In relentless pursuit of freedom.
It’s the time of year when family and holiday events take up the days and nights, and a new year is nigh. I’m trying to sit back and enjoy it before the flurry in 2016. Just a few new happenings…
And a lot more. Stay tuned. For now, join me in a little relaxation even as you finish your work for the year.
NBA great Stephen Curry has a chip on his shoulder. It’s clear when you watch him play. Even as he’s gotten better, it’s grown bigger. This is what great performers do. They play with a chip.
Steph is a great example of how the factual truth of a situation by itself does not dictate what kind of orientation we have toward it. There are two stories about Steph Curry, both true.
In one story he was born with great genes to an NBA star dad and volleyball playing mom. He grew up with plenty of money and access to basketball training facilities, coaches, mentors, and opportunities galore. He honed his skills, went to a good school, played well, got drafted for good money, and continued excel with a great team and organization around him.
By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the most fortunate people on earth. How could this gifted athlete have a chip on his shoulder?
In another story Steph grew up with more pressure than most people could imagine. His star athlete parents had done more than most kids could ever hope to in sports. He lived under their shadow. He didn’t grow as tall as he should have for basketball, and was too skinny. Despite practicing the sport almost from birth, not a single major college was interested in him. He ended up at a tiny liberal arts school. He played well, but he was not fortunate enough to be on a team with any hope of a national title. Despite his amazing shooting ability and NCAA tournament performance, Steph was questioned as an NBA talent. He was seen as too small, and mostly just a shooter without a full range of skills. He entered the league with virtually no hype compared to most future MVP’s. He had to scratch and claw through a historically great Western Conference for the first several years of his career before making it to the finals. When there, even though the team he led won, he did not get finals MVP.
By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the biggest underdog greats in sports history. How could this constantly overlooked late-bloomer not have a chip on his shoulder?
Steph can choose which set of facts to focus on and which narrative to tell himself. Off the court, Steph is likely aware of the great life he’s had and thankful for it. Remembering the best facts about ourselves is a powerful defense against self-pity. Yet it seems pretty clear that, come game day, he’s thinking about the second story. He’s not just happy to be there. He’s got something to prove.
At Praxis we like to tell the participants at the start of the program these two bits of professional advice:
The first is a reminder to think in terms of rational choice theory. Deciding someone is wrong or out to get you is unhelpful for determining how to work around them.
The second is a reminder to stay sharp because no one cares about your success. In fact, if you’re doing your own thing, they probably doubt you. Good. Use that. Not with malice toward them in real life, but as fuel for the narrative you weave of your own hero’s journey.
See, we can all be like Steph Curry after all! Now go watch some amazing highlight videos.
It’s nice to be liked. Early in life, it’s the best social currency for collaborating with others. If people don’t like you, they won’t invite you to their birthday parties.
As you progress and enter the productive world being liked is still nice, but it fades further into the background as the primary metric for who will collaborate with you. It gets overshadowed in importance by being respected.
I’ve worked with people everyone loved but had little respect for and people everyone respected but didn’t like. Everyone would rather have a beer with the former, but everyone would rather work with the latter.
People you work with do not need to like you.
In fact, if you feel great about how they all love you it may be a good time to think critically about how they see you. The most liked people aren’t often the most respected. If you’re worried about whether they like you, you may be failing to ensure you’ve earned their respect. If you stress about whether they make fun of you behind your back, you’ve got the wrong focus.
People you work with need to respect you.
Ask yourself if they do. Do they want you to have ownership over projects? Do they trust you implicitly? Would they speak highly of your work, even if they made fun of your personality? If so, they probably respect you.
I don’t mean to imply it’s a complete trade-off. You can be liked and respected, which is an amazing combo. The challenge is the more you are liked, the better it feels in the short term and the more incentive there is to protect it. When you start worrying about protecting your reputation as “fun” or “nice” you can stray from what you actually do best and slip in the respect department.
The most effective teammates and certainly the most effective leaders are liked and respected. I would argue, however, that one of the primary reasons they are liked is because of how respectable they are. The likeability can grow on people. But if you lead with being liked it doesn’t tend to morph into respect over time.
Respect must be earned through a reputation of value creation. It doesn’t come with titles or business cards or corner offices or degrees or years of experience. If they don’t respect you now, they’ll respect you less when you get the promotion. To them, you’re the same person but in even further over your head.
