I’ve always found that being open and generous pays off in myriad ways, while penny pinching is very costly.

There are more direct and obvious ways in which being generous pays off. You build social capital, and then others are more likely to be generous to you. But thinking in terms of direct quid pro quo is limiting. And if you’re keeping a tally, you’re losing nearly all the benefits of generosity.

Being generous cultivates a mindset and outlook on the world. An abundance mindset changes everything. You enjoy every day more. You see more possibility and opportunity. You get excited about the unknown things that might come back as you spread good will.

It may sound woo woo, but it’s real. Your brain is trained by your repeated actions. Repeatedly being generous trains you to believe on a deep level that this is not a loss and you will have enough. You lose some fear, gain some joy, and begin to see more clearly and have more fun.

Abundance-minded people tend to be more productive, creative, and interesting. They win more, in part because they believe they will, in part because those around them are more inclined to help them win.

The hardest part about decision making is that you already know the answer.

It’s always down there, inside you somewhere. You know it. And somehow, you know you know it.

Finding it, being honest about it, and sticking with it despite all the noise and confusion and arguments about more complex alternatives and concerns over reputation and fears over your future is the hard part.

That fact that you already know means you can’t defer to or rely on or blame anyone else. You’ve gotta find it. Listen to it. And act on it. Without shame or remorse.

If you were in the deepest reaches of space, engulfed in millions of cubic miles of darkness, a pinprick of light would still penetrate it. It could not be extinguished by any quantity of darkness.

Light can disperse darkness but not the other way around. Light can also spread. Fire lights other fires, a beam can bounce and reflect off of other objects. Darkness cannot reproduce itself, it can only occupy space left behind by vacating light. It is a borrower, a usurper, not a creator. Light has a source, darkness is devoid of source; it is the absence of source.

Darkness is always lurking, ready to overtake any place where light goes out. When times seem darkest it’s not because darkness has increased, but because lights have grown dimmer.

That’s good news. It means every time you are the tiniest light, you are reducing the darkness. It can be beat back, but only as light increases.

We are living in the movie A Quiet Place and its sequel.

If you speak – if you make any sound, if your existence, you living your life, you merely being or breathing – broadcasts any kind of signal that disturbs the lurking devourers, you get killed.

This is speech. This is expression. This is living out loud. This is being your beliefs.

What happens in this world?

Most people get killed. A zombified cityscape remains. An eerie, quiet shell of what it was just before the madness.

What do you do?

Most hide. Go off the grid. Flee. Hunker down. And they still get killed. Because humans cannot live in silence.

Others find a protected island utopia where they can live freely without the rest of the world knowing. But they too eventually get killed. Because humans living freely reverberates beyond the borders of any protected citadel.

Is there any solution to such a suffocating force?

It is not to remain quiet, it is not to run and hide, it is not to build a fortress. Those will not work in the long term. Because you are human. You must speak out. You must live out loud. Your existence must register.

Ultimately, the solution is to speak.

It is to be loud in a specific way. To find a frequency that cripples and destroys the enemy that wishes to silence you. And to broadcast that frequency so loudly it covers the globe.

And it’s not even close.

Questioning experts might lead to some mistakes. Obeying them can lead to genocidal atrocities on a mass scale.

This is a consistent pattern in all of human history and it’s predictable into the future.

“Expert” implies some kind of institutional expert-conferring apparatus. Such intuitions are subject to Public Choice dynamics. They will always inevitably reward group loyalty and conformity and become cartelized and myopic. Always. Every time. You cannot prevent it with good people or good intentions.

The best way to reduce the harm of these tendencies is with outside pressure. Doubt in the institutions. Competing institutions. A free and open market for ideas, services, products, and expert-making.

A sure way to dramatically exacerbate the problem and raise the cost of its outcomes is to involve the state. Adding threats of violence to back and protect these institutions exponentially increases their evils and attracts even worse people to them.

Government-backed experts are a graver threat to mankind than any other in all of history. There is no amount of ignorance, arrogance, or stubborn refusal to listen to them that can hold a candle to the evils caused by obedience to experts. The worst outcomes of skepticism and defiance of experts are infinitesimally smaller than the median outcomes of blind obedience.

