In relentless pursuit of freedom.
Tom Woods brings me on his show to talk about Praxis and the road from theory to practice through creating alternative experiences for people here and now. We talk about what makes a successful Praxis applicant and how to figure out which path is right for you. Tom is a historian, author, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and a popular podcaster.
Check out tomwoods.com to learn more.
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
Article I saw
A rare Medium well done
Or was that my steak?
I was thinking of writing a post today called “bad arguments of the week” as a kind of catharsis. I came across an unusually high number of terrible arguments this week in my regular perusing of social media. Instead I’ll make a broader observation in hopes of offering freedom, rather than simply critique.
You don’t have to respond to every idea.
I reflected on the diverse list of bad arguments I collected and realized they all shared a few things in common. They were each reactions to an article or piece of news the arguer disagreed with. They were all written very much in the moment. None of them actually put forward arguments against the core idea they were reacting to.
All these bad arguments attacked persons and motives. They took forms like, “If you say X, you’re probably too dumb to realize Y”, or, “Why is this person even writing on X topic when Y other person has more credentials”, or, “Person A said something dumb, so activity B they engage in must also be dumb.”
It’s fun to engage in a little sarcasm sometimes, or playfully mock an idea. But the arguments I saw didn’t seem all that playful, as evidenced in part by the continued back and forth comments by those making them.
I won’t pretend to know anyone’s motives, but it appeared that in each case the bad argument was made as a sort of addictive behavior. The arguer saw an idea they strongly disagreed with. They did not want to take the time or energy to meaningfully engage the idea and offer a logical counter. Nothing wrong with that. But then the response addiction kicked in and they had to say something. In the middle of the moment of frustration, they posted an insult disguised as an argument. When others responded, the addiction wouldn’t let them leave. They kept going.
The odd part is, more time and energy is spent going back and forth shoring up weak insults and arguments than it would’ve taken to relax, engage the original idea, and put forth an argument not full of logical fallacies and emotion.
The solution is probably not to make better arguments, but to make fewer.
None of us realistically have the time or mental space to put forth well-constructed arguments for all of our beliefs or against all those we find odious. That’s OK. If you know you won’t engage an idea, you don’t have to respond at all.
How valuable is it to you or anyone else to post under an article something like, “This is wrong.”? You’re signalling two things: first, that you do not wish to engage the idea at the moment; second, that you can’t resist letting people know that you disagree (with an air of condescension). But if you really aren’t up for discussing, why register your disagreement at all? Once you do it might be hard to move away from the comments that follow.
Give yourself permission to walk away from bad arguments. If you don’t intend to put forth good ones of your own, try not responding at all. Not because you owe it to anyone or you should follow some rules of social media decorum, but because you might end up feeling a bit more free and relaxed yourself.
If you’re not having fun, what’s the point?
Ernst & Young no longer requires degrees for entry level jobs. A lot of people shared articles about the change on Facebook. On one thread I noticed the following comment:
“[T]his is great but it could also be an excuse to pay people less.”
The word “excuse” stuck out to me. Why would EY need an excuse? If they want to offer less pay they can do so at any time. Of course any potential hire can just as easily refuse the offer and only agree to work for more.
Employers want the best workers for the lowest possible price and workers want the best jobs for the highest possible pay. “Best” and “highest” of course include the entire bundle of compensation, benefits, work environment, etc. Both parties have an incentive to bargain. Both parties have an incentive to only agree if they don’t think they can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s a bet on the value they’ll receive from the other party.
The comment reveals a bizarre but common belief about work. There’s an idea that jobs and income are an automatic and deserved reward for moving on the conveyor belt and jumping through all the right hoops. It implies that pay is based on a rigid credential scale and companies can only adjust pay if they adjust the hoops to jump through. It implies that, with ironclad causality, a degree will automatically entitle the holder to higher pay and the only way to pay less is to hire those without one.
A degree has never made someone more valuable. What you can do determines the value you can create and demand. The degree is only a signal that, with more or less accuracy, tells employers that you are likely to be better on average than someone without the degree. That signal is no longer working for EY because the reality isn’t backing up the assumed correlation.
EY does potential employees a favor to announce and implement this policy. The degree is not signalling enough value to distinguish those with it from those without. Degrees are very expensive. Everyone who buys one assuming it will bring them a good EY job is buying under false pretenses. They need to create value to get hired.