Focus on value creation and stay above petty stuff and popularity contests. Be kind to everyone, deliver above and beyond expectations. You’ll get the respect anchored down. Then you can work on the likeability part.
*Oh, and being disliked is not the same as being respected. Don’t assume you are respected just because everyone is afraid of you or thinks you’re an a**hole. Yes, people thought Steve Jobs was an a**hole, but the causality doesn’t run that way. Most a**holes are not value-creating highly respected leaders. Never take pride in being disliked by those you work with.
I heard an interesting talk from Dan Sullivan on why 10x growth (in business, life, whatever you choose) is actually easier than 2x growth…if you get your mindset right.
He described 2x thinking as fundamentally controlled by the past. You look back at what it took to get where you are and you attempt to do more and better of the same activities, approaches, and processes.
10x thinking is controlled by the future. Since the future hasn’t yet happened, you first have to imagine the future you want. Once your idea of that future is firmly in place you work backward from it. You deconstruct what it takes to get there. You let this vision of the future determine what you do in the present. The past may occasionally provide lessons, but it’s mostly a distraction. What does the future demand? If you are to grow 10x, what would have to happen to get there?
It’s amazing how much this little insight helps. So many things we do unthinkingly just because we did them in the past. We assume they are necessary because they were before. When you ask only what the future wants, instead of replicating what the past was, your entire mindset shifts and you begin to focus only on the truly key activities and those that are scalable.
Are you a slave to the past or are you letting your vision of the future lead?
Today’s question comes from Vivek Rajasekhar:
“Does voting matter? I’d argue that, only if your preferred candidate wins by exactly one vote (i.e. you are the tie-breaker) did your vote actually produce change.”
I give my response, which is rooted in Public Choice Theory. Here’s a Public Choice primer I wrote if you want more details.
I also answer a bonus question about college football from Danny Benavidez in this, the final Ask Isaac episode of the year. I’ll be back in 2016, so submit questions anytime via this link.
This episode was sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and Praxis. If you’re high school or college aged and interested in clear thinking about the world, you should check out a free FEE seminar this summer! Tell them you heard about it here. If you’re interested in creating your own education and career path outside of the classroom, apply to Praxis. And of course, you can do both!
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away Chris Nelson was enjoying the Star Wars expanded universe. Then the evil Darth Mickey destroyed it all.
I couldn’t be more excited about the new J.J. Abrams led Star Wars movie. Chris has a different take. He joins me on this episode to explain the wide world of Star Wars beyond the movies, why Disney is ditching it, and what he thinks they’re missing. I learned a lot about the franchise and even (gulp) curbed my distaste for the prequels a tad. No small task.
This episode is sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). FEE is the best place to learn the core ideas of economics and freedom. If you’re in HS or college, you need to carve out three days for one of their amazing summer seminars. Apply here and let them know you heard about it from the podcast.
*Bonus: I discovered something fun when Googling the famous opening phrase. Google “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” and see what you get…
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
I posted this recently to Facebook:
Before vacuuming the inside of car:
“This thing is a beater. It takes too long to start, it sounds loud, I think it’s misfiring, the transmission is near shot and it has no pickup left. I just hope it lasts me another few weeks.”After vacuuming the inside of the car:
“This thing has a lot of pep! It rides so smooth for its age, and it really has some zip. I bet this car can last another ten years!”
Thinking more about how true this is for me brings to light an important fact. Even if perception does not alter physical reality, it alters emotional & psychological reality and our emotional & psychological experience is what determines our happiness in the moment.
What kind of car we have doesn’t determine our happiness. How we feel about the car we have does. What kind of misfortune befalls us does not dictate our happiness, but how we interpret and process that misfortune and the narrative we build around it.
My friend Leon is a master at creating a fun narrative and living in accordance with it. When he comes home and his power is shut off due to an unpaid bill, he laughs and chalks it up to the story of his unpredictable and fun-filled life. He actually gets more jokes and stories out of the ordeal, so it’s a plus. I remember he was elated when an overdue parking ticket (for a giant foam pig on a trailer…but that’s a different story) resulted in him being pulled over and going to jail. When he energetically tells the story, it actually makes you jealous it didn’t happen to you. But if it actually did happen to me I would’ve been pissed. It would have ruined my day. It didn’t ruin his.
