The Amazing World In Which We Live

Not long ago I decided to give away an idea.  It was something I think is a truly awesome idea, with tremendous potential value.  If I wasn’t fully devoted to building Praxis, I’d probably pursue it.  But I am, and no one I could find was able to do it without me being significantly more involved than I realistically wanted to – raising money, finding programmers, etc.  So I considered penning a public post about it.  I figured best case, it prompts someone to do it and this cool new platform would exist that didn’t before.  Worst case, it would be ignored and nothing would happen, which would leave things as they already stood.  Either way, I liked the idea enough that I felt the need to do more than keep it in my brain, so I wrote about it and posted it to Medium.

Then something really cool happened.  It never went viral.  It didn’t get a lot of views.  In fact, of the twenty or so posts I’ve put up on Medium, it has the fewest views and shares by a long shot.  Still, it felt good to do something with this idea even if it was just to get it into words and put it into the internet ether.  But I digress.  That’s not the cool part.  The cool part is that among those few readers were some incredibly interesting people.

Executives (or at least people with executive sounding titles) of four separate companies emailed me in response to it.  One was a social media company that said, “Nice article.  We don’t do that, but you might like what we do anyway.”  Interesting.  Another said, “That’s exactly what we do!”  Turns out it wasn’t, and their app was good but not great.  A third emailed back and forth a few times asking me questions, and then told me they are launching something similar in coming months.  We’ll see.  The most interesting of all, however, was one of the companies I mentioned by name in the article.  I got a LinkedIn request, which moved to email, which set up a phone call.  I spent twenty minutes talking with the president of an awesome company about how I use their product, and how I could see my idea being used.

Maybe they’ll do nothing with it.  Maybe it was just a polite gesture.  Who knows.  Regardless, it was really fun.

The point of this post is not to brag.  I don’t think I have some amazing following or amazing writing ability that other people couldn’t match.  Far from it.  Nor do I think I’m the first person with an idea for an innovation on an existing product.  Lots of people do, and I’ve had many before myself.  But I never felt like I was qualified to write about them publicly, or pen something akin to an open letter to a successful company with my average Joe notions.  The thing is, now more than ever, no one cares about credentials and gatekeepers.  Anyone can share ideas.  Of course you’re not guaranteed a happy reception, or any reception at all, but the possibility exists.  People won’t really look down on you for openly sharing your thoughts.  If it’s interesting, it can immediately make its way to interesting and relevant parties.

This is not something that was possible a few decades ago.  And it goes both ways.  Not only can consumers communicate ideas to producers and execs without gatekeepers, but the other way around too.  Celebrities can communicate directly to their fans, as a group or individually, without journalistic gatekeepers.

This decentralized world has staggering implications.  Primarily it means that the future belongs to those who focus on product, rather than credentials or the imprimatur of powerful institutional gatekeepers.  Do your thing.  Openly, freely, and with abandon.  Keep doing it.  Don’t be afraid to let the world know.  Direct connections to your ideal collaborators, consumers, or investors can result if you keep producing your unique stuff and putting out there.

Age and Your Option Set

I meet a lot of young people who have the skills, interest, maturity, and resources to do right now the very thing they want to be doing in five years.  Almost none of them realize it, or feel free to do it now.  They feel as though they need permission, or need to be in the “normal” age bracket for it to be in their set of options.

I know some coders who have the skill and interest to work for a software startup.  They don’t enjoy school.  They don’t feel it’s making them a better coder.  They have a job offer right now to go work someplace they love.  They even say that the job offer is exactly the kind they want to get in four years when they finish school, and voice disappointment that it came their way too early.  How could it be too early?  The company wants you and you want them, right now, today!

The conveyor belt mindset is so strong in most of us that we are incapable of seeing options in front of us if they aren’t part of the set of options that is supposed to be in front of a 16, 18, or 24 year old.  At 18 your options are among different colleges, internships, summer jobs, or gap year programs.  That’s the norm, and that norm blinds people to the massively larger set of options they actually have.  This blinding is so strong that even when offered something that they hope will be available four years hence, they are unable to see it as a serious, viable option, and they say no to go suffer through something less interesting for four years and untold thousands.

This isn’t just about college.  Our tendency to stick with the age-defined conveyor belt option set society expects is strong throughout life.  I’ve met women who desperately want to stop working and have and raise children, but they feel like they aren’t allowed to until they’ve put in a certain amount of time as a working woman, even though they could afford it today.  I’ve met people who want to play gigs at bars with a band, but they feel that’s the kind of thing an accountant can only do when he retires.

Don’t be blinded by social averages and expectations.  If you want to learn code today, who cares that you’re only 10 and supposed to be doing other things.  If you want to switch careers, who cares that you’re 60 and it’s supposed to be too late for that.  If you have a job offer today that matches what you hope to get after graduation, who cares that you’re only 18.

The conveyor belt sucks.  Get off.  Pave your own path.

