In Praise of Weird

At the Students for Liberty International Conference over the weekend I heard and overheard several jokes and comments about how many weird participants were there. It was mostly good-hearted self-deprecation, but there was often a hint of concern. There was perhaps a subtle but sincere belief that, if libertarian ideas and the individuals and organizations at the event are to have an impact on the world, the oddballs need to be drowned out by normal people. I’m not so sure.

Of course any group that rallies around a particular interest or set of ideas will have it’s own vibe somewhat distinct from the “average” person in the world. (If you ever meet this average person, I’d be curious what he or she is like. I’ve searched for many years and have yet to meet them.) If insiders and outsiders alike view events like this as gatherings of assorted weirdos, that’s probably a sign of a vibrant, healthy, non-group-thinkish phenomenon. With libertarian ideas as the rallying point, all the better to have a broad swath of all that humanity has to offer in attire, personality, tastes and preferences; what a wonderful testament to the humane and universal character of the ideas.

If, on the other hand, there is a drive to get more conformity and less weirdness in order to look more like the mythical average person, such gatherings tend to end up either stale or cult-like. In the former case, a lot of social pressure to wear non-offensive clothing and behave in an average way can sap the energy and creative life out of groups of shared interests. I’ve seen churches like this. Everyone makes such a point to be normal – in part to prove to the world that believing what they do doesn’t make them strange, in part to prove it to themselves – that it’s like a bunch of Stepford wives. While it may make being a part of the group less risky, it doesn’t make it any more attractive to outsiders, and it certainly makes it more dull for insiders.

The latter and far worse result of the desire for normal is cult-like conformity. If nobody wants to be the weirdo who gives their “movement” a bad image by dressing out of fashion, everyone can end up wearing cute little matching suits. There are subcultures where everything down to facial hair is uniform. Not only is this creepy and off-putting to the outside world, but such pressure for aesthetic sameness seeps into the realm of the mind and grows into intellectual conformity, the death-knell of any social movement, especially one as radical and free as libertarianism.

The weirdness or non-weirdness of a group of people doesn’t seem to indicate much about their life and potential. It’s the sameness that does. If everyone is weird in the same way, you’ve got a closed off niche easily caricatured or ignored. If everyone is normal in the same way, you’ve got much the same thing. If you’ve got enough weirdos to make the normals feel surrounded by weirdos, and enough normals to make the weirdos feel like the minority they enjoy being, it’s probably a pretty exciting, interesting, dynamic and growing bunch united around some pretty powerful ideas.

I saw a lot of unusual looking and acting people at the event. They stood out because the majority of participants looked pretty normal and acted pretty sophisticated. I took both of these to be wonderful things, and I hope those commenting on the need for less weird were poking fun more than seriously hoping to change the culture and weed out the oddballs. The range of religions, styles, personalities, persuasions, motivations and behaviors in that room were a beautiful testament to the breadth, depth, and life of the ideas of freedom. Bring on the weird. May it never die.

Traveling with We and Me

Snow falls on a Southbound train
Flakes enough to paint and stain
All the world in their domain

Stuck inside this stagnant crust
On metal wheels and under-rust
Feels more like pain than wander-lust

Sitting still because of freight
To see its fate we wait and wait
The youngest stir, their voices grate

There has to be a better mode
To cross the land to one’s abode
Since progress from when horses rode

Indeed there is a smaller box
Much smoother too sans bed of rocks
To it the wiser masses flock

This newer mode more civilized
More flexible and free it rides
The height of speed industrialized

Often now is criticized
“We must ignore the soul to rise
Above the individual lies”

“The greater good we all comprise”
Or so they do idealize
I’m stuck here as I realize

The greatest mode of transport be
The one that makes a person free
And that one still a car for me

“So blow the smoke and smog”, they say,
“And hasten now our judgement day
Unless we find a better way”

Unless that way will give me wings
I won’t let go my joyous flings
I do not fear these doomsday things

I’ll drive my car free and fast
Knowing that the fad won’t last
It’ll be your train, not me that’s passed
So joyfully I’ll push the gas

You needn’t worry that I do
It’s me who pays instead of you
Unlike your train that’s funded through

Money taken from the rest
And given to the pompous blessed
So they can do what they deem best

I’ll keep mine, thank you, if you please
It makes us all feel more at ease
So keep your hands away, you sleaze

I’ll drive into my own sunset
Excited for new forms unmet
Or maybe my own private jet

There’s something wonderful and free
Left uncontrolled by transport “We”
When making plans for me is me

Democracy is Not Our Savior

(Originally posted here, but I remain bewildered by the religious devotion to democracy, so I’m reposting.)

