I didn’t intend to get into the business of launching careers – I was just trying to make my own awesome!

I set out on my professional journey with one overriding rule for myself: don’t do stuff you hate. Other than that, I followed the path of maximal interestingness and went hard after the opportunities I saw (or imagined). Through a process of learning and elimination, I moved through a lot of cool jobs. Everywhere I went, I found myself connecting people to opportunities. I realized I got a high from finding “hidden talent” and helping it find where it could flourish. I was always recruiting interns and making excuses to hire assistants. I loved to do what some people had done for me and give people a shot before they knew they were ready.

Eventually, my official job became to help young people get internships and jobs. I discovered that one of the things that makes me come alive is helping others discover and do what makes them come alive. After a while, the entrepreneurial itch grew too damn strong. In 2013, I started Praxis, a better path to skill development and career prep than college (and it’s not even close.)

At Praxis, we uncovered some pretty powerful secrets about finding and winning great jobs. It reinforced my belief that nearly everyone is capable of a better, more fulfilling job than they think possible. It revealed that what employers say they want on job postings is almost always inaccurate, but most candidates get scared away by it, thinking they lack the experience, credentials, or skills. What we discovered as the powerful secret was essentially the art of “pitching”. It’s not a passive application with a generic resume, it’s an active sales and marketing process with something made just for each company.

When job seekers treat the process like a hunt, where they must prep, study, stalk, take aim, and fire, they feel empowered and in control. And they win much better jobs, and fast! We routinely helped 17, 18, 19, and 20 year olds with no degree and zero experience land great jobs that said “4 year degree and 2-3 years of experience required”. How? Because we helped candidates find a way to show instead of just tell. We helped them uncover their own skills and abilities, put them into the form of tangible projects, connect them to a specific company, and present that story to the hiring manager.

It works. Big time.

In 2018, I got the itch again. Praxis had become a force to be reckoned with, helping hundreds of people opt out of college for something better. But I sensed an opportunity. We couldn’t deliver the intense, in-depth life-changing Praxis experience to the whole world. It’s too demanding and not everyone can do it. But we could peel off that one layer – the secrets of the job hunt – and build the best job-hunting platform the world has ever known.

Crash was born.

We spent the last 18 months refining a powerful tool to create digital profiles and tailored pitches and run the job hunt like a pro. Early users have had tremendous success – nearly 1,200 interviews and 400 job offers, just among a small group of beta users, most of it during a tough 2020 job market. Crash pitches get a response over 80% of the time, and lead to a job offer over 30% of the time.

We’ve learned that a product isn’t quite enough for everyone. This approach is so new, and so different from what everyone’s been taught, so job seekers don’t just need tools, they need to actually see the world differently – to see their own value, and all of the great companies who could use it. They need a radical new perspective on the job hunt, and a guide along the way. We always say, Crash is really a mindset wrapped in a product.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a comprehensive course designed to walk job-hunters through, step-by-step, the process of finding and winning jobs that we’ve seen work time and time again. There’s something magical about watching downtrodden job-seekers go from depressed to empowered when they reframe the whole process and take charge. It not only changes the outcome, but it makes the process of job hunting itself actually exciting, interesting, and fun!

This course is a distillation of not only my learnings (and secrets! You’ve gotta add the word “secrets” to really get those clicks! ;-) over the last 15 years, but of the entire Praxis team, Crash team, and all our thousands of customers and users. We’ve been deep in the career launch world for a long time, and teased out some stuff that seems obvious after you learn it, but nobody is taught! People are still taught to get good grades, format their resume, and click apply 150 times and wait and hope. Boo. That’s some bullshit if you ask me.

If you or someone you know is on the job hunt, or might be soon, go check out:

Job Hunting 101: A Crash Course

And give me some feedback! Let me know how you like it, and how we can make it even better!

The course is a one-time purchase of $120, and comes with lifetime access to the entire Crash job-hunting platform and tools, and access to the Crasher Slack group. Plus the whole Crash team and community at your back.

Our mission is to help people discover and do what makes them come alive. I’m excited about this course, because it is the best distillation of the key steps in this process we have yet found.

Go forth and create a great career!

It’s harder to find creative freedom within flexible, self-imposed constraints than rigid, exogenous constraints.

When I feel cramped by my own decisions and commitments, creativity is massively difficult to muster because I can always question whether I should stick to those decisions and commitments or alter them to enhance creative flow.

When cramped by forces beyond my control, it’s easier to create in spite of it. There is nowhere else to look, no choice but to get creative.

This poses a conundrum. Maximizing agency is a key to living fulfilled, happy, and free. But a choice freely made is better fully committed to – ships burned behind – than leaving options open in perpetuity.

Self-imposed constraints must be real in order to open creativity.

My nine-year old daughter started attending some once a week homeschool classes. After the first week, I asked how she liked it. She said, “It’s OK. It’s fun to see people and I like lunch and recess. But the rest is weird.”

I asked what was weird about it.

“We sit in the same place for 45 minutes in each class and just listen to the teacher talk. The entire time! We’re supposed to learn just from listening to what she says and memorizing it?! It’s so weird. That’s literally ALL it is!”

She wasn’t complaining. She was genuinely mystified. I don’t know what she expected, but this classroom experience was so foreign to her, she seemed to be wondering why no one else finds this odd and who in their right mind would think people would learn in this fashion.

She’s a curious kid and very hands-on. It was a good reminder how the main thrust of schooling is to condition kids out of natural learning and make blind obedience, even with no clear goal or measure of effectiveness, normalized.