Maybe You Should Feel More Fear

Zak Slayback and I were talking about some people we’d recently met who desperately wanted to do something exciting and new, but in the end they couldn’t pull the trigger.  I told him I was surprised by how much fear can hold people back.  Zak’s insightful response was that their problem wasn’t too much fear, but too little.  Too many people will do anything to avoid the experience of feeling afraid, and if more people would embrace it, they’d be happier.

As usual, I stole this wonderful conversation and turned it into a blog post.  It’s up today at the Praxis blog, where I riff a bit on this theme.  Thanks Zak!

From the post:

“If we believe that experiencing the emotion of fear is the worst possible thing we can go through, we will do only those things that are not accompanied by that emotion.  We’ll stay safe, stay home, stay in he comfort zone, only try what we’re already good at, only talk to who we already know.  The avoidance of experiencing fear is a recipe for stagnation.”

Read the whole thing here.

 

Ask Isaac: Grab Bag – Parental Pressure, Social Media, Macroeconomics, and College

Today I take a crack at the following questions:

  • What do you say to a young person who wants to forge their own path but is butting heads with their parents? E.g., a young person wants to go work and eventually start their own company, but their parents are adamant about them going to college.
  • Future of social networks: How to ride the wave and use it rather than get swept up underneath it. And how NOT to use it.
  • Do you think the ad supported model will continue to work, or will you need to find another way to monetize news?
  • What do you think of the idea of intrapreneurs?
  • Why should some people go to college?
  • Do you think macro- and microeconomics require different mechanisms?

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

What to do When The Game Kills Your Entrepreneurial Dream

I’m putting the finishing touches on several presentations I’ll be giving next week at FEE’s Economics of Entrepreneurship seminar.  I always love crafting a new talk, and I’m especially looking forward to one on how insights from Public Choice Theory can help entrepreneurs.

I don’t want to give anything away, but here are the four options I’ll discuss for entrepreneurs when they face a clumsy, interventionist state that stymies innovative efforts with political games:

  1. Ignore the game
  2. Defy the game
  3. Play the game
  4. Change the game

We’ll see how the talk goes, and if it works I might keep it in the live mix and give it this fall at some events.

My Education and Career Path

I was homeschooled, but in practice that meant playing Legos most of the time.  My mom felt guilt over her failed attempts at creating a more structured learning environment and curriculum.  At the time I thought I was probably embarrassingly behind my peers in “normal school”, but I didn’t much care.  We (my siblings and I) always had lots of chores to do, and I had paid jobs from age ten or earlier (weekly then daily paper routes, golf course, grocery store, construction…).  I had no interest in any kind of intellectual life until I was about sixteen.  Up until then, it was sports, Legos, earning money, playing guitar, and whatever I had to do to get decent grades in my few homeschool classes or textbooks.

When I was 15, I attended a small private school for my sophomore year in high school.  I enjoyed the sports and made some friends, but after years of loose homeschooling, it felt stiflingly prefabricated.  I don’t think I took homework home with me the entire year, since so many classes required almost no attention, I’d do homework right there at my desk.  The whole thing seemed artificial, and I found it absurd that we all followed the same bells and schedule, like cattle corralled through the halls.  I was not too smart for school – plenty of kids there were smarter than me – but too impatient with the lack of individualization.  I was also irritated that it severely restricted the hours I could work.  I decided to quit.

I’ll never forget when I told the music teacher of my decision to leave and enroll full time in the local community college.  I considered him a friend and something of a mentor.  He helped awaken my musical interest and gave me opportunities to sing and play that I was not qualified for, something I’m still grateful for.  But he just didn’t get it.  I came in to class after running around outside in a rainstorm with a few other students and broke the news.  He stared, mouth agape with a bewildered, wounded look in his eyes and said, “College!?  Isaac, you’re not ready for college.  You’re still a kid who runs barefoot in the rain!”  Any doubts I had about my decision vanished then and there.  It was a well-meaning plea, but I took it as a challenge.  I felt he underestimated me, and that was a great motivator.

I spent the next two years taking a full load of classes, packed into two or three days a week, and working as many hours as I could the other two or three days.  I loved it.  I could choose the classes I wanted, make my own schedule, and interact with a variety of people much wider than in the private high school, and even more than at the university I later attended.  Most of the classes were ok, some bad, some good.  The best classes I ever had were business and marketing from a crazy, middle-aged, self-proclaimed capitalist fanboy who ran a successful business but taught for fun.  It was around this time that I awoke to the world of ideas.  It had nothing to do with any of my classes, but for some reason (probably a breakup with a girl) I started picking up books, something I had, with a few early exceptions, hated.

