Someone sent me these three question about having a remote team. My answers below.

1. Why do you hire remote workers?

This question strikes me as backwards.

Having an office and requiring every team member to live and commute in the same place is way more costly and hard to justify. It seems to me the burden of proof should be reversed.

Why would you build an on-site team? Do you think the city you’re in has talent superior to every other city combined? Will the best people always want to move there? Will your team work better in a physical office to the tune of (insert amount paid for rent)?

Non-remote workers are very tough for me to justify. Remote workers are just workers. They need no special justification.

2. How have remote workers benefited you?

Allowed me to build two companies. No chance in hell I’d have been able to had I needed on-site workers from day one.

Remote allows me to easily experiment with interns and contractors and see who develops into full-time talent as we grow. It allows me to attract world-class talent at below market wages (because adjusted for quality of life, and cost of living in city they pick, they come out ahead).

It allows me to live in a smaller city that’s ideal for raising my four kids even though it’s not ideal for the talent my company needs.

How many times is the best place to raise four kids also the best place to find startup talent? Probably never. Why compromise on either when you can have both?

3. How do you keep them engaged/interested in the work?

Hire the people who don’t need me to keep them interested.

Really!

When you’re remote from day one, this isn’t hard. People know what to expect. You attract those who can handle it.

Many people say that team members will have a hard time focusing or being motivated if not in an office. The dirty little secret is that anyone who would have that struggle as a remote worker is already having that struggle in the office, it’s just going unnoticed because people can see them there and assume they must be working.

The bar and accountability are higher with remote teams. If you don’t reply to a message, it’s easy for people to assume you’re asleep or at the beach. You need to maintain a great reputation by delivering results. In an office if someone pops in to chat and you’re not there they just assume you went to the bathroom. You can get away with more.

It’s kind of funny that most curricula are focused on kids and young adults learning things before they need to know them.

They learn about and memorize facts and ideas that are completely unnecessary to solving actual problems they face. The idea is so that they’ll be prepared and know things in case they ever become important or useful to know in the future. It’s odd for several reasons, not least of which is that this kind of learning has almost no retention, but especially because most of the students won’t end up ever facing most of the problems even if they did retain the knowledge. (I have used Pythagorean theorem once in my entire life, and even then I didn’t remember its name or the specific formula, but had a vague idea that there was a way to find out one length of a triangle if I had the other two. Google did the rest.)

It should be taken as a given then that I am not pushing for “just in case” learning, or any kind of compulsory education period.

But if one were to agree with the standard approach of learning a bunch of things that might possibly be useful to some sliver of the class at some point in the future, you would think there might be a good bit of material on wealth management. After all, there are 12 million millionaires in the US – more than 3% of the population – which is probably higher than the percent of students who will ever need to know how to label a mitochondria. If you believe in preparatory learning, preparing to manage wealth would seem at least as logical as preparing to be a medical doctor. (There are roughly 900,000 doctors in the US, or less than 0.3% of the population).

We tend to think about wealth as only a benefit, not a problem to be dealt with. “Oh yeah, sure would be nice if my biggest challenge was learning how to manage a million bucks!” Maybe. But probably not as nice as we imagine.

What’s the opportunity cost of paying off a mortgage vs putting the money to work in the market? How liquid do you need to be? Where to keep cash since banks are only insured or $250,000 in deposits? How to deal with requests and demands from friends and family? How much to hedge against exogenous economic shocks? How to do so? How to not get taken advantage of by financial planners, lawyers, accountants, and managers of family offices and trusts? What’s the best way to handle inheritances so you give your kids a leg up but don’t cripple them and rob their ability to gain strength by solving their own problems?

Most people have trouble with financial management at the paycheck to paycheck level. More money doesn’t magically solve that. The problems just get bigger and the stakes higher.

While the idea of compulsory public schools teaching wealth management is not desirable, there might be something to the idea of individuals who desire to achieve wealth learning how to manage it a few steps ahead of time. If nothing else, the mindset alone is a form of subconscious confidence building. Investing in wealth management is a kind of bet on yourself that you will put it to use.

So close the first time

And yet so far, I hope that

This time is closer

This year I’m trying to spend about an hour a week making something totally unrelated to work.

Doing a two hour discussion on bitcoin every few weeks has fit the bill. Though this one ran way too long!

I always learn something and have fun, plus it gives me an excuse to hang with my friends.

On frustration, momentum, and product scope.

Read it and all issues here.

I have a friend who is like Jim Halpern from the show The Office.

He will spend inordinate amounts of time scheming and executing elaborate pranks. They always delight everyone around him, and he is clearly very alive while doing them, but I always felt like it was such a waste.

How much time and energy was taken away from productive, profitable work?

I think I was underestimating the value of pranks.

I’m not going to claim there’s no such thing as unhealthy distraction, but I think the process of pranking is a source of untapped creativity and productivity.

