In an interview for This Week in Startups founder and investor Peter Thiel described three kinds of innovation.  The first is a truly breakthrough technology unlike anything seen before.  Bitcoin is an example.  The second is a marginal improvement on an existing technology or process.  The mobile phone market has seen most of its innovation in this manner.  The final category is a brand new combination of existing technologies and processes.  A unique way to coordinate and combine stuff that’s already here to produce an end result that has never existed.  That is precisely what Praxis is.

We’ve taken a host of existing technologies, ideas, resources, and processes to create a truly novel combination.  We’ve combined the age-old process of on-the-job learning with the immense value of abstract principles and self-improvement.  We’ve removed the time and money barriers that prevent people from getting that on-the-job learning until they’ve spent years and many thousands on less valuable stuff.  We’ve combined the power of curated, self-paced online content with intense, real-time interpersonal interaction and engagement.  We’ve combined the notion of a signal of knowledge, skill, and value with the insight gained in face-to-face conversation.  We’ve adapted the old European practice of oral exams in order to assess and validate knowledge.  We’ve made value created the predominant signal of potential to create value with self-driven portfolios.

We’ve broken down the barrier between work and education; learning and doing; playing and building.  We’ve combined talent identification and recruitment and job placement with liberal arts education and business education and professional development.  We’ve combined a network of small businesses and entrepreneurs hungry for talent with a network of young people hungry for experience.  We’ve merged the roles of headhunters, jobs boards, educational institutions, career workshops, philosophy seminars, coaching, and put it all in a self-directed package.  We’ve added self-exploration with the acquisition of valuable skills and knowledge so you don’t have to “find yourself” and then work or study, or vice versa.  You can find yourself while working and studying.

We’ve created an entirely new path from where you are to where you want to be; to the kind of career and life that makes you come alive; to a vibrant mind with big ideas and a work ethic and habits that can execute on them.

It’s all so simple.  All the pieces already exist.  Apprenticeships have been around.  Internships have been around.  Online learning has been around.  Personal coaching and mentoring have been around.  Virtual communities and videoconferencing have been around.  Oral exams have been around.  Job-shadowing has been around.  Skills workshops have been around.  Professional development has been around.  Communities of self-directed learners have been around.  Seminars on entrepreneurship and startup basics have been around.  Growing businesses eager for talent have been around.  Smart, hard-working young people eager for more than just a dull education-to-career conveyor belt have been around.  Praxis is the first to combine these in our own unique, original way.

We’ve built something special.  I wouldn’t have dropped everything and poured my heart and soul into anything less than a huge innovation.  I’m not an inventor or tech wiz.  But anyone with vision and a lot of work can identify a lot of existing stuff and create powerful new combinations.

Join us if you want to be a part of it.

I once had a powerful mental image of people taking their dreams, represented as newborn babies, to an altar to be burned.  It was horrific and it stuck with me.

Dreams, goals, desires, a sense of purpose and what makes you come alive; these are akin to new life.  When you have a notion of something you are inspired to do or create it’s like being pregnant.  I’ve written before about this analogy.  When you’re pregnant with an idea, you know its birth is inevitable but it still requires you to do things to tend to its growth and development, and finally the birth itself.  When an idea comes to fruition something truly new is introduced to the universe.  New life emerges.  Something that previously existed only as potentiality is now reality and has changed the sum total of opportunity in existence.

Just like in my mental image, it’s too easy to ritualistically slay our own dreams.  Whether the fetus is aborted before it’s ever born or the newborn dream is destroyed shortly after, it has the same soul-deadening effect and is equally tragic.  We come to believe that our dreams are fun playthings, but really a lot of work and mess to take care of, raise, nurture, and watch grow.  They might be more than we’re ready for.  Keeping them is really rather irresponsible.  Who are we to think we can handle these inconvenient things or really tend to a new life?  When we mature, get serious, “grow up”, we realize the silliness of the idea that we could ever birth, raise, and unleash our dreams onto the world.  We have to get real and purge ourselves of all but their memory.

Best not to let them fertilize at all.  Best to prevent the growth of the tiniest seed.  Don’t let it come to term.  If it does, put an end to it quickly, mercifully.

Perhaps this mental image is in bad taste.  In fact, I know it is.  I did not consciously construct it.  It came to me when I was a teenager and it brought me to tears.  It terrified me.  But in that moment I realized how real and important it was.  Just as grisly and awful as the notion of children being sacrificed is the voluntary destruction of dreams.

Don’t give it over.  Don’t laugh at your young idealistic self and boast of growing out of it.  Don’t join the gruesome collective ritual of dream sacrifice.  It is a life, and when a life is lost it is tragic.

The most common argument for authoritarian schooling is the need for structure.  Structure is crucial to any kind of success and young people need to learn it.  I could not agree more.  Which is precisely why I find school so problematic.

If you cannot make and live by a schedule and learn to prioritize and execute on activities you will have a difficult time creating value and meaning.  If you want to learn how to create your own structure the sooner you exit environments where the structure is provided for you the better.

Schooling provides structure and the external stimulus to follow it.  The mental muscles and willpower to create one’s own structure atrophy.  I’ve seen young people enter amazing work experiences where they have tremendous amounts of autonomy with their hours, where they work, what kinds of work they want to do, and in what ways.  These are enviable jobs.  Yet these young people are stressed and unproductive.  They yearn for more externally imposed structure because they are incapable of creating their own.  They want to be told what to do because that is how they have always achieved; not by setting their own goals and exploring and testing their own means, but by jumping through hoops set up by self-proclaimed authorities.

Managing one’s own time, setting one’s own goals, and creating one’s own routines are so very important they cannot be left to schools.  They are impossible to learn by having someone else do it for you. F.A. Hayek said of the economy, “The more the state “plans”, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”  Schools make planning harder for the individual by doing it all for them.

The sooner you learn to create your own structure in environments where no one will provide it for you the better.  The sooner you learn how to operate where all that matters to others is the value of your outputs and no one cares how you produced it the better.  Get to know yourself.  Learn to be alone with yourself.  Learn to manage yourself.  If you don’t someone else will be happy to manage you.  Then you might find yourself wondering why your life doesn’t feel like your own and living feels only partly alive.