I found myself mesmerized by philosophy, theology, and eventually economics.  My job had me travelling across the state and installing phone and computer cables (pre WiFi), and taking on scary amounts of responsibility, mostly making things up as I went.  My education, which came almost entirely from books I read on my own and late-night conversations with friends at church, the used bookstore, and coffee shops (which were kind of a new thing in Kalamazoo, MI at the time) was moving at breakneck speed.  It was like my whole childhood I was just doing whatever I had to to get by educationally, but the dam broke in my mid-teens and I was in love with the life of the mind.  I also had something of an entrepreneurial spirit and helped start a nonprofit and did a lot of international missions work, which at the time I thought was the best way to make the world a better place.

After community college I continued the work/school split while attending the local, generic, massive state university where I majored in political science and philosophy.  I changed majors several times, but finally settled on subjects I most enjoyed and would let me finish as fast as possible.  I didn’t mind school, but hated the amount of money I had to pay, and just wanted to get the piece of paper that was supposed to be a ticket to a job.  Trying to save money, I went two whole semesters without purchasing a single textbook and still got good grades.  It seemed like a racket.

With the exception of one professor and one TA, none of my fellow students or faculty really aided my intellectual development in comparison to what I was pursuing on my own and with friends outside of school.  I used to walk around an old building downtown and imagine buying and turning it into a real college, where students only bought the items they wanted from the bundle, and where work and classroom were not in competition, but complementary.

Despite never having a single meeting with an advisor, somehow I graduated.  At least I assume I did, since they sent me a certificate in the mail.  I was 19 and I started a business with my brother.  It was something of a failure, with a few high points.  We folded it up after just nine months.  I spent the next five years as a very young and very poor married guy working in the state legislature, then at a think tank.

I loved ideas, and had come to believe the way to make the world a better place was through political and policy change.  But the more I studied and observed the machinations of the political world, the less faith I had in it as an avenue for change.  While at the think tank I took night classes and got a Masters in Economics.  It was a uniquely amazing program, as we used no textbooks but instead read all primary works beginning with Hesiod all the way through Marx and Mises and Friedman.  I drove across the state three hours each way, one night a week for a year and a half during the program.  By the time I was done, my belief in the inability of politics to improve the world had become firmer.  I had little interest in anything besides educating people about the perils of government intervention and the wonders of the market.

My wife and I took a chance on a great job offer running libertarian educational programs in Arlington, VA, a city we weren’t too fond of before we moved, and one that, after leaving I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  The job was amazing.  Over my four plus years there I ran fellowships, seminars, mentoring programs, and raised money.  I interacted with hundreds of bright students and dozens of successful entrepreneurs.  I began to observe troubling trends.  So many young people were stacking up degrees and educational accolades, yet wandering aimlessly, insecure and unsure about their career prospects.  They had degrees and debt, but couldn’t find a job.  Many of the smartest decided, since they didn’t know what else to do, to go to law school.  So many came out the other end with massive debt, no closer to finding a fulfilling career.  (If I had a nickel for every lawyer that told me they wished they hadn’t done law school…)

Meanwhile, in fundraising I met countless business owners who claimed they were always hiring, even in a supposedly down economy, but couldn’t find enough good talent.  Something was amiss.

My views on changing the world were shifting too.  Education as I thought of it – convincing people to change their worldview – seemed insufficient.  I began to observe areas where change happened, it seemed to have a great deal to do with entrepreneurial innovation.  You could spend your life trying to convince people the Post Office is inefficient or immoral, or you could invent FedEx or email.  I got the itch to disrupt the status quo as an entrepreneur.

A culmination of desires I had in college and opportunities, skills, connections, and worldviews I’d developed since came together.  Cliché as it sounds, I went for a walk on the beach and had an epiphany.  A single word, “Praxis”, popped into my head.  I could almost see it in bold letters floating on the horizon.  A relentless flood of ideas filled my mind, and I ran to my car and drove home as fast as I could to type it up.  I was going to create an alternative to the university system.  Better, faster, cheaper, and more individualized.  I wanted to create a new class of entrepreneurial young people.  I wanted to seize the best online educational material, organize it, add a powerful credentialing signal, and combine it with work experience at dynamic companies that couldn’t afford unproductive interns.  I was tired of seeing young people languish and drown in debt.  I was tired of seeing business owners struggle to find good workers.  I was tired of seeing so many entrepreneurial opportunities and so few people with the confidence to pursue them.

Thus Praxis was born.  It’s kind of the incorporated version of my philosophy on education.