Imagine if your local grocer used mass voting to determine what to stock on the shelves. Everyone in a 30-mile radius of the store would get a ballot every few years, and you could vote on what items they should sell. Think long and hard about what people would vote for. Do you think this would result in better selection and quality than the current system of letting markets decide?

Voting is an incredibly inefficient mode of social organization. It rewards irrationality, selfishness, ignorance and greed. It makes peaceful coordination and cooperation incredibly difficult. It is divisive and hopelessly, systemically flawed. All the incentives are wrong. We should not see voting or democracy as a solution to social or political problems, but one of the primary causes.

Perhaps my example of voting on groceries is unfair. In most political systems we don’t vote on each and every issue. Instead, imagine that residents within 30 miles of the grocer don’t vote on the store’s stock and policies, but rather vote on who should manage the store. Let’s go a little further and say they vote on the manager, CFO, board members and a handful of other middle-management roles. What would be the result?

For starters, those seeking to hold management positions at the grocery store should forget about any skills except the skill of convincing all the voters to vote for them. Marketing themselves as better than the other would-be managers would be the only thing that would get them the job; not their expertise at running a store or their knowledge of stocking procedures, management or the industry. Would people’s votes provide better and clearer information about who should manage the store than the profits, losses, operations and happiness of employees? Of course not.

At first glance, voting may seem similar to a market. After all, when people buy or don’t buy from the grocer, it sends price signals telling management what shoppers value. It’s like a vote, with a crucial difference: It costs the buyer. Market exchanges reveal what people want when they face trade-offs. Voting reveals what people want when it’s “free.” Lots of people might vote for the store manager who promises not to import anything from other countries because it makes them feel good to support local farmers. These same people, when faced with higher priced and lower quality local food in the open market might very well choose to purchase imported produce. Voters support candidates who promise to restrict cheap imported goods, then on the way home from the polls they stop and buy cheap, imported goods. Voting irrationally is costless, while shopping that way hurts your pocketbook.

Voting also turns friends into enemies. I have neighbors that support different products and services and businesses than I do, but this doesn’t cause any tension in our relationships. But if we were forced to vote on which products, services and businesses were available to us, how much they should cost and who would pay for it, in a zero-sum election, you’d better believe tension would arise.

The fact that no grocery stores select products or managers by popular vote should clue us in to something: Democracy is a far worse way of coordinating and managing complex processes than markets.

It’s easy to see how disastrously inferior democracy is to the market in providing groceries. The provision of food is the most fundamental and important service to any society; if the market can handle food provision so much better than democratic processes, why not the provision of less fundamental services like health care, education, protection and all kinds of lesser services? In truth, the incentives built in to the democratic process create massive inefficiencies in all these government services, as well as allow for corruption and all manner of moral transgression.Government failure is an inescapable part of government.

In civil society, voting is a rarely used mechanism. We vote on inconsequential things like where to eat or what movie to see with a small group of indecisive friends. Voting is used in religious or civic organizations to select board members or decide on some major issues. Not only are these relatively small, homogenous groups, but they are groups of people who have voluntarily come together around a shared vision. They can also freely enter and exit; shopping for a church or denomination may sound off-putting, but the freedom to do so is crucial to the health of individuals and churches.

Even in these smaller, voluntary institutions, voting has important incentive and information problems that most organizations try to curb in some way. The more populous the group, the more complex the decision—and the more costly or important the outcome, the worse voting is as a coordinating mechanism. When you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of people and a cross-section of highly complex policies with life-and-death consequences and millions in potential gains or losses, voting becomes an absurd mechanism of coordination. Governments may try to supplement voting with all kinds of irritating and invasive data collection like censuses, but these do not solve the problem in any way—and can make it worse. Does your grocery store need to conduct a census to supplement the anonymous information you provide them with your purchasing behavior?

Most advocates of limited government understand why tyranny and central planning are dangerous. But too often they assume more or better democracy will improve things. We hear about turning backward countries around by making them more democratic. We hear about turning our own country around by convincing people to vote for better candidates or policies. None of these will ultimately address the problem. The grocery store that is managed by vote would not be much better off if the residents selected a “better” manager; the manager would face the same lack of vital information, and the voters and manager would face the same bad incentives.

The way to make the world a freer, better and more prosperous place is not to enhance and expand democracy or to elect better people through the democratic process. It is instead to reduce to a minimum the number of things decided through the democratic process, and to allow more peaceful and emergent institutions for social and economic coordination to take its place. This can only happen when enough people understand and believe in the power of peaceful, voluntary interactions over the power of coercive political methods.

