I keep parts of my property unmown. The tall grasses and flowers are lovely, and it saves me work.

But I always mow a double lane around the entire perimeter and any obstacles or objects like trees or gullies. The edges of the property need to be maintained, or else the property will begin to shrink.

Every few weeks, the mowing around the edges gets tough and the mower struggles to get through it. The thick unmown encroaches on the lower, kempt grass. I’ve got to push back the boundaries regularly. There is no state of neutral. The boundaries are either being actively pushed back, or they are actively encroaching in.

I’ve often thought of this when I publish a blog post or a Tweet or make a career move.

Once you carve out a space in the world, the edges of that space will begin to close in if you don’t actively beat them back.

You’ll get defined, labelled, and categorized. Maybe all well and good – and even quite useful if they are accurate. But they don’t stay put. The categorizations, the public perception of your brand and identity is like the perimeter of my lawn. There’s no stasis. It moves in on you if you leave it unattended.

You must constantly redefine the edges of your identity. You’ve got to bushwhack it when it starts to close you in and reduce your scope of movement. Sometimes that’s unpleasant work. Sometimes it irritates people who were creeping up your lawn assuming parts of it were theirs.

So be it. Keep those edges trim. The wilderness is beautiful to look at and even wander through. But your property has to be maintained or be overrun.

I just had to submit an invoice. To obtain the info I needed to complete it, I had to open four different tabs, sign in to two different accounts, which each required me signing in to a password manager, then an authenticator app, then I had to download then upload an image to put into a doc that had to be downloaded then uploaded. When I clicked submit, I had to click on all pictures that showed a bus (does the tiniest sliver of the hood count as “show a bus”?).

The invoice was for a few hundred dollars.

Stuff like this makes me want to quit.

Death by a thousand badly designed cuts. The level of hoop jumping in the digital world is getting so bad. It chips away at all the things that make digital cool. The number of clicks needed to do anything has gotten so damn high.

It’s usually ostensibly for security. But the odds I make a mistake that makes me more insecure get higher with every additional action required. More complicated doesn’t always mean more secure.

Thank you for joining today’s rant.

The most successful marketing email ever sent by any of my companies or projects was an apology email.

At Praxis, we accidentally sent the wrong thing to the wrong list. I can’t even remember exactly what it was, but it was a big embarrassing mistake. The kind a lot of people get pissed about.

We immediately sent a short “We screwed up” email to everyone – even those who probably never received the original. We owned it, asked for mercy, and offered something to make up for it.

And people loved it!

The open rate was off the charts. So was the click-through. So were the replies.

We couldn’t plan or predict that. The scientific side of marketing – A/B testing subject lines, formal vs informal, length, time of day sent, etc. – can get you stuck in a robotic way of connecting to customers and prospective customers. When you screw up – when you’re human – and you respond in a human way without the optimization, sometimes it’s a breakthrough.

Yesterday, I suffered a few embarrassing errors. The process of figuring out what to do about it reminded me of the Praxis apology email. It was a good reminder to be human, be humble, and own mistakes instead of stressing about how to hide them. Hell, amplify them!

We’re all learning here.

I’ve been hyping a 30 day blog challenge over on Bitpost. It starts tomorrow, so my normal daily blogging will be taking place over there. I may cross post here as well, I’m not sure.

I used to be obsessed with having all my stuff in one single place, but eventually I gave up. Too many articles, videos, and podcast interviews, both personal and company, to keep track in a single place.

If you’ve never done daily blogging, join the challenge!

“Acme Co. wants to see your anonymized browsing data for the past 30 days and will pay you $2 for it. Allow, deny, or counter offer?”

I’m not scared of data being the new oil. But I’d love to see ways people can more easily capture the value of their own.

Everything you do creates data. That data has value. Currently, the data is predominantly obtained and stored by the platforms where the actions take place, and since they have it, they are best able to capture its value. They sell it to whom they wish. You get little control over who gets to see what or ability to bargain for what you get in return.

You don’t get nothing. Platforms provide free services you value (otherwise you wouldn’t keep using them) in exchange for the data you produce and they get to capture and sell. But it’s an opaque market, and your choices are pretty much limited to using the platform or not. Sometimes you can provide feedback like “I don’t want to see ads like this”, but that’s only minimally useful to you, and you capture little of the value such info creates for the platform.

What if you had a personal control panel where you got to decide who saw what data, and could clearly see the costs/benefits? What if the offers on the table were more transparent? “Use only X feature of this platform and provide us no data, or access all features in exchange for letting the platform see the following data.” Markets for types of data, niche customer bases, etc. could emerge. “Allow Monster Truck related newsletters to access your email address for $5, Y/N?”