EY is saving potential employees money and time by telling them what’s always been true: it’s about the value you can create, not the paper you have. The paper was used because it often correlated and it was a quick and dirty way to eliminate some weak applicants. Now the applicants with degrees are not sufficiently better than those without.
This represents not an excuse for companies to pay less, but an opportunity for young workers to pay less. You are not required to spend four years and six figures poured in cinder block walls with fluorescent lights to take tests on things you mostly have no interest in. You are free to learn to create value any way you can.
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Want a better way to get the skills, network, knowledge, confidence, and experience you need? Want to be more than a worker? Want to be an entrepreneur? How about an education that comes with an awesome job. It’s college plus your first job plus a lot more wrapped into one. In one year. For a net cost of zero. Check out Praxis.
So my brother Levi was asked to do this and he emailed me saying, “I’d like to, but how would I even share it? I’m like a grandpa when it comes to online platforms.” I told him I’d share it on my blog because it’s interesting and entertaining to me and, I suspect, my readers, half of which are our mother.
Levi is the hardest working person I’ve ever met, and also (paradoxically) one of the most laid back in some weird way. I’ll let him take it from here.
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(This is Levi)
My former employee James “J-Train” Walpole recently answered the Life Hacker “How I Work” challenge. Now I’ve been called to give an account of how I get things done. Here goes:
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Location: Charleston, South Carolina
Current Gig(s): Founder of Ceterus
Current Mobile Device: iPhone 6
Current Computer: Surface Pro
One Word That Best Describes Your Work: Passion (I love what I do)
For work: Google Apps, Asana, Zoho CRM.
For clients: QuickBooks Online, Bill.com, ZenPayroll (now Gusto).
For me: Fanduel, Yahoo Fantasy Football, Voxer
We have an open office environment, where I often work while walking around outside taking phone calls (I have been told I am too loud to stay inside). The environment is 100% flexible, in that staff can work from the office, their home, or anywhere they can be valuable. For me, this is almost always the office itself.
Inbox management. There is no one way (although mine is pretty awesome and simple), but owning your inbox leads to major time saved.
Gmail inbox/labels.
My iPhone wallet case. I hate “things”, and until the phone itself replaces my Amex and drivers license, having these affixed to my phone is ideal.
No one empowers entrepreneurs with innovative financial reporting and on-time bookkeeping better than I do with my team at Ceterus. Note to the reader: asking an accountant this questions will lead to a very lame and boring answer, see mine above. Sorry.
I’m currently reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, and I am always re-reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
One of the first tasks for my newer employees is to setup a station for me on Pandora. This ranges from hip-hop, to folk and as long as it is loud it works for me.
I enjoy people, but am an introvert at the core.
I get up at 4:48 on weekdays. I try to sleep 5-8 hours per night, but do not have a set bed time. I wake with an iPhone alarm in the adjacent room. I am currently working to never use snooze (results are mixed to-date).
Isaac Morehouse, as he is so kind to post this for me (a social media neophyte).
[It just so happens, I beat him to it and answered yesterday.]
My longtime youth basketball coach, friend and father figure once told me “I only remember the shots that go in”. As a confidence-lacking young athlete who was more focused on not messing up than on being great, this advise was instrumental in my hoops game at the time and in all life decisions since. Play to make the shot, don’t play to not miss.
No.
My colleagues at Praxis and I found this exercise to be fun and useful, so now it’s my turn to answer.
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Location: Mount Pleasant, SC
Current gig: CEO of Praxis
Current mobile device: iPhone 6
Current computer: ASUS Zenbook. It’s gorgeous and wonderful.
One word that best describes how you work: Fast.
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Voxer, WordPress, the Scrabble app, fantasy football apps, and Momentum.
What’s your workspace like?
Tiny. I purposely have a ridiculously small, clear desk. I don’t want space for anything on it. It contains my beautiful sleek laptop, and usually a giant stein of water, and sometimes a few books I’m reading. I move around and work from different places in the house sometimes too. My office is actually just a small section of the bedroom, since I got kicked out of my designated office room. I work from home and as my kids grow they take up more space. Since I travel a lot and don’t really care where I work, I moved. I could work in a broom closet as long as it wasn’t cluttered and I got to take walks outside.
What’s your best time-saving trick?
Delete, shred, destroy. I get rid of absolutely everything nonessential. Immediately. I am ruthless with throwing away paper mail, physical notes, business cards, receipts, and other odds and ends. I am also a strict zero inbox guy, keeping on top of my emails frees my time, but more importantly my mind, to create.
