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.

I’m not big on the memorializing of celebrity deaths. There is enough pain and suffering with those I know personally. I normally say nothing and move on.

But damn. Kobe Bryant.

I remember watching him play in the McDonald’s High School All-American game before he was drafted. I remember him entering the league in 1996, right when my sports first love was moving from baseball to basketball. I remember his swagger. I remember him trying to take the mantle from MJ. I remember him doing it.

I didn’t know the guy personally. I have no idea whether he was a “good” guy. I can tell you that his determination to achieve greatness was insane. I never thought anyone would match MJ’s drive for greatness. But Kobe did. That is inspiring.

Kobe has been a fixture in my sports fandom since age 12. His myth and mystique color all my sports conversations, and even the way I think about life beyond sports. The stories are legend.

There are a few sports moments I’ve experienced that transcend whatever they mean within the game. Moments that left a mark. Moments I’ll never, ever forget. Kobe’s last game was one. It was the final day of the NBA season. I was flipping back and forth between the Warriors chasing an historical 73rd win, Steph Curry chasing yet another 3pt record, and Kobe’s last game. I assumed Kobe’s Lakers would lose a meaningless game, Kobe might hit one or two memorable vintage shots, and get a moving standing O and maybe a little speech.

You never could’ve convinced me that by the 4th quarter, I’d be completely ignoring the Warriors game, eyes glued to Kobe. I’ve never seen anything like it. No playoff contention. No records on the line. No bigger glory for a big performance. The man’s legacy was sealed. He didn’t come out and goof around high fiving everyone. He laced up and came out playing to win the game like always. But his teammates just wouldn’t stop passing it to him. They wanted the most they could get. And Kobe pulled out the most Kobe performance ever. What he did that night surpassed in my mind even his 81-point night years earlier. He was in his prime then. Feeling it.

His last game wasn’t Kobe feeling it. It was Kobe willing it. He looked so tired. He almost – almost – looked like he didn’t want them to pass him the ball. He was like a boxer in the final round, just trying to stand, summoning everything to throw a punch that looked barely strong enough. And the shots kept falling. Not only was he scoring, his team was pulling closer from a game they’d trailed and looked to be over. He. Just. Kept. Hitting. Shots. It was out of control. Every release was a cosmic spark. You could feel it in your bones. He ended with 60 points. At age 39. After a 20 year career. 60 points of pure exhaustion. Kobe gave every last drop his mind and body could possibly give as a basketball player.

Oh, and the most Kobe part of all? They won the game.

I’ve re-watched that full game a few times. And the highlights several times. And the final quarter many more. I’ll never forget that. There was something in that performance that rippled through the universe. It changed the nature of what’s possible. That game spoke to me on a deep level. It still does. Thank you for that Kobe.

When I yell, “Kobe” while tossing a wad of paper in the trash, it’s just a little different now. Something’s missing from the universe. A little piece of Greatness is gone.

RIP.

Sunday so empty

No fantasy or Lions

Why do I miss pain?

You can read this and all issues if you subscribe here.

(It’s $5 a month to keep me accountable and make it feel super exclusive only for big time ballers.)

Strength in memories
Identities
Now come back to me
As unity
The stuff that moved me
When I was young
Holds a power still
Can come undone
Objectivity
Is no option
This one life that is
Where I stopped in
Can’t get out of what
Gets inside me
Wired into systems
Can’t divide me
Into little parts
Cleanly broken
Instead I’m fused in
Things heard, spoken
From day of first breath
To day of death
An unfolding arc
That beckons breadth
Unseen not unfelt
This changeless core
Animated by
The call to more
So bring it home now
Place where it starts
Is where to gain more
Depth for new parts

I just talked to an entrepreneur friend of mine and he had a great phrase for what building a company is like.

Playing chess with the market.