Be a Philosopher

I have had the privilege of meeting a lot of very successful people.  Some have been successful in academia or art, but most have been successful in business of some kind.  No matter how diverse the industry or experiences or path, all of these successful people have one thing in common: they are all philosophers.

Obviously, all of these people don’t have “philosopher” written on their business cards and they don’t publish articles in journals of philosophy.  But they are all lovers of knowledge and people who have spent and do spend significant time and energy examining their life and pondering the world.  I’m always amazed at how clear and coherent their life philosophy is.  Scratch that; I’m amazed that they have a life philosophy.  How many people do?  Do you?  Could you describe it in five minutes if someone asked you?

Highly successful people work hard and they work a lot.  But they also observe and ponder.  They continue to refine their worldview and test new theories to see if they work better than the old.  If you want to achieve great things, cultivate your mind.  As I’ve written before, you need to work your butt off, but if that work isn’t fueled with fresh ideas and new ways to see the world, you’ll only get so far.  Take time to think.  Let your thoughts grow and develop.  Be a philosopher.

Carnivals Just Aren’t That Cool Anymore

We took the kids to a carnival of sorts last weekend.  It was nothing huge, but I thought it would be pretty exciting for them.  When we arrived, I was underwhelmed.  There was popcorn and hot dogs and a little cotton candy machine.  There was an inflatable slide and ski-ball.  There were a few games and a few people in Star Wars costumes.  We spent a few hours there and had a fine time, but it was nothing amazing.

It would be easy to fall back into the old-guy attitude of, “Things were so much more amazing when I was a kid”, or, “Kids these days are so spoiled, nothing is special anymore.”  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Carnival wasn’t all that amazing simply because every day is so amazing for my kids.  We’ve been to numerous backyard birthday parties or get-togethers for no special occasion at all where the hosts have rented giant bounce castles, slides, or water playthings.  Cotton candy can be purchased cheaply almost anywhere.  My kids love these things no less than I did as a kid, they just have the ability to enjoy them more often and on their own terms, not only after waiting in long lines and being crammed in with sweaty strangers.

It’s pretty amazing that it doesn’t require a monumental feat of organization, fundraising, ticket sales, and planning to have a once a year event with cool stuff for the kids.  I appreciate this even more as I watch my kids have those nervous moments of indecision about whether or not to hazard the giant water slide.  If they chicken out, they don’t have to spend possibly years regretting that they missed that one opportunity, as I had done in similar situations as a kid.  They can take their time, and if they regret the decision not to give it a try, they’ll likely have a next time soon.  They probably make better decisions because of the everyday availability of carnival trappings – I remember feeling sick almost every time I pounded giant wads of cotton candy or elephant ears with all the pent-up demand of an inmate on holiday.

I could be bitter at the fact that, in many ways, my kids have it better than I did, and therefor they don’t seem as excited about stuff I loved.  But why?  Who cares?  I decided to enjoy the fact that I don’t have to run out and attend every fair, because my kids have a lot more options than I did.  Yeah, sometimes it hurts that they don’t lavish me with praise for getting them a pack of Big League Chew or a corn-dog, but that’s my problem, not theirs.  It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them, it means I’m too sensitive and doing stuff more for me than them.  They’ll probably never realize how awesome their world is compared to the past, but none of us really can.  Let’s enjoy the present regardless!

I Write Because it Changes Me

In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) is told by a friend that, despite the mockery of his atheist colleagues, his prayers for his sick wife are having an effect.  Lewis, however, is not concerned with whether or not prayer “works” in altering the universe:

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.”

This is a powerful bit of self-honesty.  Lewis felt no need to respond to philosophical or theological objections to his actions.  He wasn’t praying to convince God, he was praying because he knew the value to him of this activity, regardless of the outcome.

I have made a point recently to remind myself of why I write; not to change my audience, but to change me.

There will never be a shortage of people who offer objections to ideas I put to paper, or critique the way I choose to communicate those ideas.  If my goal were to win over as many people as possible to my point of view, this would be incredibly stressful.  Every objection would require a response or a change in my future behavior. It’s not a particularly fun or productive way to live.

Feedback is wonderful.  It creates a connection between creator and consumer that results in better content.  But feedback is only helpful if it doesn’t make us bitter and we don’t worship it.  If it hurts us to hear and we begin to create things motivated entirely by the need to stick it to the “haters”, we’ll produce lower quality content and be less happy doing so.  If we overvalue feedback and rethink every word to predict every possible way in which it might be misinterpreted, we’ll produce boring content and have less fun in the process.  Both of these responses put the feedback of others in the drivers seat and you, the creator, in the passenger seat.  Don’t let that happen.