While living through the various phases I was only sometimes conscious of these things, but in retrospect I can draw several lessons from my educational and career path:

  • Free time is more valuable than planned time.
  • Work is more valuable than school.
  • Responsibility and ownership at an early age are irreplaceable.
  • College is what you make it, but nearly everything good you get from it can be had better and cheaper elsewhere.
  • Your education belongs to you, and no institution can give it to you.
  • Discovering what you hate is more important than finding out what you love. As long as you’re not doing things you hate, you’re moving in roughly the right direction.
  • Seeing geography as a constraint is a major impediment to your educational and career progress.
  • Your personal philosophy and educational and career path should feed each other.
  • Wandering and experimenting are great, but not at any price. Meandering through an educational path you’ll be paying off for a decade or more is different than dabbling in a free class or internship that will only cost you a few months.
  • Don’t fear how you compare to your peers.
  • If the interest isn’t there, don’t put energy there. But when it is, go all the way.
  • You always get more out of things you choose over things you’re made to do. Find ways to have more of the former, and fewer of the latter.
  • Work ethic can overcome knowledge deficit, but not the other way around.
  • Mentors can be great, but they can also hold you back. Don’t take them too seriously.
  • If the process isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.
  • If the process isn’t hard, you’re doing it wrong.
  • You’ll be doing it wrong at least some of the time. That feedback helps you figure out how to do it right.
  • Push your imagination to see yourself as capable of great things. Continue to do this.

The few regrets I have for the path I took boil down to one: I wish I had more confidence, and earlier, about going my own way.

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Excerpted from The Future of School

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*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Episode 20: Jerry Brito on Regulating Bitcoin

Jerry Brito is the Executive Director of Coin Center, a cryptocurrency research and advocacy organization. He talks about how he found himself at the intersection of policy and tech, the regulatory challenges facing Bitcoin, and whether or not it’s a bad idea to have a “seat at the table” in Washington.

As always, this and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

The Hunt-to-Meat Ratio and Personal Fulfillment

I was talking with Levi about an article we both came across describing how extreme athletes and entrepreneurs share a brain chemistry that gets a bigger high off of overcoming risky challenges.  The basic idea is that both types of people need that ever ratcheting risk or they become depressed.  This is why entrepreneurs who get a big payday almost always end up launching another venture instead of retiring on an island.  We discussed how plausible this seemed, and in the process hatched the hunt-to-meat ratio.

Hunting is hard and unpredictable.  It requires some practice and training, you may come up empty, or your prey or another predator could turn on you and end it all.  It’s physically and mentally trying, involves lots of patience punctuated by quick bursts of adrenaline-fueled activity, and pre and post hunt analysis.  The assumption is that we hunt because we value the meat.  This is only partially true.  We also hunt because we value the meaning and fulfillment we derive from the hunting experience itself – because of, not despite, the risk.

The thrill-seeker or serial entrepreneur might have a very skewed ratio wherein a much larger percent of their fulfillment comes from the hunt than from the meat that results.  This is all of course arbitrary and from the hip, but I’d say I’m somewhere around 85% hunt, 15% meat, meaning the vast majority of my fulfillment comes from the activity and not so much from the reward at the end.  Levi and some other entrepreneurs I’ve met are probably more like 95-5.

A great many people genuinely believe that they hate work and they’d be happy if they just had wealth without effort.  They believe that their satisfaction ratio is something like 10-90 or 5-95.  They focus only on the meat and hate the hunt.  They end up depressed, and many wrongly conclude that it’s because they need even more meat and less hunt.  They think the ideal life would be 0-100.  This is a tragic misnomer.  Though everyone’s level of fulfillment from leisure and wealth vs. the thrill of a challenge will differ, I suspect it’s hard to be really happy with a percentage of fulfillment that comes from the hunt lower than 50.  A 50-50 hunt-to-meat ratio means you enjoy the challenge of the work in equal proportion to the rewards.  With no struggle at all, we wilt.  Welfare recipients and trust-fund kids alike.

I’m not sure to what extent we have to discover our inherent hunt-to-meat ratio and to what extent we can create it.  Can you learn to get more fulfillment out of work with a different mindset, or does lack of fulfillment simply indicate you still haven’t found the right hunt?  Rather than wishing you didn’t have to hunt at all, I suspect finding your optimal mix and the optimal hunting style that gets you going is more effective.

Gains From a Radically Different Daily Structure

The other day I was in line at a Chipotle in Chicago.  It was around noon on a weekday, so the line was almost out the door.  It took 30 minutes.  It dawned on me just how wasteful and unhappy the whole situation was.  Why should we all wait so long to get food when an hour or two later the cooks and servers would be waiting around with few customers?

The same is true for traffic during rush hour, parking on the weekends, and prices during vacation.  The absurdity of the suffering we all endure and the economic and psychic cost of all this waiting, planning, and crowding is hard to measure.  But it’s real.

It all stems from the same source: the regimentation of life.  Every kid goes to school at the exact same time every day, stays for the same number of hours, leaves at the same time, and has the same days off.  More variation exists in the working world, but not much.  The bulk of producers clock in at roughly the same time every morning, eat lunch in unison, and head home en mass.

The odd thing is none of this is necessary for a growing number, possibly even most of us.  How many jobs require someone to actually be physically present between the hours of 9 and 5?  Why the heck do kids need to sit in clumps of same aged children for identical hours to be forced to study the same things in the same way?  We can work from almost anywhere.  We can learn from almost anywhere.  Most of us have the tools, the freedom of movement, and the resources.  Why don’t we see a diversity of daily schedules?  Why don’t more people treat Tuesday as the weekend?  Why don’t more people do all their errands during the day and their work at night?  Why don’t more people abandon regular offices or classrooms altogether?