I love this because building a business isn’t so much about right and wrong, luck or skill. The outcome is determined by a series of moves made in response to another player whose mind you can never read. There are causal chains, but they’re all theoretical. They assume certain actions by the other player that may or may not happen. In fact, it’s like a never ending series of chess matches against a rotating cast of random opponents, where moves that worked the first five times stop working the next, and patterns you learned change.

This framing reveals how hard it is and make the challenge exciting. It also depersonalizes it a bit. Of course you won’t get every move right or win every game. But you try to learn each time. Treating it like a game is a huge cognitive relief.

I grew up in a pretty conservative Midwestern protestant situation. I was homeschooled and church was a big part of our social life. There are plenty of things to mock and joke about in this milieu (and I do!) but there are some under-appreciated benefits.

There are benefits to not getting into sex, drugs, and partying as a young person, but that’s not what I’ve appreciated most. As time has passed, I’ve seen other benefits I didn’t think about at the time. I took them for granted and assumed they were omnipresent.

Those benefits are philosophical. Epistemological, not aesthetic.

While not ubiquitous in Christian upbringings, the particular niche of Evangelical Protestantism I came up in was very focused on intensive Bible study, theology, and examining questions of meaning, free will, good and evil. There was an expectation that you should be able to logically prove every belief, examine arguments against it, and wrestle until you had coherent, non-contradictory ideas. Discussing claims made in sermons and questioning their accuracy, alignment with scripture, or logical consistency was normal.

There was utmost respect for reason and analytic philosophy. Difficult scriptures were studied in depth, arguments on all sides examined, original Greek and Hebrew checked, historical context learned, and commentaries consulted.

I always enjoyed this. I liked studying the Bible and various theologians. I loved their debates and disagreements. I was fascinated by questions of fate vs. free will.

There was a sense in which we Christians always felt the need to, “Be ready always to give an answer for the hope that you have”. You didn’t just believe stuff, it was incumbent on you to really examine it and understand it, and be able to explain it even to antagonists. I remember diving into apologetics and preparing to be attacked from all sides by classmates and professors when I took college philosophy classes.

I was disappointed.

Everyone in the class was an atheist (this was the very early 2000’s, before the resurgence of spiritual interest common today), but reflexively so. It was a default setting. No one had any arguments. None of them seemed to have examined anything. And it didn’t seem to trouble them. I was looking for some fights! I wanted to challenge and be challenged. It was as if everyone – even those wanting to major in philosophy – didn’t much care to examine the most fundamental questions of being and existence and morality and meaning. They would laugh at or dismiss ideas sometimes, but freeze up if asked to explain.

This was a real shock to me.

I had one TA who asked any theists to raise their hand. I was the only one. Some people snickered. He said, “Don’t laugh. All the best analytic philosopher were theists. Aquinas would run circles around most of you. Do you know why? Have you engaged this stuff?” He was an atheist moving towards agnosticism, but he had mad respect for anyone who did good philosophy (I later discovered he became a Bhuddist and quit academia. He was my favorite philosophy professor, so I’m not surprised). There was one other philosophy prof who was a Christian, and everyone was afraid to debate him. I think he dreamed in airtight symbolic logic.

I didn’t realize at the time that the intellectual tradition I’d inherited in all those Bible studies and debates and books was straight from Aristotle. The more I studied the history of philosophy, the more I realized I wasn’t the one who was wacky or out of step. Questions of God and religion had been taken the most seriously by the most serious thinkers. The whole Protestant project was, in a way, a big philosophical “eff you” to those who said don’t think for yourself, just act out the rituals. It was a celebration of reason. (This is not to say Orthodoxy and Catholicism do not retain a lot of sound philosophy, or that Protestantism always does. All religion tends to have interesting ideas at its core, and devolve into a less rigorous social movement subject to capture as it grows).

I often wonder how people go about their lives acting on important core ideas and assumptions without seeming to have any interest in or feel any necessity to examine, define, and make logical sense of those ideas and assumptions. Being wrong is one thing. Being uninterested in examining tacit truth claims is another.