When someone says, “Just shut up and trust the experts and governments who tell you to”, especially in an environment where questioning them is shunned and banned, they are on a very very dark and dangerous path, whether they know it or not.

With a bit of a professional track-record, you start to hear the sirens.

They beckon you away from productive activities to endless cyclones of time-eating flimflam, using flattery and honorifics as bait.

Beware.

Sitting on boards, being an advisor, a mentor, a presenter, a panelist, a contributor, or an ill-defined partner are usually euphemisms for giving away your energy for a bit of pretend importance.

It’s not that you can’t or shouldn’t help others or have a range of activities you’re involved in. That is a good way to invest in yourself and build social capital. But when it comes seeking you, and especially when it comes with a formal title, it’s usually a trap.

The universe has taken notice of you. You’ve created enough value to have a budding reputation. Energy-hungry vampires can smell it. When they see a rising star, increasing its output, they will seek to siphon off some of that energy by offering you nothing in return. The nothing will be disguised as something important and appeal to your vanity and the schooled-in absurdity of resume padding.

Business relationships should be clear, not open-ended. You pay X to get Y. You get paid Y to provide X.

Non-business relationships should be fluid, not formal. You don’t need a board seat to bounce ideas around with your friends.

Highly formal yet unclear relationships are the most likely to eat your time and parts of your soul as you innocently and excitedly give it a shot to see if some unknown good might come of it.

Early in your career, when your value creation potential is limited as your reputation, it’s a good idea to take as many new opportunities as you can to learn what’s what. But by mid-career, you have found some higher-leverage activities and know how to create some value. You’re beyond open-ended exploration mode. You’ve flipped from, “Unless you hate it, say yes” to “Unless you love it, say no”.

The more titles and official roles you carry around at this stage, the more you signal to clear-thinking people that you’re wasting time and chasing clout.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Brains need novelty

Souls grow deeper through routine

Be routinely new?

It’s one of those weekends. I feel the urge to go completely offline except for a few work obligations and my daily blog post.

A good screen detox always tends to help me. And it helps me appreciate how great the internet is when I’m back. I’m not anti-online at all. But I am pro taking control of my relationship to the flow of info.

Remember the controversial Starbucks Christmas cups?

Of course not. Nobody does.

But everyone remembers trending social media posts about them.

Scratch that. That’s also incorrect. What people remember are articles like, “What people who get upset at backlash against people who cheer for the new Starbucks cups say about society”.

None of the people in the story really existed. Yet everyone felt compelled to go to social media and post about how they thought people posting about how they thought these cups were good or bad was good or bad.

The event itself wasn’t really a thing. People who experienced the non-event and shared about it weren’t much of a thing either. People commenting on the people not really experiencing the non-event were a manufactured thing. And people responding to that were a real thing. But can you really call that real?

Most trending topics and emotional stand-offs on social media are abstractions of abstractions of abstractions of things that may or may not exist concretely. It’s a constant flow of symbols attempting to convey meaning and signal it to others battling with other signals over other signals.

I don’t know that this is bad. It’s certainly interesting. What is bad is forgetting that all this abstraction is going on. If you play the game as if these are concrete realities opposing each other, you’ll get all kinds of messed up. You’ll add to the abstraction with your emotional reaction while believing you’re on the level of concretes. When you’re playing a different game than you think you’re playing, you always lose.

Remember, pretty much everything on the real-time internet is a fake reaction to a fake reaction to a fake event. Trying to layer on realness adds undue weight to these symbol games.

Statues get torn down.

Heroes become villains.

Villains get put on T-shirts.

Orwell was right when he said those who control the present control the past. The deeds of one’s life do not create an indelible legacy. It is always up for redefinition per the zeitgeist. No matter how provable and objective you think the facts are, they can be changed, hidden, forgotten, or misconstrued. You have no power to preserve your reputation once you’re dead.

This is one of the reasons I’ve never really been motivated by the idea of leaving a legacy. It’s seems to be the most common motivator for people who have achieved a lot of success and made a lot of money. People will go to great lengths to form a legacy, hoping that they are remembered as great by many generations to come. I don’t really get that.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve always believed in the immortality of the soul. If you keep living and acting beyond death, why make such a fuss about trying to cement memory of what you did during the tiny sliver of earthly experience?