Circumstances don’t change in any objective sense due to our feelings about them (though the way we approach them can lead to different outcomes). But the level of enjoyment or stress in those circumstances does.
Back to my car. It will last as long as it lasts. Physical realities, not my feelings, will determine when the engine finally conks out. Besides doing basic maintenance, I can’t change or control that. It will happen when it happens. But I can alter my quality of life in whatever number of days I left driving my car. I can experience those as enjoyable days or stressful days. If I vacuum my car out, it makes it feel less old and increases the enjoyment level and decreases the stress.
That small act – like Leon telling jokes about his misfortune – alters my perception of the situation and increases my quality of life. It matters.
A few things I’ve been consuming lately and really enjoying…
I’ve gotten so many emails from bored, unhappy college students in the last few weeks I decided to write a post addressed directly to them and others like them.
You can check it out over at the Praxis blog. Here’s an excerpt:
You haven’t done much more than read textbooks and sit through lectures. You haven’t been around many entrepreneurs, innovators, or creators. You begin to suspect that your grades aren’t a reflection of your value-creating potential in the market. You begin to wonder why they matter at all. Same goes for your second major…and your first. You ask yourself what your plan was coming here in the first place and realize you didn’t really have one. It just sort of seemed like the next stage on the conveyor belt moving you along to an undefined “normal” life.
Here’s the good news. You can get off the conveyor belt.
If you want to explore whether you might be a good fit for Praxis, shoot us an email.
“Let’s grab coffee and chat.”
Those five words are far more dangerous than you may realize. When you begin to create, start a business, write a blog, or generally do interesting stuff a funny thing happens. Lots of people want to have coffee with you. Most of the time it’s a bad idea.
Face to face meetings can be valuable. There’s an energy that you don’t get any other way. But the cost is very high, and it’s extremely rare to gain that energy with a stranger. Unless you know from interactions over email, social media, or phone that you and this person have mutual interests and will both be spurred to beneficial action by a coffee meeting, avoid it.
It’s not that coffee isn’t fun. That’s the problem. It is fun. Waxing about how much you love innovation or art is a blast. But that’s not scarce. There are more opportunities to talk about cool things than ever before. What’s scarce is conversation that leads directly to productivity.
There are professional coffee drinkers. People who spend all day asking others to coffee to talk. They keep talking, meeting, discussing, exploring, plotting, networking, devising, gaining input, seeking inspiration, building consensus, creating boards and backers and teams for non-existent organizations or efforts. These people will consume you.
(One of my theories is that they are actually robots placed by an alien race that feels threatened by creative action on the part of humans. They sent a host of coffee-sipping droids disguised as cool people who love your idea as a way to slow you down. They are fueled by caffeine and lack of follow through. Just a theory.)
It’s easy to emulate this behavior. You get a quick high from talking about big ideas with cool people over hot drinks. Hammering out the next steps and taking them is no fun. The coffee grinds taste better than the work grind. (See what I did there?). It’s easy to seek the next quick inspiring hit via another quick coffee or phone meeting. Then again. And again.
Working for a non-profit increases susceptibility. Absent profit and loss it can be hard to measure success. As a result, many non-profiters report activities as a proxy for outcomes. If you’re a program manager and you report that you had an amazing meeting with a really cool person who runs similar program X, your superiors are likely to think, “This gal is really going out there and doing a lot of stuff!”. (In fact, non-profits are so predictably prone to the meeting-as-work conflation that I can tell without looking when someone works for one. They send meeting requests not for a 15 or 20-minute phone call, but a full hour with an open-ended, “Can I pick your brain?”)
None of us are above it. It’s flattering to be asked to coffee by someone who thinks your stuff is great. But it almost always eats away a huge chunk of your time and energy with very little in the way of a tangible outcome. You can feel like you’re doing something because your calendar is booked with coffee and conversation and you don’t have time for stuff. But busyness is not business.
Don’t let flattery or a quick high or the open-ended hope that some synergy just might magically appear let you fall into the perpetual coffee meeting malaise.
And be on the lookout for the people who ask you for coffee the first time they meet you. They might be evil alien robots trying to stop your progress.
This is the sequel to a post about the two spheres we all dwell in – the political and the civil – and how each affect our behavior.
Originally published in The Freeman.