The thought process that pranksters have is playful. It’s not threatened by circumstances, but seems to see only opportunity in every event. It is empathetic and has a deep understanding of what makes other people tick. It’s creative and challenging. It’s patient. And it lightens the mood for everyone and creates a strong esprit de corps.

These are all desirable things if you’re trying to create and deliver value in the world.

I’m not a big prankster, but working myself into a more mischievous, pranking mindset never seems to have anything but positive effects on my work. The lost time is made up for in gains from fresh thinking and enjoyment.

There’s a lot of debate about who should make decisions.

Should government decide what substances you’re allowed to ingest, or you?

Should owners decide how many vacation days to offer employees, or should employees or other agencies force it on owners?

Should product designers decide what goes into a product, or should they ask customers what they want?

These debates mostly miss the point. In their quest to answer what should occur, they fail to understand what actually does occur, whether they like it or not.

In reality, only individuals can ever decide. Only individuals act. Individuals decide to listen to other individuals or ignore them. You can’t change this. To say, “Let the experts/government/market decide” is just a less clear way of saying, “Let individuals decide”. The thing that changes are the consequences and incentives for those individuals. What is really being debated is what happens after an individual decides.

The real thing on the table isn’t who decides, but how decisions are responded to through time. It’s not the source, but the sequence of decisions.

After an individual chooses to offer an item for sale, what should happen next? Should another individual with a warrant and a gun come and tell them to stop? Should other individuals be free to buy or badmouth or ignore it?

The sequence of decisions is crucial. Individuals will make good decisions and bad decisions. But most of the time you can’t tell whether it’s good or bad based on the decision in isolation. You’ve got to see the sequence that follows.

In business, it’s not possible to defer decisions entirely to consumers. You can’t wait for people to decide what you should do because the information is never complete. You have to decide what to make, how to price it, where to sell it, etc. This doesn’t mean you dictate to consumers. Quite the opposite. After you decide, you see how they decide. You see the response or non-response, take in feedback, then decide the next step. It is a sequence of decisions through time that determine what’s good or bad, working or not. It’s not about who chooses once for all, but how choices unfold through time.

You can’t escape individual choice and responsibility. Neither can you expect a single choice to be decisive. The best results come from an ongoing sequence of individuals choices that inform, incentivize, and build off each other. It’s not about who leads in the dance. It’s about how the initiation-response process unfolds.

If I told you a hurricane was certain to strike your neighborhood in five days, what would you do in those five days?

You probably wouldn’t spend that time thinking about what to do if you got in a car accident. You wouldn’t spend them planning for career contingencies. You wouldn’t spend it thinking about your dream vacation, or buying domain names for a project you may do someday, or planning your kids long-term education.

All those things are fine activities, but they involve preparing for something that might happen. Meanwhile the hurricane is guaranteed to happen. It would be weird to spend all your energy on many things that could happen and ignore the one thing that absolutely will happen.

We will all die.

Death is the only fact of life that is utterly and inescapably universal.

We know it’s coming. It will happen. It’s the only guarantee in all of life.

Yet it seems like the thing we spend the least time and energy preparing for. We do more planning for totally unlikely events like winning the lotto, or global apocalypse, or contracting a rare disease, or becoming famous than we do for the sure thing that is death.

Death denial is widespread. Not just stuff like preparing a will or getting life insurance or creating succession plans. Many people (though not as many as would seem prudent) do these. They kind of check them off the list then try to never think about it again. Like maybe if we don’t confront it, it won’t happen? But it will.

It would seem normal to spend more time contemplating and preparing for death than anything else. It has a 100% probability of happening. How many things in life can you know with such certainty? It’s a huge leg up and ought to make prepping for it easier. Why not pre-death counseling, to emotionally prepare for it? Why not study all theories related to the process of dying, biologically and spiritually, and theories on what might happen next? Why not plan for death like we plan for less sure things?

I’m not sure why we don’t. I’ve been thinking more about death. And, like almost everything, it seems way more scary when avoided then when confronted. I used to think people or religious traditions that talked a lot about death had some unhealthy obsession. Now I wonder if it’s those who don’t that have the bigger problem.

The answer to strategic dilemmas is rarely strategic thinking.

I often find myself hemming and hawing over strategies and tactics while building Crash. When it’s something small, I can think my way to it quickly. Something medium, I can reason, discuss, debate, write, or test my way through it. But big strategic decisions require some kind of deeper epiphany or understanding. Something closer to a spiritual insight or feeling than a strategic one.

A thought in the shower that animates me so much I have to jump out sopping wet and write it down. A just-upon-waking understanding of what must be done that makes me jump out of bed. A long walk that begins in indecision and ends with decisive clarity. Some kind of re-connection with a gut-level knowledge of what must be done.

I have this suspicion that we always know what to do, but the difficulty is learning what we already know from ourselves. That is a different process than just strategic thinking. It’s going where your gut already wants to go, and where tension melts away and positive energy emerges.

I don’t know why it works this way (though I’ve explored it for years and keep playing around with theories) but for me at least, it does work this way.

I think daily blogging has spoiled me.