There are some benefits the the regimen, but not enough to justify the costs we endure.  These practices continue primarily because of a mindset.  We have status quo bias.  We feel guilt or confusion at the idea of not being present 9-5 at work or 8-3 at school.  It’s an obsession with externally defined roles and goals at the expense of outcomes and value created.  What do we want and need to learn or create or earn?  How and when can we best do it?  Those are the important questions and the answers, if we are honest, would vary widely and look little like the routines most of us subject ourselves to.

Imagine a world where kids freely explored, worked, played, and learned on their own terms and timelines.  Imagine a world where people of all ages worked when and how they worked best.  Imagine a week not punctuated by any regular rush hour or weekend or meal time.  Certainly patterns would emerge and some schedules would be more common than others, but absent our rigid adherence to an outdated schedule, supply and demand would be regulated by the money, time, and headache of peaks and troughs, and the market would smooth out and have smaller ups and downs.

The value of such a shift would be immense.  Think of how many hours people would not be sitting in traffic if few had to show up at the same time to the office or school in the morning.  Think about the hours and money that would not be spent during peak times for flights, hotels, parking lots, and Disney World tickets.  Think of the immense subjective value enhancement by not enduring the throngs.  Little if any of these major gains would show up in GDP measurements.  In fact, it may hurt GDP.  Less spending on the same goods.  Less need for parking structures, etc.

We are seeing a slow but steady move in this direction, which is part of the reason I’ve argued that GDP is a dated and increasingly useless measure of anything valuable.  Let’s speed up the process by asking “Why not?” instead of “Why?” about radical new structures that make us happier.  You let your kids unschool?  Why not.  You work remotely?  Why not.  You take the day off to go to the beach in the middle of the day?  Why not.

It might not be doable for you in any big ways, but I bet there are some stressful patterns in your life that are relics of a bygone era and can be shed with little difficulty.

Twitter and/or Voxer Could Do Something that Would Change the World

I’m going to give away an idea that I think could revolutionize communication and entertainment.  This idea came from conversations with my brother Levi, and he deserves most of the credit.

I am a huge fan of Voxer and Twitter.  Both have changed communication for me in significant ways, and Twitter has for the whole world.  This is why I’m so excited about what I see as a potentially breakthrough combination of the two.

First, let me briefly outline a few of the things that are so powerful about each.

What’s great about Voxer

Voxer is by far the best form of one-to-one or small group communication I’ve found.  It allows asynchronous voice messages of any length that can be listened to in a real-time back-and-forth, or left for the other party to listen whenever they get a chance.  The beauty is that it maintains a single, ongoing conversation that fits the contours of the schedule of each party.  In this way it’s like email or text, except you don’t get all the messy clutter of a huge email thread, and you don’t have the fat thumbs problem of texting.  Not to mention the inability of texting to convey full emotion, or to be done while driving (or walking if you’re like me).

The best part is the ability to create group threads.  In my company we have four or five separate Voxer threads for conversations relevant to marketing, education, events, and more.  We have an urgent action thread and a get-to-it-anytime big picture thread to leave ideas as they come.  These group conversations are amazing, and far superior to email or trying to get everyone on a Google Hangout at the same time.  I can’t even tell you how much fun my NBA and NFL threads are with friends.  We have ongoing conversations about the sports, as well as live in-game commentary and jokes.  Voxer also has an individual voice memo function which saves in the cloud instead of taking up space on your device.

Voxer occasionally glitches, but they’ve got the functionality down for the most part.  You can email, download, or forward individual recordings.  You can also post text and images.

What’s great about Twitter

By now most people are aware of the amazing ways in which Twitter has changed the world.  Without getting in to all the benefits in ways many others have already done better, I’ll just boil down what seem to me the most powerful aspects of the platform.

Twitter destroys gatekeepers.  No longer do you need to enroll in an MBA program and read about a great entrepreneur in case study.  Now you can follow Marc Andreessen‘s Tweetstorm firsthand.  He’ll probably even like your Tweet if you mention him.  No longer do you have to trust the gossip column to convey what a celebrity or athlete is thinking or doing.  They can tell you themselves.  No longer do you have to wait for official news coverage, often warped by political preferences, to see protests and major events worldwide.  Twitter lets each individual – whether famous or not – control their own brand and communicate without mediators to their audiences.

The other major breakthrough is the size.  Twitter brought on the idea of micro blogging and tiny packets of information that are valued more for their timeliness and rawness than for their depth or polish.  Getting a quick gut-level reaction in 140 characters real-time is something totally different than a long-form, heavily edited thought piece.  Twitter is the first place you go when something you’re interested in is happening live.  You can read a recap about a football game or a major event, but nothing is quite like watching the stream of Tweets go by as it happens.

