called, the less time you have to get an edge by playing to the way it is being called. 

Someone who can only succeed with a certain type of calls isn’t great. Someone who plays the same no matter what isn’t great either.  Greatness requires adjusting the game you practiced in the gym to the one being called under the lights. 

You can’t control what you don’t have a stake in.

Likewise, you can’t be controlled if no one has a stake in you.

Jesus said the devil had nothing in him.  He didn’t say the devil had nothing on him, or no leverage over him.  Anyone can use information about you as dirt on you.  Anyone can use their perceived position, or your desires, to have something over you.  But the only real harm is when you let those things in you, let them claim a piece of you, let them have an equity share.

Let them do and say what they will.  Let them plot and scheme and attempt manipulation.  If you don’t need them, they have nothing in you.  If they have no hooks in you, you won’t turn when they pull their strings.

Fans are fun, customers are crucial.

Fans tell you keep going no matter what, customers seek value.

Fans have lots of positive and negative feedback, customers have their wallets.

Fans can make you feel like a millionaire or a schlub, customers can make you one.

Fans want your time and attention and want to give you theirs, customers want results and give you what they think it’s worth.

Fans want to know what you think, customers want to experience what you build.

Fans like big movements and camaraderie, customers like effectiveness, even if lonely.

Fans like your personality, customers respect your product.

Work-life balance is an overrated concept.

Even if you think only in terms of your work, you’ll find need for ample time outside, with others, excercising, unplugged, creating, and consuming new ideas.  Focusing on good work alone will lead you to this. Good work demands it. You don’t need to separately worry about your personal self as distinct from your productive self.

You can if you want. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just overrated. 

Getting “right” personally as a precondition to professional growth is overrated too. Personal problems and stresses are discovered and improved better and more often through productive work than through avoiding it to get personal.

Finding your passion is more likely if you’re busy creating value. 

Finding yourself is easier if you have a context within which to apply yourself and get feedback from the world. 

Self-reflection is improved by real world experience, not a prerequisite for it.

Get busy building something. Your personal problems will begin to assume proper proportion.  You’ll know yourself better and improve yourself more if you’re productive. 

I think it’s a decent default rule to take the lowest pay you can for the first decade or so of your career.

If you ignore pay and focus on other things, I’m willing to bet you’ll be happier and earn more pay a decade in than someone who maximizes pay from day one.

I’ll walk you through my own example to explain some of the reasons I think this is true.

An early choice

It wasn’t a dramatic sell-your-soul-for-riches moment, but at age 19 I had a juicy job offer.  I had just gotten married, had no job (nor did my wife), zero cash, and a mortgage to pay.  I was working odd electrical and landscape gigs and sending out resumes.

I had a job opportunity that my friends were jealous of.  It had a $45k base salary, company car, plus commission.  They said I’d likely make around $50k in my first year.

I said no.

I wasn’t really excited about the job, but I could’ve been fine with it.  Beyond looking for something more connected to my interests and skills, I also knew this job had a fairly low ceiling.  I’ve never been primarily motivated by money, but I knew some middle aged people who had essentially the same job and I knew their life seemed pretty mediocre to me, financially and otherwise.

Instead, I got a job I was thrilled about that paid $25k.  I excelled, and it led to several next steps with slightly higher pay.  Here’s my first eight years in the professional world.

My actual pay trajectory:

Year 1: $25,000
Year 2: $28,000
Year 3: $35,000
Year 4: $35,000
Year 5: $40,000
Year 6: $40,000
Year 7: $45,000
Year 8: $75,000

Seven years in, I was still making less than that first offer I turned down.  I never focused on pay.  I don’t think I ever asked for a raise.  That year seven job probably paid me too much too.  I would’ve done it for $40k, but I wasn’t going to turn down the higher offer.

Let’s compare my pay trajectory to a very reasonable estimate of what I would’ve pulled in over the same eight years with the other job.

My forgone pay trajectory:

Year 1: $50,000
Year 2: $55,000
Year 3: $60,000
Year 4: $60,000-$65,000
Year 5: $60,000-$65,000
Year 6: $60,000-$65,000
Year 7: $60,000-$70,000
Year 8: $60,000-$70,000

The job had a pretty consistent ceiling.  The best performers made somewhere between $60-70k.  It wasn’t a role or industry that really had a clear path to something else within either.  A jump to something totally new can always be made – I’ve done it myself more than once – but one of the dangers with high pay early is that it makes those jumps harder and less likely.

So for seven years, I looked like a poor sucker compared to my company car driving alternate self.  But by year eight, I not only surpassed the ceiling of the previous trajectory, but had massive amounts of opportunity and social capital at my disposal, not to mention greater fulfillment in my work.

Why does it work this way?

I think there are several reasons I was better off taking the lowest pay my wife and I could handle for nearly every job for the first several years.  If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t find a way to live on even less and worry even less about pay.

For me, lower pay early on meant several things:

1. It was easier to be impressive

A great way to get ahead in your career is to always strive to be the best employee anywhere you work.  Not all employees are equal, and this is where low pay can be a big advantage.