Take in feedback, enjoy it, laugh at it, use it, but don’t pay it too much attention.  Remind yourself that the reason you write (or read, or speak, or paint, or sing, or…) is because it changes you.

Homestead Your Interests

Homesteading is an age-old form of gaining common-law right to property.  A piece of land that is unowned or abandoned can become yours if you improve upon and maintain it for a period of time.  In the American West, pioneers would find a parcel of land they liked and stake it out as their own.  So long as they built fences or signposts or boundary markers of some kind and generally maintained the property, it was considered theirs.  Smart pioneers would homestead more than they could gainfully farm at first, looking to the future and leaving open the opportunity to expand their operation.  We may not have vast stretches of unclaimed land today, but the need to homestead some metaphorical acreage is still very real.

You have a body of knowledge, expertise, and a set of activities that define you.  This is your brand.  I’ve written before about the danger of being hemmed in by your brand, especially if it’s a successful one.  But how exactly can one prevent it?  By homesteading more space than you can currently occupy.

If you really enjoy architecture and keep in the back of your mind the idea that someday you may put a lot of yourself into it, whether vocationally or avocationally, you need to stake out a territory that includes architecture, and keep the underbrush trimmed so it doesn’t begin to encroach on your homestead.  Maybe you’re a lawyer, and all your friends and associates know you as the law guy.  If you keep your passion for architecture under the surface for twenty years, never letting it see the light of day, it will be a lot harder to make a sudden switch from law to design.  People will find it odd and see it as a frivolous deviation from your brand.  You will feel a lot of pressure to prove that you’re serious about it.  It will take a monumental amount of courage and resolve to make the move, and you will have to steel yourself against the reactions should you fail at first.  It’s like homesteading a virgin wilderness full of hostile flora and fauna.

If, on the other hand, you staked out your creative territory early in dimensions far beyond just lawyerdom, and you maintained your property line with the occasional foray into architecture, the opportunity to make a move later will be far more real and the transition far less daunting.  Maybe you keep copies of popular architecture magazines around for inspiration, and to let visitors see that you consider it a part of who you are.  Maybe you write about it from time to time, or offer amateur architectural tours of your city.  Maybe you keep a design table in your house and draw up blueprints.    Whatever it is, if you maintain the fringes of your property, it will be a lot easier to occupy it should the opportunity arise.

I make myself post a song or a poem once a week on this blog.  It feels a little odd sometimes, and It’s a little embarrassing.  But I love creative writing and keep in the back of my mind the possibility of composing short stories, recording songs, or working on film scripts as something I may want to put more of myself into someday.  I feel like it’s somewhere in me, but not yet ready to fully occupy my energy.  If I go on only producing what currently comes more naturally, commentary and prose, one day I’ll feel the urge to emerge creatively and it will feel like such a drastic transition it may be overwhelming.  I want to trim the weeds back at the corners of who I am by a little creative writing here and there.  I want it to be public, so that a later switch won’t seem quite as out of left-field to the observing world.  I’m under no illusion that posting a song once a week means I will be taken seriously should I become a full-time songwriter; far from it.  It won’t be quite as scary though, and I’ll have a little more confidence being used to putting my creative side out there.

Think about who you are, what you love, and what far-fetched dreams you entertain.  Draw a generous property line that includes even the most out-there interests.  Homestead it, and keep title to your identity with regular maintenance.  You never know when you’ll want to expand your brand.  If you never do, who cares.  You won’t have lost anything by keeping your boundaries wide.

Kiteboarders or Cops?

Last summer I had a conversation with a kiteboarder about his sport and the clan-like nature of his fellow athletes.  He told me that the local government body has entertained the idea of putting more rules and restrictions on kiteboarding but that, thus far, they’ve been stymied.  Every time they try, the community of boarders rallies information and support and kills the case for more regulation.

As usual, calls for government intervention follow highly visible events.  Political operatives rarely push legislation because they spent hours studying how to make life better; instead they respond to opportunities to gain public support by appearing as the savior after bad things happen.  In this case, there was a kiteboarder who cruised too close to swimmers and had a collision.  No major injuries resulted, but it got a local reporter to write about this “growing problem”.  Ordinances were proposed.  Kiteboarders were able to stop them, mostly because the public was pretty indifferent and the few people that did care heard their stories.

The boarders explained two things: that no one could police bad actors better than they already were, and that no one should forget the immense value of kiteboarders, which outweighs the slightly increased risk to swimmers.