Why do so many San Franciscans want to curb Airbnb’s innovative business model?
Proposition F would have restricted the number of nights owners could list their homes and which types of rooms could be listed; it would also have required a litany of paperwork and reporting to a city department. Listings that did not meet city standards would have incurred fines of up to $1,000 per day. The details are many, but the thrust is obvious: this proposal was to make Airbnb far less successful at creating value for customers and investors.
The proposal ultimately failed, but it wasn’t a landslide. Forty-four percent of voters supported it. Nearly half of the voters in a city that owes its recent prosperity and identity to this kind of innovative company wanted to strangle one of the geese on whose eggs they are feasting.
Most political action is signaling.
The simplest explanation is that proponents of this proposal were the minority of businesses and individuals who are in direct competition with Airbnb — hotels and those working or investing with them. True, but something deeper is at work. A surprising number of investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday residents of the city who are not involved with competing businesses voiced their support for the proposal. Some supporters were even Airbnb investors.
How could this be?
Here are five reasons (by no means an exhaustive list) why people behave so badly in the political realm.
1. Other People’s Problems
Milton Friedman famously described the four ways to spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself, your own money on someone else, someone else’s money on yourself, or someone else’s money on someone else. It’s clear that you’ll be most judicious in the first scenario, and less so in each that follows.
All political issues are a case of the fourth scenario, even when money is not directly involved. You’re voting on the use of resources that aren’t yours — the pool of taxpayer dollars that fund government bureaucracy — to solve someone else’s problem, in this case hoteliers threatened by competition and San Francisco residents supposedly being pushed out of affordable housing.
Ballot initiatives tell us that some people, somewhere, are having some kind of problem — and that we can vote to make it better. It’ll cost you nothing (at least nothing you can see at the moment), so why not?
Not only voters, but also the regulators, enforcers, and drafters of such propositions are so far removed from the issue at hand and have no personal stake in the outcome that it is impossible for them to make decisions or draft policies without unintended consequences.
2. Information Issues
Proposition F is ridiculously complex. To cast a fully informed vote on the Prop F, one would need to begin by reading all 21 pages of legal text. What’s more, the costs of obtaining the information far exceed the probability that your informed vote will be decisive. The result is what economists call “rational ignorance.”
Customers, employees, managers, and investors of Airbnb are best suited to optimize the service. Even the company’s competitors are in an excellent position to curb it or force it to improve if they channel their efforts where the information matters, namely in the markets where they stand to lose or gain.
3. Signaling for Survival
Most political action is signaling. It’s not so much that people want to buy American or recycle everything — we know this because when their own money is on the line in the real world of trade-offs, they mostly don’t. But people want to be seen as the kind of person who buys American or supports recycling. There is tremendous pressure in the political sphere to prove to everyone that you support all the right things — especially things that come at a direct personal cost to you. This proves you care about that abstraction called “society.”
Once control by force is an option, a great deal of otherwise productive energy and otherwise creative people are drawn into the crooked craft of politics.
The best thing a rich person can do in the political sphere is vote for higher taxes on the rich. The best thing an Airbnb investor can do is claim to support regulations that restrict Airbnb. You’ll get lots of cheap signal points, even if what you support would actually be bad for everyone.
4. Binary Choices
Voting is a yes or no affair. The political sphere is incapable of genuine pluralism. Imagine if markets worked the same way. What if your local grocery store sent out a survey asking you to vote on which kind of wine you wanted them to stock, or how much, or at what price (with any losses to be made up by adjusting other prices)?
Can Airbnb be improved? Of course. Can a bunch of people with no control over the outcome and little skin in the game be given an up or down vote on a single policy proposal and make it better? Don’t be silly.
The adaptability, nuance, and diversity of options, offerings, and solutions in a market are the greatest strength and the very stuff on which the startup scene was built. Cramming broad society-wide solutions into binary choices is absurd.
5. The Problem of Power
The infamous Stanford prison experiment didn’t go horribly wrong because the wrong batch of subjects was chosen: it was a case of dangerous institutions and incentives. When rules are enforced by raw power, the person who wields that power has more control than any human being can responsibly handle.
Contrary to Thomas Hobbes, it is not the “state of nature” that is a war of all against all; it is Leviathan that rewards force over cooperation and cultivates the worst traits. Once control by force is an option, a great deal of otherwise productive energy and otherwise creative people are drawn into the crooked craft of politics.