A young $35k worker gets noticed for being just a little above average.  A young $60k worker, on the other hand, had better be pretty damn good to command that salary early in their career.

You can stand out to your colleagues and the broader world pretty easily when you’re a low paid employee.  Soon, you develop a reputation.  “Hey, have you met that young dude from that one place?  What a hustler.  Maybe he’d be a good fit for this…”  Again, this works both internally at a company and externally.

I had little problem establishing myself as impressive because being obviously worth more than a low salary is doable with a little hustle.  A great reputation built over those first several low pay years can catapult you to a higher pay in ten years than yearly cost of living increases at a fatter starting point.

2. It was easier to find what I loved and hated

$50k isn’t quite golden handcuffs, but it’s kind of like copper handcuffs.  Early, that’s a lot of money.  Once you’ve tasted it, it’s very hard to go back.  One problem my wife and I have is that we’ve always managed to live right up to our level of income.  Always.  Once you have high pay, going back is brutal.

This means that if you discover two years in you never want to audit tax documents again, it might be too late.  Not just to change, but to even see it.  You actually become worse at knowing yourself and being honest with yourself if you are paid a lot.  You weave stories about how much you kinda sorta like it, or how you’ll leave in five years.  Lies.  I saw many people do it.

Self-discovery is too important to play servant to your early income goals.

3. It was easier to find new opportunities

Opportunities travel through the grapevine.  You have to be sending a frequency that others tune into in order to find them.  People have a rough idea how much you make.  If you are a young hotshot with a big salary, I can almost guarantee someone somewhere has said, “Hey, she’d be a good fit…but doesn’t she make like $50k right now?  This role starts at $35k.  Doubt she’d do it.  Who else?”

I’ve said it about people many times.  Sometimes, the person in question was too senior for the role, but sometimes they were perfect for it but their pay was just too senior for the role.  Some of them will be making about the same in five years, where the role I decided not to consider them for could have blossomed into much more than that.

I got some very cool opportunities for jobs and side gigs that I never would have gotten had I started at the $50k job.  Low opportunity cost was my secret weapon.

You don’t realize it, but a highly paid young person is like a red flag to people looking for hungry young talent.  Salary maximizers often miss out on the best long-term opportunities.

4. It was easier to act on new opportunities

Even if you manage to gain self-knowledge, and you manage to find cool opportunities, if you’re earning bookoo bucks early, seizing them isn’t easy.

Again, the copper handcuffs begin to chafe.  You are used to a certain standard of living afforded by your high pay.  It can be hard to move to completely different areas and maintain it.  I had little trouble early on saying no to bad fitting roles and yes to cool ones with low pay.  I started at $25k and we learned to live on that (we had our first child while I was still making $28k for goodness sake!), so new opportunities weren’t big sacrifices.

Focus on what matters

Go in to each job with a mission to be the best employee there.  To create the most value, have the most fun, capture the company vision and help build on it, learn everything you can, help as many people as possible.  Don’t turn down a job you like over a few thousand in salary.  Don’t haggle over an offer to ratchet up the pay inch by inch.  Ignore salary altogether if you can.  Focus on building value for yourself and others.

I’m willing to bet the entire $50k I passed on in year one that you’ll be doing better a decade down the road than those who maximize pay above all.

I watched Greg Popovich in a press conference the other night and loved it. 

Pop is cold, short, sometimes rude.  Once upon a time, I would’ve thought it needlessly impolite. I placed a higher value then on gentle interactions and decorum. I’m not a naturally rude person, and I looked for sunshine in others and felt uncomfortable if it wasn’t there.  I’ve always liked direct people, but preferred it colored with a smile. 

Every year that goes by I value politeness less.  I don’t really care about rudeness. In more and more instances, I think it’s actually preferable to be colder.

I’m not sure why. I do not feel jaded or bitter or cynical. If anything, I’m more at peace, optmistic, and fulfilled than ever.  Maybe that’s it. Perhaps offense at impoliteness betrays nagging tension with our own relationship to the world. 

Or maybe I’m just getting old. 

One in ten is a generous estimate of medical professionals who are highly knowledgeable and passionate about their work.  This is based entirely on my own interactions with everything from surgeons, specialists, pediatricians, ER doctors, and more.

From a customer standpoint, this sucks.  A tepid box-checker is a poor vendor of any good or service, not just health.  When you get your car fixed, you want the guy who’s fascinated by the clunking noise and getting all House M.D. in his zeal to find and fix it.  You want the lifetime gearhead who dreams about pistons at night.  When it’s your body, you want the actual House M.D.

But you’re almost never going to get it.

Most medical professionals aren’t very sharp, interested, passionate, or eager.  Not trying to be rude, they just aren’t.  It’s almost always a lackluster if not downright crappy experience.  They aren’t thrilled by sleuthing the root cause behind the symptoms in your unique body.  They rattle off tons of drugs they haven’t studied that might dull the symptoms, classify you with a government/insurance approved code, order several useless tests, and blather some condescending thing about flu-shots or the latest seasonal scare.