Check it out.

https://soundcloud.com/isaacmorehouse/i-escaped-the-libertarian-movement-nicole-sauce-on-living-free-in-tennessee?ref=clipboard

A day is like a rocket without steering. The trajectory on which it begins determines the arc. Small changes in that trajectory matter a lot.

Beginning the day on my terms is important. The challenge is that those terms change and it’s not always easy to tell what they are. What will allow me to feel free and in control of the day, vs. feeling dragged along by it?

Today, it was starting with a walk outside and a blog post. I knew I needed to avoid any screens until I had some protein, got some movement in the morning sun, and sat down with a fresh cup of coffee. When I sat down, I realized I needed a playlist and a few minutes to write before I opened emails or Slack or surveyed and prepared my week or work.

This allows me to create and think independent of any demands as the first activity of the day. It puts me in a frame of ownership. I feel balanced. So when the demands start coming, it feels easier to field them because I feel autonomous.

Some days I get up, hop right on my computer and immediately start checking emails and Slack and reacting to what I missed overnight. It feels chaotic and those days don’t end well.

So consider this post the setting of my trajectory for today. Take charge of yours and enjoy it. I’ll do the same.

If you caught me on the news talking about Crash.co and discoverpraxis.com, welcome!

Crash was experiencing some outages due to crazy traffic, but please come back and check it out again. So sorry about that. Meantime, feel free to browse around here and check out some of my books and podcasts on education and career.

Some resources:

• Career personality quiz.
• Free career guides at Crash.
• Career Crashers podcast.
• Stories of successful careers without college (add yourself and share!)

If you didn’t see it, you can watch the clip here:

 

 

Watch on Streamanity:

https://streamanity.com/video/gWm9BeacgTaba4

On SoundCloud or any podcast app (under the Isaac Morehouse Podcast).

If you must, it’s also on YouTube.

Read it here.

Someone else having a billion dollars does no harm to you.

It very likely makes their life harder – not materially, but emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically – but it does nothing to make you worse off. If you feel less happy because you envy them, that is not caused by their billion dollars, but by your choice to judge yourself in dollars and against another person. That’s an unhappiness only you can fix by changing your orientation.

It is possible that someone obtained a billion dollars through violence. The most likely scenario is via collaboration with government, as it would be very difficult and very rare to do so violently without at least some state cooperation. Gaining wealth via government, which is always backed by the initiation of violence, causes harm to the world. Taxpayers and those prohibited from peaceful activity by monopoly protections are harmed.

But notice it’s the acts of theft and violence that do the harm, not the billion dollars itself. The having of the billion does not by itself cause harm, only if the process of obtaining it did. Then the problem is with that process, not the money.

One could use a billion dollars to do harmful things, like buy weapons to hurt people. But then the hurting of the people is doing the harm, not the holding or spending of the billion dollars.

There is no way in which another person having possession of a billion dollars can harm you. Outside the peaceful free market they may cause harm in obtaining it or use it to cause harm.

But if they obtained it via market means (no violence, just voluntary exchange) and use it on the market (again peacefully), not only does someone else getting, holding, or spending a billion dollars do the world no harm, it does tremendous good and creates value.

The only way to obtain money (absent force) is to take a resource valued at X, do something to it, and exchange it with someone who values it at >X. The > is the profit you earn, and also a measure of the minimum amount of value that was created. Value that did not exist prior to the exchange.

Even those who earn billions by investing in companies and then “doing nothing” while the company gains value are creating value. Not only by providing capital that the company needs to earn profit (create value), but the process of investing itself is so full of efforts and failures that it generates untold new information that makes the market better and better and innovating and creating new value. The billions earned on a few winning investments pale in comparison to the untold benefit created by all the failed investments that pushed ideas and products forward and created priceless info about what works and doesn’t.

So billionaires in a free market are no threat, and their wealth is likely a sign of tons of value created for you and others. This doesn’t make them morally good people or intellectual adept or fun or kind or anything else. It just means their existence is no threat and how they got there created benefit for others, intentionally or not.

Billionaires in an unfree market don’t harm you by mere fact of having a billion dollars, but they way they got it or what they use it for could.

Fight for freedom, not against others having arbitrary amounts of money.

Read it here.

We’re going live with a major update to crash.co tomorrow. This is the beginning of the next big chapter in building the best career launch platform in the world. I can’t wait! Lots more work to be done, but tomorrow’s update will be the foundation we build on. Over a year of user feedback and beta testing has helped us hone it.

I’m mixing it up again, after a year and a half streak of daily blogging, I’m gonna switch my routine. I won’t be blogging daily for a while, but I’m doing a lot of stuff in a lot of other places!

• I write articles and guides at crash.co
• I record a weekly Career Crashers podcast episode
• I am active on Twitter and Twetch
• I talk about bitcoin every few weeks with some friends
• I’m doing some new episodes of the Isaac Morehouse Podcast
• I write a weekly, subscribers-only Inner Game of Startups newsletter

Of course the majority of my time is spent building Crash into the greatest career launch platform in the world and being a husband and dad and trying to maintain my physical and intellectual health. But I work in a lot of other interests as well, and writing will always be a big part.

Who knows whether/when I decide I can’t handle life without daily blogging (it usually happens when I take these breaks), but for now I’m going all in on a new routine.

If brevity is

The soul of wit, well I guess

I am really screwed

(Also available on the Isaac Morehouse podcast)