I’m also a let the chips fall kind of guy. Legacy is about what other people think of you, and worrying about what other people think is disempowering. You have no control over how the facts of your life get interpreted, whether you etch them in stone or not, so why bother and fuss?

I also believe that the words you speak and how you live alter the world in powerful, permanent ways whether anyone knows it or not. Legacy is about making sure they know it, but greatness is about actually doing it. I’d rather live my best life, knowing the world will be forever changed by it, than spend energy trying to ensure people realize or think highly of it. As I’ve written before, I’d rather have a secret legacy.

It’s hard enough to take control over your reputation while living. It’s dangerous to try too hard. Why try to do so beyond the grave?

When you want to achieve something or be true to who you are at your best, the universe has a way of seeing if you mean it.

We tend to think of these shit tests as critics, negative experiences, people being rude to you, threats to your reputation, and haters. That’s part of it. But that’s the easy part.

The real shit test is genuine love, care, need, and concern from those close to you.

Tim Grover, trainer to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and many others, said once he was packing his bag for another work trip. His young daughter came in and asked why he had to travel so much. He said he traveled for work to earn money to pay for food, housing, and everything else for the family. His daughter said, “If I eat less can you be home more?”

Grover said at that point in the story you expect to hear that he stopped packing, cancelled his trip, and found a less demanding job. But he kept packing.

The easy thing is to say he’s an asshole, bad father, selfish jerk, unbalanced, bad prioritization, etc. etc. Too easy. Everyone would call him great if he changed his goals for his daughter’s desire to see him more.

I don’t know if Grover is a good father in other ways, but I know that he was being true to himself by going. He knows who he is. He knows he’s wired to work his ass off with top athletes to get them winning. He knows if he’s not doing that, he’s living a weaker version of his best life.

That’s the hardest test. When good people you love want you to alleviate some of their suffering by abandoning a little bit of who you’re called to be. Of course you’ve gotta fight to discover and rediscover who that is, and you’ve gotta be honest with yourself about what you find. But once you do, giving it up for the temporary comfort of those you love is not doing you or them any real favors. It will win you the easier stuff – love, praise, fuzzy feelings – but it won’t win you the harder stuff, which is your deeper purpose for living.

Taking shit from haters is one thing. Disappointing those who love you is another. If you want it, you’ve gotta really mean it. Sacrifice doesn’t always feel heroic in the moment.

The best way to learn about something is to use it, do it, or try it.

Trying to understand a game before you play it is less effective than playing before you understand it. Play to understand it, not the other way around.

My friend TK Coleman coined the term tough minded optimism a decade or so ago. The idea is to recapture genuine optimism from the false idea that it means being a Pollyanna, living in delusion, or denying tough realities. Real optimism does not stick its head in the sand or deny any negative realities. It accepts them and chooses to focus more energy on the positive responses to those challenges.

I’ve always been on board with this approach to optimism, but it’s never been more valuable to me than now.

I’m not trying to be sensational, but the world is more visibly fucked up right now than at any point in my lifetime. There are trends that pose a threat to the way I work and live, and require adjustment, adaptation, monitoring, and re-assessing the best cost/benefit tradeoffs. To continue to live as free and fully alive as possible I cannot ignore or wish away shitty developments as easily as I used to.

Most bad things in the world do not affect you and stressing over them won’t help you. That is still the case, but there is a much higher percentage of bad things in the world that actually do affect me than at any time I can remember.

Optimism is difficult right now. Especially the kind that comes to mind when I don’t explicitly employ TK’s approach. The old optimism as naivete is difficult and costly. But tough minded optimism is very possible and important.

A stoic assessment of all possible outcomes, even the worst, and acceptance of those possibilities is the starting point. Then a conscious choice to focus energy and attention on the best course of action for even the worst series of events comes next. Increasing the probability that the better outcomes occur. Then daily focus on good developments that are often quietly happening right alongside the bad in my own life and the world.

Nobody wins being negative. But positive shouldn’t mean naïve. Tough minded optimism is the answer.