To illustrate the first point, the guy I was talking to described how all the boarders know each other, and new kites quickly attract the old guard.  They get to know the new boarders and make sure they realize they are not only representing themselves, but are part of a community with all the benefits (helping each other in rough weather, etc.) and accountability.  He said when an “idiot boarder” showboats, is in over their level of experience, or gets too close to swimmers, others in the community are quick to respond.  Sometimes they even threaten to “take action” if the behavior doesn’t stop.  He told me this works remarkably well.  He laughed at the idea that shore-based beach police could respond to rogue boarders in any meaningful time-frame.  He said by the time they arrived, the bad actor would have been thoroughly dealt with by other boarders.

The second point was even more powerful.  Do kiteboarders increase the risks of beachgoing?  Sure, a little bit.  It’s one more thing going on and collision is a possibility, self-patrolling notwithstanding.  But what about the benefits?  Not just the economic benefits to beachside businesses from the popular sport, or the benefits to boarders themselves, but what about a reduction in risk to the beachgoing public?  This boarder told me that in the last two summers alone no fewer than three people, two of them children, were saved from drowning by his fellow athletes.  The kites allow boarders to zip across the water at lightening speed to the aid of struggling swimmers long before anyone from shore could.  I’d take a slightly increased risk of a collision with a rogue boarder along with an reduced risk of drowning any day.

Every perceived new danger brings calls for regulation and intervention.  But who is better at producing order and reducing risk; communities like the kiteboarders, or professional bureaucrats and enforcement agents?  For a pleasant and safe beach experience, I’d take kiteboarders over cops any day.

(Also posted at LFB.org)

New Tides and Old Time

New tides pull the mind
Leaving old ideas behind
In the pools of time unkind

Glasses full of red wine,
Still we’re powerless to climb
The stormy seas of yours & mine

So pull the thread of this rhyme
Unfold the bundles we bind
As mud on the eyes of the blind

What’s yours is mine
& loving you I find
Is a piece of the divine

The Law is Written on Our Hearts

(Originally posted here.  I’ve been thinking more on this topic and I felt the urge to re-post.)

A great many people believe that changing the law is the solution to social problems. This is a fiction.

If written law were some kind of unbreakable magic spell, the United States would not look as it now does. Nearly all of what the government does today is not by any stretch of the imagination “constitutional.” Written laws and documents do not hold the power to control individual behavior or government behavior.

It is true that when people believe the law to be important, they will obey it. But when they believe it to be unimportant they will just as easily disregard it. In the end it is people’s beliefs, not the law that determines behavior.

Perhaps we are seduced into the “Myth of the Rule of Law” because it is so hard to see what’s really regulating behavior and generating social order. The “Invisible Hand” that Adam Smith described as channeling self-interest in the marketplace to serve the diverse needs and wants of its participants is also at work in the marketplace of ideas, social norms and morality. The core beliefs we hold and the norms that emerge from centuries of social interaction are what restrain or fail to restrain behavior.

This is not merely academic. It is dangerous to persist in the belief that the law is the ultimate check on human behavior for two distinct reasons: First, law does not ultimately change the behavior of its intended targets; second, because it does change the behavior of others.

The first problem renders social reform efforts ineffective. The vast majority of attempts to restrain government, help the poor, make people healthier, more charitable, more equal, less intolerant, more responsible with natural resources, or better educated are really just attempts to change what’s written on pieces of government paper. A different combination of words in the Federal Register one day to the next cannot change human hearts one day to the next.

A powerful example is the brief experiment with alcohol prohibition in the United States. Many in the temperance movement genuinely wanted to prevent drunkenness, alcoholism and the irresponsible and even violent action that sometimes accompanies. They focused their attention mainly on what they incorrectly thought to be the source of power over human behavior—the law. They were successful in changing the law, but failed to sufficiently change hearts. A large number of people still wanted to consume alcohol because they did not believe it was immoral to do so. Because they believed in it, they did it despite the law. The main effect of making the activity illegal was to make the production and distribution of alcohol a violent business, where it had previously been much like any other beverage. There were not gang wars over the soda fountain.

Contrast the legal strategy with the strategy of an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous. AA aims for the heart. They work to change individual lives and behavior by developing a non-judgmental network of support and accountability. AA has been able to change countless lives and free people from the bondage of alcohol addiction. The law could never do that, and we should not ask it to.

I mentioned a second problem with believing the law to be the source of social order: It has a negative effect on unintended parties. This can also be illustrated by the prohibition example. Not only did the law fail to change the behavior of most drinkers, it succeeded in changing the behavior of criminals and government officials, leading to more corruption and violence. It also allowed those who wanted to lessen the damage done by alcohol addiction to feel like they’d “done something about it,” when in fact they’d not helped those that needed help at all.