With the acquisition of Periscope, Twitter is adding even more value to the shared live experiences part of the product.  That’s where Voxer comes in…

The killer combo

Imagine watching a game, but instead of being forced to listen to whatever commentators the network selected, you could mute the game and instead listen to one or two or five of your favorite journalists, comedians, athletes, or friends give their own live take.  Imagine Pardon the Interruption but live, during the game.  Imagine hearing Stewart or Colbert lampoon a political speech…while it’s happening.  Imagine being able to listen in to an ongoing conversation between a few of your favorite thinkers.  Imagine a podcaster doing micro episodes live on the spot as ideas come to them.  Better yet, imagine you sharing your own voice.

With one small change all this and more would be easy.  Voxer could create a unique link for every thread – whether between me and my wife, or between my team at work, or even my individual memos – that I could share with the world.  Anyone could click the link to listen to the thread.  Just like any Voxer user, they could scroll back to listen to older messages, or start right in with the most recent.  They could listen in real time or after the fact.  They could not participate, only listen.

The ability to share asynchronous conversations between anyone with anyone would open up everything.  Periscope is great, but for now it only lets you see one person’s live video at a time.  Voxer lets you hear not just one person’s voice, but much larger conversations between many people.  Think about your favorite podcast interviews.  It takes so much time and scheduling and production to get Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins sitting down in the same room with a mic.  What if they had a public Voxer thread, where Tim could pose questions anytime, and Tony could respond anytime, from anywhere?

The possibilities are endless.

Twitter is the company in the best position to build or acquire something like this.  Voxer already has everything but that last little bit – the publicly shareable thread link.

I’m not a tech guy.  Neither is my brother.  We both love this idea.  We investigated the time and cost of building something like this from scratch and it’s more than either of us can realistically commit to, as we are both building our own businesses.  If I had a pool of developers at my disposal, I’d put them on this in a heartbeat.  The next best thing to building something awesome is sharing the idea so someone else can build it.

Voxer, Twitter, or anyone else if you’re listening, take this idea and run with it!

The Final Enforcer of Contracts?

Think about construction projects.  Which projects have the highest likelihood of being over budget, under expectation, and past schedule?  If you’ve ever built or remodeled a house you might say all of them, but there is one organization that consistently sees cost overruns, quality problems, and time delays more than any other.  Government.

Government projects are notorious for shady contracts in the first place, broken promises during the project, and lackluster results after, including continuous repair and maintenance far exceeding what was originally planned.  Government is a bad general contractor and project manager.

This is particularly interesting when you consider one of the major justifications given for the existence of coercive states.  We need, the argument goes, some entity with complete monopoly power to be the final arbiter and enforcer of contracts.  Yet we have this entity right now and it is consistently worse at making and enforcing contracts for its own projects than almost any private company or individual.

When will we stop believing that the incentives magically improve in the absence of competitive pressure?  When will we look around and notice that all the order we see and experience every day is being maintained by a complex web of emergent beliefs, norms, and institutions within a constant give and take marketplace?

Your Resume is Boring, Do These Five Things Instead

The resume is supposed to be a relatively quick way for someone to get to know your personal and professional accomplishments, skills, interests, and the potential you have to create value in a given setting.  The thing is, it’s pretty outdated.  In fact, it never worked all that well, evidenced by the fact that most people do not get jobs because of a great resume but because of a personal connection.  Resumes have always been a poor substitute for other, more robust ways to get to know someone.  There just weren’t too many other ways once upon a time.  But things change.

Today we have so many ways to paint a picture of who we are, what we love, and what we can do than we ever did before.  It’s time to stop leaning on a sheet of paper with boring bullet points and begin building better ways for people to see what you’re all about.  When I get resumes now I barely look at them.  A quick scan, then I immediately jump on Google to find the things that give me better signals.  Here are five of them.

1. Create a personal website.

This might sound daunting, but it’s doesn’t have to be.  Go to WordPress, get a domain with your name in it if you can, pick a basic theme, complete an “about” page with a few photos and a bio, and write a few blog posts that update what you care about and what you do.  Update it at least once a month so it doesn’t look dead.  Don’t feel too much pressure if you’re not a great writer.  The content is less important than that you have a site.  Someone who has taken the time and developed the basic skills to set one up has already set themselves well above the crowd.

2. Have a LinkedIn profile

Most young people hate LinkedIn.  So do most of the adults they spend most of their time with – teachers and professors.  But in the professional world outside of academia, LinkedIn is gold.  It is everything your resume is, but far less boring and with several added benefits.  You need to have a profile there.  It can house all your basic experience and skills and other stuff that goes on a resume, but it also has some color, endorsements, and a way for people to see shared connections, what kind of articles you’ve liked, and more.  When you send a resume to someone they are going to look for you on LinkedIn whether you like it or not.  If you’re not there, or if you have a shabby, out of date profile, your stock will drop.