Also saying no. Often.
What’s your favorite to-do list manager?
I’ve tried Asana, Google Tasks, Slack, and several others. None of them end up being that valuable. I use Google Calendar and the native Sticky Notes app on Windows, or if I’m not at my computer the native Notes app on the iPhone. I leave myself Voxer messages in the My Notes thread sometimes too. Everything else gets too complicated.
Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without?
Since I just bought a Kindle Paperwhite so I don’t overflow my room with more books, I’m hoping it will become indispensable. I’m still a lover of physical books, so we’ll see. Otherwise no particular gadgets really matter much. I did just get a waterproof mp3 player from a friend that lets me listen to podcasts while swimming, so that might become a necessity too. Until the weather gets too cold to swim.
What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?
Mornings. I’m awesome when I wake up. I’m happy, eager, productive, and full of energy and optimism…even before coffee.
I’m also pretty solid at writing good, concise emails.
What are you currently reading?
Siddartha by Herman Hesse, Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, Outwitting the Devil by Napolean Hill (rereading), and Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse (rereading).
What do you listen to while you work?
While writing I either listen to a playlist on Spotify of Moby songs, or a station on Pandora called “Yoga music”. While doing less creative stuff I might listen to some Led Zeppelin, or ’90’s era hip hop, or 80’s New Wave, or anything sappy with vocals I can belt out. If I’m not writing, I mix it up quite a bit. When I’m writing, it’s only ethereal mood music.
Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
I’m definitely an extrovert based on any personality test or technical definition. However, in the last 5 years my ratio of time I need to be with people and time I need to be alone has reversed. Now for every one hour I spend “on” and around people I need four hours alone. It used to be the opposite. I can go mix it up or give a talk or be at an event and enjoy it, but I really, desperately need to get out and be alone for long periods of time afterwards, and I am (no longer) ever the last one at the party, but more likely one of the first to leave. I’d rather be alone writing or reading or watching a Sci-Fi with my wife than anything else.
What’s your sleep routine like?
It’s not always like this, especially with travel, but my ideal routine is: go to sleep when my mind wants to, wake up when my body wants to.
My mind is typically very active in the late evening until around midnight or 1 AM. I often feel physically ill if I get up earlier than 7:30 or so, and I much prefer getting up at around 8 or 8:30. I used to feel guilty for that and make myself get up earlier no matter what, but I found my mornings far less productive because I felt too out of whack physically. I now try not to schedule anything before 9 or 10 so I can wake up, lay in bed gathering my thoughts for a bit, get some food and coffee, and write a blog post before the hustle and bustle begins.
Fill in the blank: I’d love to see ______ answer these same questions.
My good friend and colleague TK Coleman. I’ve known him for over 15 years, and I still find his work and life habits a total mystery.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“If it doesn’t affect bowel movements or erections, don’t worry about it.” True story. A wise man actually gave me this advice once.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
If you’re not having fun (even if sometimes intense or stressful fun) you’re doing it wrong.
Yesterday I got an email from Kickstarter that at first I laughed off as silly PR and signalling. Then it made me sad. Then it made me upset.
I like Kickstarter. I use it. It’s a supercool platform and has opened up a whole new world of crowdfunding, the effects and possibilities of which we are only beginning to see. So what did they send me that rubbed me so wrong?
Kickstarter is no longer a traditional corporation but a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). I have not looked into the legal structure of PBC’s nor am I any kind of legal expert. The way a company chooses to structure itself doesn’t really matter to me. The thing that got me was the description in the email:
Until recently, the idea of a for-profit company pursuing social good at the expense of shareholder value had no clear protection under U.S. corporate law, and certainly no mandate. Companies that believe there are more important goals than maximizing shareholder value have been at odds with the expectation that for-profit companies must exist ultimately for profit above all.
Benefit Corporations are different. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals.
What could it mean to have legal “protection” and, far more ominous, “mandate” to pursue social good?
The most obvious questions are what is social good and who gets to define it? Even if specific goals or outcomes are written in to a legal charter, who gets to interpret them? If an investor puts millions in to a business with expectation of financial return and the money gets squandered on a giant made-from-recycled-shoes art project at the office, could it be argued that this was the legally correct move because it’s good for the community or some other undefinable value?
Firms are not profit driven because they are evil. They’re not even profit driven because they care more about profit than anything else. No one got together and decided to make firms profit driven as an evil conspiracy. They simply ended up that way because it’s the best possible method of accountability to value creation.