Not sure we’ll get there, or if this paradigm will look silly in the future, but I love the idea. You’re sitting on a reserve of the new oil, and making more all the time. The problem is, you lack the tools to extract, store, and sell it. So you allow others to do it for you which isn’t the worst, but we’re getting to the point where individuals want more granular control.

First, five syllables

Then seven syllables next

Then again it’s five

My first business started with a model. The model and the vision were so tightly connected. The value prop to customers was the business model.

We got a lot of things wrong with the product, the market, the channels, and the operational side. But the model was right.

I used to believe the model was less important than the vision, the product, or the market. Now I think the model is the most important building block.

It’s not easy to find a good one where the incentives, ability and willingness to pay, and value delivered all line up properly. Lots of companies can create value so someone. Lots of parties will pay for stuff. Not many businesses align who gets value with who pays, how they pay, how much they pay, and when they pay in good order and in a way that leaves sustainable margins. Before even determining how big the market is or how to deliver, the model has to make sense.

Playing around with business models might be a better starting point than playing around with products.

I’ve given up on my ability to fully control the chaos even of my own household. I’m type A. My desk is always immaculate, and if there is an object on it, it is perfectly perpendicular to the sides of the desk. I adjust frequently to ensure this.

But I live in a house with a wife and four kids, from very young to teenage. So far, I’m the only type A in the house. If I want peace, I cannot also demand complete order. I’ve tried, and it’s not worth the cost.

My tendency as an all-or-nothing person is to just let everything go except the few things, like my desk, over which I have complete control. It’s so hard for me to bring some order to bear, while not being able to really do it the way I think it should be. So I’m a bit too hands off. It keeps me from losing my mind.

But from time to time, I realize I need to find some kind of compromise – to bring some, but not too much of my type A to bear. What seems to work better than, say, bringing partial order to the whole house, is picking a few pockets of complete order. If the dishes are always done and put away, the beds always made, and the shoes always in the basket, for example. It’s easier for me to maintain and help them maintain these few pockets of order than it would be to try to keep semi order over every part of the house. Leave the junk drawer alone. Leave the corner of the basement alone. A few pockets of chaos. Some pockets of order. And the main part of the house sort of stays good enough without major fighting.

It’s a constant dance, and like the economy, never in the theoretical equilibrium of the models.

We’re at a weird point culturally. There doesn’t seem to be anything that’s not religious. Maybe this was the historical norm for humans and the more recent past is the aberration. Either way, it’s a big change from the era I grew up in.

At this point, the sciences and social sciences, or any other attempt to understand reality and the humans who inhabit and form patterns within it, are insufficient. They are one-dimensional and likely to lead to blind corners. It feels necessary to study myths, cults, religions, their formation, dynamics, narratives, history, theology, and cosmology. These are more illuminating and useful for navigating the current age than anything else.

I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it’s certainly strange and requires change.

Say what you will about Evangelical Protestant churches in America (and there’s plenty to say), they are awesome in a pinch.

I grew up in this milieu, and I am well acquainted with the problems of shallow theology, cheesy efforts to be cool, lack of connection to the Christian tradition and history, focus on numbers, vanity in the big show of services, and ever-present hypocrisy. It’s all there.

But damn. If some shit goes down, these people are on your side helping out quickly, efficiently, and in large numbers.

There was some flooding around here recently. The immediate mobilization of every Evangelical Protestant church in the area to survey, collect, and deploy needed tools, workers, water, food, places to stay, vehicles, money – even little things like toys for little kids who lost every thing – put any military or government agency to shame. It also seems the more qualities a church has that would make a “high church”, Catholic, or Orthodox person cringe, the more amazing they are at this kind of direct aid to humans in need.

Clusters of guys with matching trendy church T-shirts were swarming disaster areas and happily cleaning, fixing, and doing anything they could.

There were plenty of individual citizens helping out on their own, and there were some other nonprofits, and of course the largely inefficient, ill-timed, awkward assistance of various government bodies. But nothing came close to the swift, vast action of the local churches.

They may be badly lacking in the theology and rituals of the Christian faith, but modern Evangelical Protestants know how to be Christlike in a crisis better than any I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never found a problem where the simpler answer wasn’t better than the more complex answer.

Sometimes the process of getting to simple is complex. Sometimes understanding the simple is complex. But the simpler answer is always better long-term than the more complex.

Complex answers tend to be so because they lack courage. They make elaborate justifications and Rube-Goldberg appendages instead of taking a more direct route, because they are avoiding something difficult but true. Don’t avoid it. Run right into it. Face reality as head-on as possible.

Simplify.

Most of us have grown up with an implied Whig theory of history. That is, things always progress.