3. Make use of Facebook and other social profiles

Everyone uses at least one social platform.  Most are on Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, or others.  My advice here is controversial but I stand by it.  Make your social media pages publicly viewable.  Look, if you have something really incriminating on there someone could find it anyway if they were motivated enough.  Making your profile public is a good way to keep a check in your mind on what kinds of things you may and may not want to share.  This doesn’t mean your entire Facebook presence needs to become whitewashed of anything personal or fun.  Far from it.  That’s good stuff, even to a potential employer, and a completely polished presence is slightly disconcerting.  But if you’re constantly in name-calling flame wars over political issues on Facebook, for example, that’s probably not good for most jobs and probably not good for you.  Let the world see a little bit of the real you, and let that be a you you’re proud of.  Again, when you send your resume people are going to look for you on social platforms anyway.  They tend to get frustrated when they can see that you exist but can’t view any details without a friend request.  Let them in.  They’ll get a flavor for so much of the richness that a resume simply cannot provide.

4. Review books on Amazon

This is an underutilized gem.  Amazon has a wonderful reviewing community, and reviews you post there under your real name have pretty decent search engine results.  One thing that’s hard to gauge from a static list of activities is a person’s intellectual depth and passion for learning new things.  Curious, interested people are people employers want to hire.  Everyone does a few classes and clubs, but how many people read interesting books and take the time to write a review?  It’s a good practice in general for your writing and thinking skills, and it really gives you an edge in demonstrating your interests and abilities.

5. Build something

Anything.  Outcomes are more valuable than inputs.  Products are more valuable than paper.  Everyone can list activities they’ve done from date X to date Y.  But what did it result in?  What did you create?  The ability to build and “ship” something is rare and valuable.  Most people get stuck thinking about the article they want to write, the app they want to build, the event they want to run, the group they want to launch, or the painting they want to do.  It takes guts, discipline, humility, and grit to actually finish it.  Think of projects you care about that have a tangible, demonstrable result you can put out there for the world to see (another great use of your personal website).  Saying, “I worked here” is so much less powerful than showing, “I built this”.  Showing beats telling, so find more things you can show.

If these sound like interesting ideas but you’re a little overwhelmed, take them one at a time.  And, of course, you can join Praxis where we have one-on-one coaching and an intensive educational experience focused on helping you learn how to do these things and do them well.

How My Son Learned to Read When We Stopped Trying to Teach Him

We were homeschooling and our son was six years old.  He had a good vocabulary and comprehension of ideas beyond many kids his age.  We knew reading would open up the world to him, we knew he’d like it, and we knew he was very capable of doing it.  But he didn’t.

We tried flashcards.  We tried read-alongs.  We tried playing hardball and we tried being fun and exciting.  We tried restricting activities until he’d done his reading lessons, and we tried giving rewards.  All these efforts had two things in common: they didn’t help him read one bit and they made our relationship with him worse.  Being a parent and being a child cease to be fun when you’re at odds all the time.

So, at an age when we were starting to worry about his lagging behind, we simply stopped trying.  We quit the whole effort.  He was nearly seven when we gave it up in favor of more peace and harmony in the house.

Daily life was a little easier, yet we still had this nagging worry about him.  What will happen if he’s behind where he’s supposed to be for his age?  Still, everything about our efforts to make him read felt wrong, so we simply ignored the fears.

I was reading a lot of great books on how kids learn and I knew intellectually that kids need no instruction to learn to read.  They will learn when they find it valuable and if they are in an environment where it’s possible – one with books and other readers.  Still the head and the heart are very different things.  I knew kids were better at self-teaching than being taught, but I had to watch my own son, sharp as he was, remain completely outside the wonderful world of the written word.

Then it happened, just like so many of the books said it would.  You believe it in stories, but it’s still a surprise when it happens in real life.  One night I overheard my son reading aloud to himself in his bed.  And the first thing he read wasn’t Dick and Jane, but Calvin & Hobbes.  Not light fare for a brand new reader.

Let me back up a bit.  We would often read to him for a few minutes before bed, and lately he had been in love with some old Calvin & Hobbes comics I had from my adolescence.  We’d read him a few pages and say goodnight.  One night it was later than usual and he asked me if I’d read.  I was a bit grumpy and tired, and I said no, I was going to bed.  He protested a bit but could see I wasn’t up for it so he let it go, seeming defeated.  Ten minutes later I heard him reading.

He later told me that he wasn’t actually reading it that night, nor the first several nights after when he spoke the words (and often laughed) aloud.  He had heard us read it so many times he had the words memorized.  He was looking at the pictures and reciting the words like lines to a familiar song.  I didn’t know this until long after he could clearly read without first memorizing, but it really doesn’t matter.  In fact, it’s probably better that my wife and I assumed he was reading it when we first heard him, or we might have been tempted to intervene and try to cajole him into reading it without the cheat of memory and illustrations.  I know too well the kind of unhappy outcome that would have created.