They’re profit driven because profit is the only uniform, objective measure of all the diverse goals and desires of everyone involved in the enterprise. Designers might want to make the world more beautiful, customer service people may want to help others solve little problems (except maybe at Comcast), investors may want to be a part of something new and exciting, founders may want to change the world, and customers may want a specific feeling the product provides. To keep creating value in these myriad ways the firm needs resources. They can’t be consuming more value than they produce. They need to create something that is valued by the customers more than the raw inputs were valued on the market. The only way to measure all these subjective preferences is with profit and loss.
When people decry profit they seem to treat it as a one-sided bilking affair. Profit is really, really hard. Loss is far more common. And loss is just as important. Loss is the greatest force for resource conservation the world has ever known. It lets us know that a company is, quite literally, destroying value. It puts the brakes on fun but destructive behavior. They are consuming resources valued at X and are only able to sell them at X-1. They have transformed resources into something less valued by society.
Profit and loss are the best signals humanity has ever had to make decisions about resource allocation. Relying on warm fuzzies or good intentions is far less effective and can even be downright deadly. If you allocate resources based on perceived need or good feels you’ll end up with big shortages and surpluses, like every planned economy ever, and the poorest will suffer from lack of access to food, health care, etc. This is how mass starvation happens. High minded ideals replace organically emerging prices as the means by which resources are allocated, and well-intentioned elites from on high replace self-interested individual decisions makers on the ground.
I’m not trying to get dramatic here. For all I know PBC’s could be an improvement over current state offered options for incorporation like 501c3’s or C-Corps or what have you. I’m also not such a fool to think technical legal jargon so powerful that it can override informal institutions or cause investors to make horrible decisions with their money. Chances are, if you’re knowingly investing in a PBC, you trust the assumed definition of “social good” or whatever other goals enough to take the risk.
The troubling thing is the rhetoric and the built-in assumption that profit and loss provide worse information about how to improve the world than vague things like a “commitment to the arts”. Being committed to a high ideal without really knowing enough to bring it about in the everyday lives or real people (hint: none of us do) is a great way to waste a lot of resources and do a lot of damage while feeling good about yourself. Being committed to accounting profit and loss is a great way to create value for the world, whether you intended to or not.
*BONUS
I was discussing this with a friend on Voxer, and added this very important point about what prices really are. They’re not only about incentivising people to do things. Even in a world where people were able to rise above self-interest, prices would still be crucial for the information they convey. It’s an incentive wrapped in information. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Are there things that shouldn’t be paired with money?
James Stacey Taylor and I discuss controversial philosophical questions concerning adoption, organs, votes and even personal identity. We look at best and worst case scenarios and how allowing markets would compare to the world we have today.
James is a philosopher, author and Associate Professor at the College of New Jersey. You can find out more about him here.
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
Seems just yesterday we got hitched
Not long after, a bun in the oven
Still surprised I haven’t been ditched
Here’s to making it a baker’s dozen!
Five cities, six houses we’ve been
And let’s be honest; some were quite crappy
Three kids, over our heads we’re in
Undeniably crazy and happy.
From the Praxis blog.
It’s an absolute necessity for those who want to seize the entrepreneur-rich future to have excellent grit, work ethic, professional skills, communication, confidence, a network, and creative problem solving. These roll-up-the sleeves habits and skills must be mastered. But it’s also a necessity to read. A lot.
You need hundreds of mental models to draw from and lay over each other to find breakthroughs at the intersections. You’ve got to wrestle with age old questions like how to have a good inner life, no matter what’s going on with your startup or job. These cannot be gained by hacks or tricks. They can only be gained by a ceaseless consumption of high quality ideas.
I once heard said that the older the problem, the older the solution. Maybe SEO secrets are best found in webinars, but the secret to reducing stress and finding meaning in your work is more likely found in a time-tested intellectual tradition or great book. All the best entrepreneurs I’ve met are relentlessly philosophical and voracious readers. Not just of business books. In fact, business books are probably the least read among the most successful people I’ve met.
There’s so much great stuff out there. How can you consume it with all the demands on your time? You want to read Hesse, and Milton, and Seneca, and Feynman, and Hemingway, and on and on. But you’re barely keeping up on your email!
First, relax. Stressing about reading or doing it out of guilt is unlikely to do you much good. Try to enjoy it. Next, carve out an hour, or at least a half an hour, each day where you’re not allowed to do other stuff. Just read. Do it before bed to calm your mind and feed new ideas into your brain before you enter the dream world.