The change in the average citizen’s moral sense is probably the gravest danger of belief in the power of law. It weakens our moral sense and lulls us into the belief that legality is a substitute for morality. We cease evaluating actions based on their merits as against the moral law and begin evaluating them against state-made law. We shirk responsibility to offer genuine aid because the law will do it, and at the same time we pronounce judgment on actions that are perfectly moral, just because they are illegal.

The issue of illegal immigration is illustrative. If we examine the idea without cloaking it in legal/illegal terms, we begin to see a different picture:

A friend of mine is desperately poor and wants to earn a better living for his family. He applies for a job with the local grocer. The grocer is impressed with his work ethic and is happy to offer him a job. This job means my friend can move his family out of their impoverished condition, afford a reasonable apartment and begin saving so his children and grandchildren can have a much better life. There is no trespass or harm committed in this story by any of the parties involved.

Would it be moral to hire armed men to stop my friend on the way to his first day on the job and physically remove his whole family and send them back to their old neighborhood and old life? Would you do this even if you knew it meant you were ensuring him a life of grinding poverty and very possibly death?

It is clearly immoral to interfere with another individual in this way, in particular when such interference condemns them to a much harsher life. But that is precisely what most Americans advocate when they cry for enforcement of immigration laws. The only thing that makes otherwise moral people advocate such immoral behavior is the word “illegal”—in other words a belief in the power of law.

People believe that breaking state-made law is in and of itself an immoral act that justifies the use of violence in retaliation. This absurd notion does not hold up under the slightest scrutiny, even for those who most strongly believe it. I have yet to find an American who says that those harboring Jews during the Holocaust were acting immorally and deserved punishment, or that the individuals who assisted escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad were deserving of incarceration for breaking the law.

Helping peaceful people who are destitute and persecuted is noble, and when done in defiance of the law can even be courageous. It is only a belief in the supremacy of manmade law over moral law that prevents most Americans from viewing as heroic those who assist immigrants hounded by armed border agents. I submit that looking out for the poor is better than locking them up when they have done nothing but seek a better life.

When we remove our awe for legislation we discover that genuine social change is hampered by a belief in the power of law. We also discover that good people will tolerate or even condone immoral acts when they believe that what is legal is more important than what is right. It is lazy to let the law be our agent of change and dangerous to let it be our moral compass.

Just Get **it Done

There are a lot of traits and skills that can make someone more valuable professionally.  All of them pale in comparison to one: finishing.  One can make up for a lot of deficiency in skill and experience with hard work, but not the other way around.

By ‘hard work’ I do not mean work that is painful or boring or time consuming.  Certainly hard work can be all of these things, but if you’re measuring work by how much it hurts or how long it takes, you’re spinning your wheels.  Hard work is work that produces something ‘hard’.  It creates a tangible result, and a good one.  What matters is output, getting things done fast and well.

It is true, there’s a trade-off between ‘fast’ and ‘well’.  While it is very important to do a job well, once it meets a certain level of quality you’ve got to complete it and move on.  A lot of people may disagree with me, but I’ve observed that probably eight times out of ten, timeliness is more important than additional degrees of perfection.  The key is to learn something each time about how you could have done it better, that way the quality improves with each project and the time to completion does not decrease.  If you simply get things done, on time, every time without a lot of drama, and learn as you go, you will develop and excellent reputation as a highly valuable individual to work with…and herein lies the danger.

Your reputation is more important to your value in the eyes of others than is your actual product.  It couldn’t be any other way, as no one you work with has time to follow every detail every day of what you do.  If you come through reliably, especially on some big tasks early on, you will begin to get a reputation as someone who gets things done.  The longer you live up to it, the stronger the reputation becomes.  At some point, you’ll see diminishing returns to hard work.  Your reputation will be strong enough to survive a missed project here or there.  When you are most secure in your professional role you are most vulnerable.  The comfort zone is the danger zone.

The danger is not that people will suddenly realize you’re no longer getting it done.  That may happen, but I’ve witnessed people who continue to get by on a legacy of past work for years.  It seems some people can spend the better part of their careers getting work because of a reputation formed decades before.  The real danger is that you’ll stop creating value.  This is a tragedy, not only for any persons or organizations who pay you to produce, but for your own well-being.  Do not underestimate the deep human need to forge and create and hone and toil and complete.

The more praise you get early on, the more you need to be alert to the temptation to slack.  You’ve never “arrived”.  You always need to work hard.  That is what separates the good from the truly great.  The good get a well-deserved reputation and then do what’s necessary to maintain it.  The great put their nose to the grind ’till the end, even if their reputation would be OK if they didn’t.  They continue to evolve what they produce so that it is more and more what they love, but they keep producing.

What can you do to better your career?  Young or old, experienced or inexperienced, just get **it done.