I, Pencil describes an unknowable act.

The creation of a simple pencil in a free market economy is illegible and beyond the cataloguing and understanding of any individual human or body of humans. It cannot be known, it can only be experienced. It cannot be planned, it can only be embodied. It cannot be predicted, it can only emerge. The author Leonard Read does not fully understand or contain or define it, but tells a rough story of how it proceeds.

In the Bible, King David is tempted by Satan to take a census of all his people. He does, and is punished by God for doing so.

The earliest known writings appear to be ledgers for accounting.

James C. Scott describes the emergence of government monopolies on force in a geographical area as relying on legibility. Grain harvests had to occur on known schedules, with knowable yields. Forests had to be managed in neat rows of countable trees. Governments cannot create anything, they rely on what they can take through the threat of violence. To threaten and take requires definable, containable victims.

There are all kinds of ancient stories of people or gods making known secret knowledge and the suffering and chaos that resulted.

What is it about making explicit the implicit, or visible the veiled, that is so dangerous? Why do devils and spirits tempt man with this idea, and why do rebels and freedom-fighter resist being counted?

On the surface, it seems like a warning against technology, knowledge, or community and coordination. It seems to imply a hand-to-mouth existence based entirely on whatever happens to come is better than plans and efforts and technological progress. Defining things gives us the power to work with and improve them. Is this bad?

I don’t think it’s a condemnation of these things. I think it’s a reminder that these things emerge and exist because we are fallible. Perfect knowledge and understanding of all future events is a kind of existence we can’t comprehend. Because of unknowns, we must guess and probabilistically problem solve and tinker and experiment and exchange.

Out of these tinkerings and exchanges emerges a series of interconnected relationships with bits of info embodied in things like language and prices. Viewing this as perfection and attempting to freeze it, know it, and count it is an attempt to build a Tower of Babel. This is dangerous and deadly. What Hayek called the fatal conceit. The point of the division of labor and the ongoing process of market exchange and discovery is to surprise and be surprised through continued mutually beneficial action.

To capture a free market is to kill it. It is an ongoing dance of motion, and attempts to cordon it off and capture some of its power is to stop the flow of creativity. Any power captured by stagnating this flow will corrupt.

The division of labor and free exchange create a kind of ephemeral yet very real and living knowledge that aids and spurs to action and gives life. The controlled, directed, and defined economy siphons off vestiges of that creativity and causes atrophy and death.

The more legible the market to would-be rulers, the closer it is to death.

The embodied knowledge of free and open exchange is harmonious with human’s limitations and therefore maximizes our capacities. The capture of that process to own and define, contain and control it exceeds human ability and therefore reduces and destroys our capacities.

I, Pencil is about a kind of knowledge that can never be controlled by a guild. A life-giving kind. Census-taking and central planning and boards and permits and macroeconomic mandates are attempts at a kind of knowledge beyond the reach of man, and as such, come with warnings and promises of death.

I don’t like outstanding or partially completed tasks. I work really fast to obsessively knock them off my list.

This has several downsides. I am not good on attention to detail, and I often don’t enjoy what I’m doing as much as I could because I am only thinking about getting it done.

Most tasks should be done as quickly as possible. But certain tasks are better when done slowly. I have sometimes carved out half a day or so to do some more mentally demanding kinds of work, but then when I get into it I can’t stop thinking in rapid fire task mode. I blaze through and get it done with time to spare, but that time would’ve better been used going slowly.

Now that I’m not a young man anymore, I’m finally learning to work slowly. I’m trying to gain some of that old man tortoise vs hare sort of methodical working wisdom. It helps a lot to just tell myself to take longer, treat each sub-task as it’s own thing worth thinking through, and relax about checking it off the list. Work that has no definite criteria of doneness – say designing a new website – is better done slower. If I do it fast, it might be good enough, but there will be a lot of value left on the table. Sitting in it for a while and enjoying the process of playing with it is better.

It’s hard for me to do this. I do find it helps if I put on relaxing music and have a cup of coffee or a glass of whiskey to sip. If I imagine it’s a weekend or holiday, it’s also easier. For some reason, working when I don’t have to work and when no one else is working makes it easier for me to work slowly.