Then – and here’s the big secret that’s hard for me and most others I know – stop reading when the book isn’t interesting. Or skip ahead. Pick up a new book. Go right to the good chapter. Don’t treat books like sacred objects that must be read in their entirety, in order, or not at all.
You go to blogs and scan for a good post. You ditch it halfway through if it’s clear the headline was the beefiest part. You scan Twitter and Facebook and feel no guilt for not reading every word. Great books are deeper, richer sources of important ideas, but you don’t have to approach them with fear and trembling. Better to consume one good chapter of Walden than to keep it on the shelf waiting for that perfect weekend vacation where you’ll read it all and take copious notes. It’s probably not going to happen.
Dive in to great books every week, or better yet every day, and keep consuming them. You need a lot of mental models at your disposal to build great stuff and enjoy the process.
First, a big shout-out to the podcast production intern Lav Kozakijevic! Lav has been doing great work on editing, show notes, and a variety of other things. He already makes me and the show better, and he just got started.
Today I take several audience questions, submitted via palmet.to/ask-isaac. (Oh, and I realized I totally forgot to answer the one about my favorite craft beer. It’s Bells.)
Today’s questions:
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
When I think about some of the famous philosophers throughout history I notice something about most of the early ones. They were always by the side of powerful, successful, wealthy people who sought counsel on how to handle success and how to grow.
Some of the great works of philosophy come out of what we might call today personal coaching or consulting sessions. Philosophy has its origins firmly rooted in efforts to help those who are serious about it to achieve their best life.
This is not to condemn any form of disinterested speculation or claim that philosophy must always be clearly connected to living a better life today. But the observation does highlight the fact that those who are called philosophers today, almost exclusively college professors who specialize in quite obscure topics, might actually be less like the ancient philosophers than people today who are considered “cheesy”.
Tony Robbins, for example, spends most of his life being paid by highly successful people who want to find the good life. As non-philosophical as his language and marketing may seem to a college professor, what he does is primarily provide new mental models and conceptual tools that help his clients progress to their next goal.
This isn’t a matter of better or worse. I don’t think a professor obsessed with solutions to hypothetical ethical problems found only in academic journals is better or worse than a consultant or life coach obsessed with getting clients to achieve “exponential growth” or whatever the phrase of the day is.
The realization is more interesting to me as a way to put the old revered thinkers in perspective. Most of them were not crafting their ideas in the abstract, but were doing it with specific goals and often for specific clients. It’s a reminder that truly profound and enduring insights are not only to be found in disinterested analysis, but can also be found in practical attempts to solve present problems.
I’ve met a number of entrepreneurs who I think have truly original philosophical insights. Most of them would never dream of writing them down or sharing them in the abstract, outside of specific applications to their work. They have been trained to believe that philosophers do that, and they aren’t philosophers. There are some brilliant, potentially breakthrough ideas trapped in the minds of practical people. There is a lot of deep wisdom to be found if you’re patient and willing to look.
This doesn’t mean it’s everywhere. It doesn’t mean doing philosophy well is easy. I don’t think it is. I think most stuff – academic or not – isn’t very good. But it does mean it can be found in more than one place. After all, Machiavelli was writing a paper for a client.
Related: Steve Patterson and I discussed what it means to do philosophy outside of official academic circles in this podcast episode. Check it out!
If you’re unhappy where you are sometimes envisioning where you want to be instead is a little too hard. Sometimes you know enough to know you’re unhappy, but not enough to know exactly what would improve things.
This makes goal-setting difficult. If a clear goal is the key to achieving it, it puts a lot of pressure on you to have one. I think there’s another way to improve your situation.
Not that clear goals are bad. I think they’re great if you can have them (and be honest about them). But it’s possible to make progress even with really fuzzy goals. What you want doesn’t need to be clear, but what you don’t want does.
Say you’re in a job you hate. You want out, but out to what? You (think you) need X amount of income, and it’s not obvious where you’d get it in a better way. It’s helpful to envision whatever vague idea of what you really want you can conjure, taking into account all the actual costs and tradeoffs. But when that’s not clear enough to provide a plan of action, go the opposite direction.
Identify one by one the things you really hate about your current situation. List them out. Now you’ve identified the known obstacles to a better life (many currently unknown obstacles will crop up later, but don’t trouble over those until you meet them).