It created such a massive acceleration in my life just a month or two after I began, and has never not noticeably made things better.

So when I try other stuff, especially health related, I’m always a bit disappointed. No alcohol, sugar, or caffeine for a month. No gluten. Full paleo. I’ve tried several of these and never noticed any difference except an increase in spending and inconvenience. I’m always hoping for something as impactful as daily blogging, or at least half as impactful as people who rave about these on Twitter.

Exercise is a bit better. I do get some results, but they aren’t very big. I feel a little better and look a little better if I’m on a daily routine, but it hits a ceiling pretty quickly. Not sure if I’d need hours in the gym or some other highly inconvenient, costly routine to break through. It’s never been that much of a priority.

I’m always looking for something as dramatic as daily blogging in terms of the insane ROI. Tiny daily commitment. Huge and constant life improvement.

Sometimes I do my daily blogging elsewhere. Today, I’m sharing a few articles I posted recently about bitcoin to a cool Bitcoin Cash based Medium style platform.

Why Bitcoiners Should Be More Selfish

How to Ask for Money for Your Bitcoin Project

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I am ruthless about saying no to things, and I try to keep my commitments few.

But I get lots of ideas.

Yesterday during lunch, I played around with making a place just for irresponsibly and irregularly sharing stuff from me and some friends. Not the regular rhythm of this daily blog or my podcast or newsletter.

I’m still not sure I’ll put anything into it. It’s intended as a net energy addition, not a drain. A fun, random outlet. I’ll let you know if we breathe life into it. It may create existential overhead I don’t need right now. Or maybe it will be easy and great.

I’m always trying to keep my curiosity stoked without burning out or losing focus.

Criticize by creating.

That’s one of my favorite sayings, attributed to Michelangelo.

It’s a useful mantra that acts as a reminder to put energy into additive acts, instead of nitpicking. It requires risk and humility to create. You might fail. The critic sits back in the safety of inaction, poking holes in stuff he’d not have the courage to create.

Most of the time, it’s pretty easy to know when you’re criticizing and when you’re creating. But not always. And you can’t always tell from the outside what constitutes an act of creation for another person.

My son loves the art of film-making and storytelling. He can spend hours telling me all his (very strong) opinions on what movies got wrong and right (even those he’s never seen!). I think most of it is interesting conversation, but not always. Sometimes it slips over into that realm of criticism that distances him from the kind of work the creators put in. But it’s not the act of critiquing a film by itself that’s anti-creative. It’s hard to describe when it is and isn’t, but I can vaguely sense the line.

I keep telling him to start a blog or YouTube channel where he does movie criticisms. Even though he’d still be critiquing someone else’s creation, his critique would move from a low-risk, low-effort offhand commentary to his dad, to a higher-risk, higher-effort act of creative criticism. He’d have to make a channel, risk his reputation publicly, open himself to counter-criticisms, and feel the pressure to make thoughtful, valuable critiques.

I know plenty of creators whose main creations are critiques. Painters and writers and musicians and even startup founders are critiquing the world by creating an alternative to it, or a parody of it. Sometimes the critique is implied by the creation, sometimes it’s explicitly stated. Writing a criticism isn’t inherently non-creative. The person who writes it has to be honest with themselves, and know deep down with their knower whether they are indulging in avoidant critique or real creation.

Social media adds more murkiness. Is a Tweet about something you don’t like an act of criticism or creation? I don’t think there’s a bright line, but for me, the lower the effort and risk, the more likely I’m being indulgent, ingrown, and critical. The higher the effort and risk, the liklier I’m creating. The real test is how I feel afterwards, and how much I care what others do in response. Genuine acts of creation are real and self-fulfilling. I don’t care whether others like or share them. Critiques, on the other hand, tend to make me more anxious to see who will support my claims.

So a funny, clever, interesting, or heartfelt Tweet or thread can be an act of creation. I’ve seen many that are, and made a few myself. But a responsive, reactive, gotta-get-my-say-on-x-in Tweet, or comment on someone else’s Tweet tend to be critical and non-creative. Especially if the thing you’re responding to is someone else’s creation or creative Tweet that got a lot more attention than you wish it did. If there’s envy in the mix, the odds are high you’re not creating but critiquing.

That’s why daily blogging is so good for me.

I have several Voxer threads with friends where we share barbs and jokes about various topics and news of the day. Those are sometimes deep and enlightening, but mostly an outlet for witty criticisms. I enjoy them, but if that was the only medium through which I was sharing ideas, I think I’d warp into a holier-than-thou critic. Facing the blank page every morning and posting something that might be seen (or ignored) by anyone forces me into creator mode. It makes me better.

The bottom line is this: only you can really know whether you’re engaged in creative or critical acts. Only you know if you’re leveling up and bringing your ideas into the world to improve it, or lowering others and shooting their ideas down. Be ruthless with self-knowledge, and be honest about what you find.

And go create something you’re proud of today.

I joined CoinSpice for a fun convo on entrepreneurship in crypto.