I suspect the reasons for the disinterest in most medical professionals are several.

1. They pursued the career for prestige, not intrinsic interest.
2. Intrinsic interest was beaten out of them in the industrial schooling system.
3. They are protected by a labyrinth of government regulations and monopoly status, so the incentive is to master the government game rather than master the craft, since the former is rewarded and the latter isn’t.
4. They have grown intellectually arrogant and stagnant due to the universal respect and awe in which they are held by a credential-worshiping media and public.
5. They were schooled in a “lump of dough” philosophy that treats problems and solutions in aggregate and plays down biological diversity while playing up one-size-fits all scientism.

It seems dentists, and especially chiropractors, have a much higher rate of deep interest in their field.  Midwives and doulas have a ridiculous, almost pathological love for their craft.

Not surprisingly, they have less of all of the above.  Their fields are less prestigious, less monopolized and cartelized with legal privilege, and they are less revered.  In the midwife/doula case, they almost never get reimbursed by insurance or recommended by the health industry, so they have to win and keep customers themselves like a self-respecting market participant.  They often face legal obstacles that make their practice borderline banned.  You’ve gotta be driven by a deep interest to persist in those cases.

Incentives matter more than anyone thinks.  The medical licensing regime is one of the more pernicious and pervasive elements of society.

My son told me about a plot he created for a dystopian movie.  It involved dissidents being sent to a dreaded penal colony another planet away, never to interact with the home civilization again.   When they got there, they realized it wasn’t the hell they feared and fled from their whole lives, but a paradise filled with the best minds (the kind who would be banished from a despotic society).  Incidentally, the only way to discover paradise a planet away was to be captured and banished, since no one there had any way to inform others about what was waiting on the other side of the law.

It got me thinking about examples of similar expectational twists, when the most deeply dreaded outcome turns out to be better than anything you could’ve imagined.  Especially those where there is no way of knowing how good it can be until you do it.

Everyone fears the horror of a world without government support for education.  What if no one could afford to go to school?  Most assume hell, I think it would be delightful.  Our transition into unschooling was a microcosm of this realization.

Leaving your loved ones sounds terrifying to most.  What if you were uprooted from your hometown, leaving all friends, family, and network behind, forced to start fresh in a new city far away?  Few things are more amazing and valuable for personal growth.  In fact, the more you fear it, the more you probably need to do it.  And you can’t ever access what’s on the other side without biting the bullet and saying goodbye.

My son was convinced our new baby would ruin the balance in the family, taking his happiness with it.  He came home and met his baby brother and told me his months of stress were for naught.  Maybe that’s what inspired his plot.

I suspect death will be the ultimate plot twist of fear into wonder.  Guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Ignore everyone.

My daughter loves Moana.  We watched it again the other day.  I love the scene where the protagonist as a toddler walks right into the ocean after a seashell – something her cautious and fearful father would’ve never allowed.

The water parted.  She was in awe and playful, totally ignorant of the fact that toddling into the ocean is dangerous.  Her wide-eyed ignorance is the very thing that allowed her to experience the magic and power of her calling.  Had she known more, been better “educated”, she’d have never left the shore.

I often think about what I know now, four years in to building Praxis.  If I had known it back when I began, I never would have launched.  It would have been foolish.  I was nowhere near prepared to build what needed to be built.  My ignorance of the dangers of the journey turned out to be the most necessary asset.

You have to become like a little child to embark on the biggest adventures.

Yesterday I decided to blog in the evening, since the day was helter skelter.  Instead, we had a baby in the evening and I completely forgot about the blog post.  I’m glad I did. ;-)  I’m pre-dating this one so it appears as if I didn’t miss a day.  Helps my OCD.

Kobe and Shaq were dominant.  Three titles and every reason to believe more on the horizon.

But Shaq likes to have fun while Kobe wants to kill.  They didn’t get along.  Kobe wanted to win, but not as much as he wanted to win his way.  Kobe didn’t fight to keep Shaq around.  He let one of the greatest duos in basketball break up.  LA fans hated Kobe for it.  Everyone mocked him.  He didn’t care.

Winning was almost everything for Kobe. Winning his way was everything.

He cared not what anyone else thought.  He was willing to risk several more titles to be able to build and lead a team his way.  They sucked after Shaq left.  People jeered.  Kobe didn’t listen.  Instead, he climbed the mountain without the big man and willed LA to two more titles, Shaqless, and no question of who’s team it was and how it happened.

Selfish?  Maybe.  Short-sighted?  Perhaps.  Kobe doesn’t worry about that.  He focuses on what he wants.  The great ones don’t just get the results.  They live life on their terms, even when those terms decrease the odds of success.  They force success anyway.  They squeeze blood out of a stone.

That’s why I love Kobe.  I’d rather work the night shift at Wendy’s than have success on someone else’s terms.