Next ask yourself if you can simply stop doing those things. You might be surprised to find that several things making you unhappy are things you can stop doing right now. If you can’t, ask what is keeping you from cutting those things out. Decide what it would take to avoid ever doing those things again.
Now you have your goals.
If one of the things making your life suck is a coworker in the next office over who is profoundly rude and negative all day and you realize the only way to escape it is to quit, move to a new department, work from home, or request a different office, now you have options. You can weigh the costs of each and decide which course you want to take. Maybe you decide moving to a new department is the best way out. But you don’t have the skills required.
Perfect! Now you have a clear, tangible obstacle to overcome.
Build yourself a set of daily challenges and activities that work towards gaining the necessary skills. Don’t stress about the long term, ten-years-from-now-you and how these skills may or may not help you reach some fuzzy utopia. You need the skills now to overcome a real, present pain in the ass.
You’ll probably never figure out the perfect mix of skills to help you get to the lofty neverland of the distant future. But if you can identify real pain points in the here and now, you can build your self-improvement project around chipping away at them.
Work backwards from where you want to be. Identify the things keeping you from happiness, then the things you’d need to do to work around, or over, or through those obstacles. Then build a daily, weekly, monthly schedule targeted squarely at beating them, one at a time.
The stoics say “The obstacle is the way”. I think for those of us without a really clear end goal, this is phenomenal advice.
Removing impediments to happiness can be a better form of goal setting than attempting to reach perfection. Your life might be more like a sculpture than a painting. Subtraction sometimes yields a better end product than addition.
I write and podcast a lot about unschooling, entrepreneurship, liberty, living a free and self-directed life, etc. Because of this it’s easy to feel pressure regarding my own kids. What if they don’t turn out all right? What if they become unhappy status-driven school-loving commies? Wouldn’t that invalidate everything I talk about?
From a logical standpoint, no. A person who secretly eats meat can have sound and compelling arguments for vegetarianism. A person who could never play quarterback might be a great coach. A bad mother might be a good thinker.
True, most people might ignore all ideas from someone whose life they don’t admire. Post a good quote from a controversial famous person and you’re likely to have more people condemn the person than the quote. Whether or not it’s fair, it will happen.
I’ve always been bothered by this way of evaluating ideas. My arguments are either interesting and useful or they’re not, regardless of my unseemly personal tendencies like the occasional wearing of jorts. I don’t feel much personal pressure to behave in any particular way in hopes that it makes my writing more appealing. I can’t imagine doing so. What a yoke to live under! Yuck.
With kids it’s different. Not in kind, but in degree. The idea that what my kids do with their lives should be a determinant of whether what I write is good or bad strikes me as vastly more offensive.
If I’m a theist and my kids grow up atheists does that make me a failure? Does it invalidate theism? I may be a failure and theism may be invalid, but not because of what beliefs and behaviors my kids adopt.
If we were to say that me or my ideas could be considered bogus if my kids did not adopt them and mirror my life, what would we really be saying about children? The implication is that a child is not an autonomous being capable of making choices and forming beliefs – good or bad. The implication is that children are sponges who ought to and do, if properly trained, become whatever their parents wish them to be. This is an idea I find disgusting.
Whatever environment we create for our kids they still have the freedom to choose the kind of life they want to live. They have to go through their own process of discovery. My hope is that, if we can maximize opportunities, minimize impediments, and avoid emotional damage, it will be easier for them to choose to live free and wonderful lives. But here’s the kicker: free and wonderful must be defined by them, not me.
True, non-envious, non-manipulative love is when you desire other people to experience happiness on their own terms. It’s pretty hard, but when you feel it it is delightful. It’s like you get to live additional lives when you can truly take joy in other people taking joy.
Yes, I feel waves of panic from time to time when I consider how my own kids might choose to live their lives, both now and in the future. But I fight it. I take that pressure off myself as best I can.
I don’t feel obligated to have my kids be or think or do anything in particular in order to validate things I think and live. They can choose whatever they want. They’re on a journey to find truth just like I am. Their journey can’t invalidate mine, nor mine theirs.
Author and blogger on careers, entrepreneurship, and education, as well as founder of four companies, Penelope Trunk joins me to talk about her past and current projects. We talk about writing, unschooling, startup mentality, trends in career development, and how to be honest with yourself when it comes to your future. Her latest startup provides online courses that help people manage their careers.
And her new startup Quistic here.
This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.