A Citizen by Choice

This excellent post by Jeff Tucker over at Laissez Faire Books got me thinking about citizenship.  Per Jeff’s suggestion, I visited Tweetping.net and sat mesmerized as I watched communities grow across the globe, irrespective of arbitrary government borders.

Odd isn’t it; we’re born into citizenship of counties, states, and countries, which are little more than organized crime gangs with layers of bureaucracy, and we are supposed to feel allegiance to these.  Yet everywhere you turn, people are constantly joining myriad associations to get the benefits, both practical and sentimental, that state citizenship is supposed to confer.  States are an anachronism, and more so every day.  Exist costs and lack of alternatives have long been the primary reasons states maintain as many citizens as they do.  Technology is smashing both barriers.

Now you can exit the state and become the citizen of a place that meets your needs and provides a voluntary community far superior.  Most people today have overlapping citizenship in dozens of digital commercial and social jurisdictions.  You can join a better community from right where you are.  Technology has not (yet) provided a way to completely opt out of states, at least without significant risk of being pursued by armed agents, but it offers alternatives to services supposedly only states can provide, including intangible things like a sense of community.  This is exciting.

When states lose the power of patriotism we can see them more clearly for what they are: violent, inefficient and corrupt monopolizers who force us to use services of inferior quality and make us pay even if we don’t.  When state operatives have a harder time winning affection by appealing to the “us vs. them” mindset in citizens because citizens are a part of so many “us’s” and with stronger bonds than they have with the state, the edifice begins to crumble.

Far from being atomistic, critics of the state desire a world of strong and genuine social bonds.  They know the truest of such bonds are forged by cooperation not force; by choice not dictate; by mutual interest not lines on a map.  The more ties formed voluntarily, the weaker the chains of the state.

Some bureau somewhere considers me a citizen of Mount Pleasant, and South Carolina, and the United States.  They take some of my money because of it.  Whatever they need to tell themselves to feel better.  I consider myself a citizen of Amazon Prime, Facebook, Visa, The Institute for Humane Studies, my church, Netflix, Google, Twitter, LFBC, The Hartford Insurance, home school associations, etc. etc. and on and on.  I joined each of these entities to meet specific needs.  Some offer valuable services.  Some offer education.  Some offer security and protection.  Some offer comradery.  Some offer many things at once, while some offer only one.  I have different levels of love and loyalty for each, but all of them render something that terrifies states because they can never offer it: choice.

When Impediments Become Implements

My wife and I took the kids out to eat last night to surprise them with a little fun, and to take a break from making dinner and doing dishes.  We got to the restaurant early and were nearly the only people in our section.  Within minutes, the kids were tearing apart napkins, biting crayons, dropping jelly packets on the floor and generally enjoying themselves.  I had settled in my chair with a cup of coffee and was delighted by the relative relaxation of a quiet restaurant and no cleanup after.

Then we heard it.  A deep, disturbing cough.  Every few minutes we’d hear it again.  I discreetly turned towards the sound and saw a rather haggard looking older gentleman sitting alone. The others in our section definitely noticed the cough and tried not to be visibly offended.  I made a comment to my wife that the noise might take all the enjoyment out of the experience.  She just smiled and said I was being a bit too dramatic.

We ordered, ate, and were loitering at our table for a bit.  The coughing happened intermittently throughout the meal, but the man left just before we were done eating.  The waitress came up and said, “You’re all set.”  We looked up a little confused.  She added, “The gentleman over there paid for your meal.”  My wife asked if she was referring to the older guy who had been coughing and she said yes.  She told us he comes in nearly every day, and, “Sometimes he just picks up somebodies check”.  I was incredibly humbled.

What I saw as an impediment to an enjoyable family dinner become an implement.  Not only did this stranger save us a little money, his act completely transformed the whole experience.  My wife was glowing, the kids thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I was reminded of how short-sighted I can be.  My position regarding this guest began as an adversarial one.  I heard his cough and immediately set myself up against him mentally.  I was fighting for an enjoyable experience, and he was trying to prevent it.  When the waitress delivered the news, it shattered my whole narrative and made me feel small.

If we look for roadblocks, we’ll find them.  If we suspend judgement and let things unfold, roadblocks may turn into opportunities.

Smith, Smith Everywhere

Everywhere I turn I see a theme: decentralized, unplanned order is superior to rigid top-down plans.

Popular economist Nassim Talib’s new book, Antifragile is about, “Things that gain from disorder”.  Historian James C. Scott’s latest book is called, Two Cheers for Anarchism.  A few years back I read a pop-business book called, The Starfish and the Spider, about the “Unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.”   Then there’s this discussion of the 2004 book, Sync, on, “The emerging science of spontaneous order.”