And who’s to blame us? For several centuries, technology has always gotten better. It seems impossible that it could go backwards. We can simply keep building on what we have, right?

Apparently not.

There are many baffling disappearances in history. Entire advanced civilizations leaving nothing but amazing technological achievements that no nearby cultures could replicate let alone improve upon. Somehow their advanced tech didn’t spread, it died.

There are even more baffling cases of the same culture having once had tech that it lost. China has some epochs where tech seemed to go backwards.

So it’s possible. And if it’s possible, we should think about what might make it reality, and look for signs even now. When you start looking, you find some odd things.

Yesterday while mowing the lawn, my plastic gasoline can got a crack in its seam and gas started dripping everywhere. Plastic gasoline cans swell and bloat in heat, have been known to explore, leak often, have unmanageable safety caps, and pour excruciatingly slowly if you’re filling up a 3.5 gal mower tank. Gas cans were better 20 years ago.

Jeffrey Tucker has written an entire book on gas cans and similar household technologies like showerheads and water heaters and toilets that are worse than they used to be.

In all of these instances, the culprit is not loss of technical ability, it’s government regulation. The “Safety” terrorists get in bed with industry lobbyists to restrict product design with a classic Bootleggers & Baptists combo of good intentions and intentional barriers to competition. It’s people’s willingness to tolerate these regressions that allow them. But what happens over a long enough period of time when every company and every consumer is conditioned to the worse tech? Factories are tooled to produce it, workers trained to make it, users accustomed to its inferiority. How long until the superior versions of the past get forgotten?

Some see similar plateaus or regressions in things like automobiles, air travel, roads and bridges, home construction, etc. They call this “The Great Stagnation”, and long for a more technologically ambitious age. I don’t know these technologies well enough to know if they’re gotten worse when you compare outcome per dollar spent, but I do know the experience of them is inferior in many ways to the past. Air travel, if measured by the time you leave your house to the time you arrive in the hotel at your destination, is slower than it was 60 years ago. The planes themselves may have WiFi and some other upgrades, but the quality of the experience as a whole is worse. Again, we find the Safety cartel behind it.

While Stagnation apologists give too little consideration to information technology, they do seem to correctly identify a lack of technological ambition culturally, as compared to say the 1950’s.

The insane advances in the past 3-4 decades around information and computation should not be overlooked. But it’s also easy get too caught up in the advances that are easy to see and ignore the ways in which tech can or has slowed, stopped, or regressed.

I don’t have a tight causal theory to the hows and whys of tech regression, but I suspect there’s a reason for so many ancient myths like Atlantis and Babel. It seems tech advancement can lead to moral and cultural arrogance and decay, perhaps what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision”, which leads to tech directed in the wrong places, which leads to decay, regression, or cataclysm.

I’m not proposing any strong theories or answers here. But I am proposing that technology can go backwards. It is entirely possible that in 20 years, kids will want to hear stories about how amazing the internet and iPhone were, compared to whatever they have.

There’s no rest like earned rest.

Ever had one of those lazy weekends or vacations that just sorta made you grumpy? I have. It happens when I didn’t exhaust myself with the best possible and hardest work leading up to it.

On the other hand, I’ve had some quiet evenings with a beer that felt like a blissful vacation. Because I worked my ass off and earned it.

Working for break time doesn’t do it. Just working until you can’t anymore does.

Movies lie.

In my nearly two-score years on this earth, every time I’ve witnessed a tornado, flood, hurricane, fire, or other calamity, I have been brought to tears by the instant compassion and heroism of humans.

In movies, it’s a free for all. People trample their fellow man and let them die. In reality, people rise, rally, and rescue total strangers.

I knew a guy when I was a kid who bought a truck with a snow plow and winch so he could go out and clear driveways and pull people from ditches in snowstorms. He loved it. He’d risk his safety to find and help strangers. This was not his job and he got no attention for it.

In my experience, this has been this rule more than the exception in times of disaster and crisis.

Humans have heroism in them. All of us.

I’m an action-biased dude. I like to get things done and fast. But there are times when nothing can be done until more time passes.

I used to try to eliminate or speed up the times between action. It usually causes trouble. I’ve slowly but surely increased my tolerance for periods in which there is nothing to do but let time pass. There are problems for which the only solution is time and inaction. I often know when this is true, but I still can’t help but talk myself into ways in which I could help things along. Not a good idea.

The spaces between rising or falling action are actually pretty cool. You can allow your mind to unwind and go with the flow. I don’t think letting the current carry you is a good approach to life overall, but in between paddle strokes you need to glide. Those gliding moments are not problems. They’re good things.

At least I’m trying to accept them as such.