F.A. Hayek wrote at length in The Road to Serfdom about why, in the political sphere, the worst get on top. It’s a predictable outcome of a powerful state.
Democracy doesn’t keep this tendency in check so much as it directs the power toward those who are best able to appeal to the desire of rationally ignorant voters to signal the trendy positions on the latest issues.
Focus on Freedom
The innovative startup founders on the San Francisco scene are an amazing force for good when they are pursuing their own interests within the incentive structure of civil society. Not one of them would remain a positive influence if they were granted monopoly power through the ballot box. Nor would their customers: even the most forward-thinking minds in the most innovative city in the world become petty and stagnant when operating within the confines of the political sphere.
When you act as a consumer and choose which kind of vacation housing to purchase, your action sends information and incentives rippling through the market price system, helping entrepreneurs guide resources to their highest valued use. When you act as a voter to support or reject a policy, you create losers and enemies, and your vote generates a host of destructive effects.
If you want a freer, better world, you’ve got to build it in the private sphere.
You’ve heard a lot of stories that ended with, “And the rest is history.” It’s not true.
The phrase conveys a sense of well-known, easy to plot steps from where the story left off to where things currently stand. It’s the part that comes after the crazy, obstacle-filled origin story. It’s the easy part.
In reality, “the rest” is harder than the beginning.
What about the heartwarming story of the guy who somehow made it through flat tires and lost keys and pouring rain to accidentally end up on the wrong blind date that turned out to be his soul mate? After the drama of the first encounter it’s easy to treat the rest as history. They went on more dates, got engaged, and got married. But anyone who’s gone from first meeting to marriage knows that process is much harder to work through than first date nerves.
What about the aspiring actress who packs up all her things and heads to Hollywood, works as a waitress, auditions every chance she can to no avail, and then unknowingly impresses a big name agent she served at the restaurant? Sure, the agent gets her her first part, but I assure you the rest is not history. Countless people get their first part. It’s not at all obvious or inevitable to them that it will produce a second, third, or Oscar winning fourth part.
The danger of believing the rest is history is that we’ll pin too much on that one big break or chance encounter. There certainly are defining moments in our lives, but that’s because of the way in which we remember them and the easy identifiers that accompany. The real story of success begins much earlier, with the choices that define who we are and what we bring to and can do with that big moment, and continues much later, with the way we use the power of the moment and parlay it into sustained results.
That couple had fights, and jealousy, and misunderstanding, and pain, and money problems, and disproving friends and family, and religious differences, and cultural divides, and different taste in food and Netflix shows to overcome. Love at first sight is the easy part. Living together and agreeing to the terms of a long term relationship is hard. The part called history is what produces the outcome.
That actress had roles she hated, and typecasting, and dry spells, and pressure from family, and haters, and creepers, and unreturned phone calls, and money problems, and bad reviews, and stalled shows, and a new agent, and Twitter arguments, and TMZ to overcome. Getting the agent and the first role is the easy part. Handling fame, fighting to define a brand, and getting the next job before the current one is through is hard. The part called history is the battle for continued growth.
“The rest is history” really means the rest is a longer, slower, less interesting slog through every mundane challenge and self-destructive mindset imaginable. It means the rest of the story is something that can’t fit in a 2o-minute interview and doesn’t make for inspirational story time. It means the rest is what transformed the subject from the person present at that fateful moment to the person standing before you.
There’s nothing automatic about history.
When we’re tempted to feel bad for ourselves because we haven’t had the big break, or think only in terms of achieving it, it’s good to remember that the break is the beginning, not the end, of the really hard part. The challenges that follow the break are tougher and lonelier, in part because everyone else believes the rest is history.
Dig into any success story and look for the real process called “the rest”. That’s where greatness is found.
Economist Bryan Caplan is always fascinating. He seems to just pick really interesting and provocative things to explore with the tools of economic thinking. We discuss how he got into economics, his work habits, belief in personal bubbles, and explore three of his research areas. Bryan was super easy to talk with and the conversation never slowed.
His first book, The Myth of the Rational Voter is here. (This short article in Reason magazine summarizing some main points is also excellent.)
His second book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is here.
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
White cinder block cells
No free association
School is not learning
Stop reading about productivity hacks and do some shit.