For a year or more we fought with a kid who clearly had all the tools to read and we got nowhere.  He wasn’t faking his inability, he really couldn’t read.  Reading was always an activity that interrupted his day and was associated with expectant and often visibly (despite attempts to hide it) stressed parents.  It was a concept as useless as it was foreign.  But once he had a strong desire – to enjoy his favorite comic strip – and his inability to read was the barrier, he overcame it in no time and never even celebrated or announced it to us.  It was utilitarian, not some lofty thing to perform for a gold star or a pat on the back.  His ability and interest in reading, then writing and spelling, only intensified as he found it indispensable for playing games like Minecraft and Scribblenauts.

We’ve since made a full transition from the imposed curriculum of homeschooling to the kid-created structure of unschooling.  Looking back I’m a little ashamed of the silly way we approached things before, but at the time it was so hard to let go, with all that crippling fear.  There are so many “shoulds” pumped into parents brains from the moment they conceive.  There are percentiles and averages and tests and rankings galore.  But these are useful only to the statisticians and none of them have your child’s interest or happiness in mind.  Aggregates aren’t individuals.  Living your life, or attempting to shape your child’s life, to conform to the average of some population is not a recipe for success.  At best it will produce blandness.  At worst a broken spirit.

You can read any number of thinkers like John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, or Peter Gray on why our son’s experience is not exceptional, but normal.  You can look at studies that show kids who learn to read at age four and kids who learn at age nine have the same reading comprehension by age 11.  You can get story after story from places like the Sudbury Valley school about kids who taught themselves to read in a few short weeks once they got the interest, and even one girl who didn’t become interested until age 13 and then went on to win a literary prize.  But it’s all theory and myth until you experience it with your own child.

Read the books.  Look into the unschooling movement and literature.  But above all, take a step back from your own kids and realize that they are only young once and for such a short time.  Do you really want your memories with them to consist of fights and forced lessons?  Enjoy them.  Let them go their own way and navigate the world.  There are few things more exciting than when they come to you to ask for your help or insight because they really want it, or when they never do because they figure it out on their own and gain a confidence that cannot be won any other way.

The world we live in does not lack for natural incentives to learn to read.  The rewards are massive, as are the costs of illiteracy.  We don’t need to artificially incentivize reading the way a poor farmer might have a few hundred years ago.  When we do we do more harm than good, if not to our children’s ability to read then at least to our enjoyment of our time with them.  They figured out how to speak – the most difficult, nuanced, and complex skill a human can master – without any formal instruction.  They can learn to read too.

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Here are a few other examples of learning by doing from my own life:

Why LEGO is more valuable than algebra

Why Mario Maker is better than a marketing major

Episode 19: Michael Malice on Writing, Batman, and North Korea

Author, TV personality, and rabble-rouser Michael Malice joins me to discuss what it was like to have award winning graphic novelist Harvey Pekar write a book about him, why he quit a lucrative career to be a writer (even though he doesn’t love writing), the experience of self-publishing a “true” unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong Il, and why he’s like Batman.

You can find Michael’s work at michaelmalice.com.

All episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

On Dismissing Ideas Out of Hand

I fully believe some ideas, arguments, and propositions are not worth spending time on.  I don’t think it makes a person more noble or a better intellect to entertain all ideas with equal weight and never dismiss any.  Primarily because it’s not possible.  We all have limited time and mental resources, and we must choose where to apply it.  Equal seriousness on every idea is not an option.  If we pretend it is we are lying to ourselves and everyone else.

The way in which the decision gets made to not give further consideration to an argument is more important than whether or not it gets made.  There is no shame in simply acknowledging the limited resources at our disposal and being honest about which ideas simply do not intrigue us enough to investigate, or areas on which we are content to let our assumptions remain largely untested, or trust in someone else we respect.  There is shame in lying about what we’re doing.  Refusing to investigate an idea for any reason other than an honest acknowledgement that we do not believe it ranks high enough to bump other things down is a bad habit, and does not breed intellectual integrity.

I suspect we’ve all done it.  For some reason we feel embarrassed to simply say, “I’m not going to take the time to look into your argument because I just don’t care that much”.  So we invent other reasons.  We appeal to authority, or lack authority on the part of the person proposing the idea.  We say vague condescending things like, “They need to engage the literature”, without ever risking anything to explain exactly where we think they’re wrong or what “literature” they need to engage.  We want to ignore the idea without admitting that’s what we’re doing.  We need to pretend we never write off anything.  That would be closed minded!  Instead we do worse than ignore it.  We pretend we’ve refuted it while ignoring it.

There are a great many topics we are ignorant on.  Many of those we’ll never take the time to investigate.  That’s a reality we can’t escape, and we don’t need to.  It’s refreshing when someone forcefully presents an argument to be able to say, “I don’t find that credible, but to be honest I’ve never really investigated it and I probably never will.”  We’re better off acknowledging our areas of ignorance and apathy then pretending we have some other reason besides lack of interest to dismiss an idea.