What do these have in common?  None of the authors describe themselves as libertarians, and only some of them reference F.A. Hayek or other libertarian thinkers who are known for the idea of spontaneous order.  This is exciting.

At first I noticed this trend and thought it was interesting how Hayek’s ideas are so fundamental that they are being explored in all disciplines by all kinds of thinkers.  But really, it goes back to Adam Smith (who doubtless drew on ideas from many others before him).  One of Smith’s core insights was that individuals pursuing their own interests unwittingly produce a broader order that benefits all.  It seems simple.  Yet this observation is so deep and rich with explanatory power that we might easily overlook it’s staggering implications.  Hayek’s work, among others, extended this insight and asked more questions about why and how unplanned order is superior to top-down dictates.

Today we see not only an extension of this idea in theory, but widespread application. Websites like Wikipedia were founded on this insight.  User-generated content and the network based framework of the web are live experiments in decentralized order.  The self-policing of blogs and forums and the customers reviews on Amazon and Yelp put the idea to test for all to see.  It’s increasingly difficult to be unaware of the “invisible hand”; it’s becoming more visible every day.

Many who are tapping the power of this insight don’t necessarily extend it to society at large.  As I said, most of the works referenced above are not full-fledged calls for libertarianism.  Still, the power of decentralization, the clunkiness of monopolistic bureaucracy, and the beauty of the unknown and emergent are more understood than ever.  Understanding breeds acceptance.

Seeing is believing.  So is doing.  A generation that believes in the power of voluntary cooperation because they take part in it every day is no less valuable than one that reads libertarian theory.  The future is open, unknown, and bright.

Without Narrative, Vision, and Imagination, the People Perish

I had a friend who assured me sometime around 2000 that the internet wasn’t going anywhere.  He was a smart guy, and even worked in the tech world.  Still, he couldn’t foresee any way the internet could grow large and fast enough to accommodate demand, especially because there was no reliable revenue model.  He predicted it would skyrocket in cost and be used only by big players with a lot of cash.

Today free internet at speeds then unimaginable with content beyond the wildest dreams of that time is ubiquitous.  But he was not a fool.  He just lacked imagination.  It’s possible that the relatively high level of expertise he had with the technology actually made him less able to see beyond its current applications.

We can laugh at predictions like this, but how often do we have small imaginations about our own present and future?  We tend to overvalue the status quo because we cannot think of any other way.  The world is replete with examples if we open our eyes.

At the very time my friend was struggling to see a way companies could offer internet access for free broadcast television and radio were already doing it and had been for decades using advertising as a revenue source.  His focus on what was immediately before him prevented him seeing what was all around him.

We suffer not only from inadequately appreciating the present and the possibilities of the future, but blindness to the past as a clue to what is possible.  I listened to a recent discussion over whether a coercive government monopoly was needed to provide firefighting services.  For nearly twenty minutes there was back and forth as the discussants struggled to think up a viable business plan absent tax funding.  If left to decide roles for the state, this group may have concluded firefighting had to be one, as the free market just couldn’t do it.  The problem with this conclusion (like that of economists who claimed the same for lighthouses) is that for the majority of history firefighting was privately provided.

In order to make the world a freer, better place we need a combination of three things: narrative, vision, and imagination.

Narrative is our story about the past.  If we don’t have enough facts or we interpret them through an incorrect theoretical lens, our narrative about what was will be incorrect.  If, for example, we persists in the false assumption that firefighting and lighthouses have never been privately provided, or the American West was a violent and disorderly place before governments took hold, we will be incapable of accurately seeing present and future possibilities.

Vision is how we see the present.  Do we see harmony and assume that legislation is the only thing keeping mayhem at bay?  Or do we see the beautiful and complex workings of spontaneous order? Our vision will determine how comfortable we are with freedom.  Through state-colored lenses we will live in fear of the chaos around the corner and be reticent to allow our fellow man liberty to experiment, try, fail, succeed and progress.  If our vision expands and we begin to see the way individuals cooperate and coordinate for mutual benefit absent central direction we will welcome and embrace freedom.

Imagination is what we believe about the future.  It determines what we think possible.  If we zoom in too close to the problem at hand we get stuck and fail to allow for the unknown.  We don’t have to know what will be, or even what precisely is possible.  We just have to be humble enough and learn from the patterns of past and present that all our assumptions are going to be blown to smithereens by human creativity.  Don’t try to resist it.  Expect it.

Only when we have the right narrative about the past, the vision to see the beauty of the present, and imagination enough to allow for the wonders of the future will we have the freedom to create it.