I’m not looking down on people who are uninterested in or not conversant in inquiry into these things. I just don’t understand it. And because I value getting to the why of things, I am very grateful that I grew up in an arena that prized the most foundational questions, and expected one to be intellectually and morally accountable for their own beliefs – and comfortable being a bit of an outsider.

I must’ve seemed so weird. An early teen spending hours underlining, cross-referencing, diagramming, checking translations in my Hebrew-Greek keyword Bible, writing arguments and counter-arguments. Fortunately in my social circles, it wasn’t weird at all.

My brother just turned 38. He said getting older was more difficult at 35 and 36, but now he’s adjusted to it and doesn’t mind at all.

I’d never thought about this explicitly, but it felt true for me too. I’m 36. In my early 30’s, I still felt young and, like all the rest of my life up until then, never really thought about age. But age 34, 35, and 36 all seemed to be big turning points. Somewhere in there, framing changes. Nothing I do in my life from here on out has any additional value for being done “early”.

Of course we all love being thought highly of by others, but being seen as ahead of my peers by the outside world isn’t the real thing I cared about. It’s not just a sense of drive, speed, and trajectory. It’s a sense of freedom and looseness. Early in the game, you feel you’ve got enough time to pivot and make up for just about any crazy thing. There are infinite re-inventions and new directions. The course is so early that small deviations can result in huge changes in the long term.

Visualize it in a really practical way we’re all familiar with. Investment projections. You’ve seen those charts that show likely return at age 70 or whatever of $100 a month invested from age 20. If you don’t start until 30, the difference at 70 is immense. (At historical rates, we’re talking $3.9M if you start at 20, and $1.1M if you start at 30. Play around here if you want.)

Now apply that not just to finances, but everything. The later you go, the smaller the end of life impact. There is a sense in which leverage decreases as you age.

But that’s not all there is. Leverage also increases, because you begin every day with a larger accumulation of human capital than the day before. You have more to deploy on every move you make. You don’t start from zero. You don’t have as much time as when you were young, but you have more of everything else.

After turning 36 last year, and especially after moving into an advisor role for my first company Praxis at the end of 2019, I no longer feel pained by aging. I closed chapter one in The Life and Times of Isaac Morehouse (a running joke with my kids). Young man Isaac started and built a company, made a difference, overcome a lot of shit, had fun, and handed the reigns to the next generation. Medium-aged Isaac is just beginning. And he’s got all kinds of assets no young man ever could.

It’s a great feeling. I like aging. I like change, and I’m not super sentimental. No, I don’t like the increased need for body maintenance, but everything else about getting older is fun, or at least not unfun. I’ve more than made my peace with it.

At least for now. There’s probably a next tier, maybe when my kids start to leave the house and set off, where I’ll have to make peace with a new stage.

Titans versus Chiefs

Smart, simple, boring, versus

Complex, exciting

I recently ran a workshop for Praxis participants on job interviewing. It was so so. I didn’t do a great job and wasn’t particularly pleased with the outcome.

I used to do workshops like that a lot. And I got pretty good at them. It’s been several years and I only took about 5 minutes to prep, assuming I’d pick right up where I left off. But apparently, running a workshop is not like riding a bike.

It got me thinking about different types of learning, different types of know-how and mastery. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been, riding a bike and swimming are no harder. You learn them once and the know-how sticks, without decay.

Why aren’t workshops like this?

It can’t be due to the physical nature of biking and swimming. Because basketball is not the same. Even if the form of a jump-shot stay largely intact (only if you put in enough reps when you learned, even then the form can start to decay a bit), the shooting percentage plummets after long absences from the game. It’s true, getting the percentage back up to playing-days average is quicker than originally getting to that average, but not very quick.

And language is not a physical task, but seems more like bike riding. I can’t speak Spanish. Until I visit a Spanish speaking country. Then the same proficiency (not very, but enough to get around) I first learned as a teen comes back in almost an instant, maybe an hour or two. Same for accents and impersonations and parts of songs. If I learned years ago, it never really decays. Worst case, I forget, hear it one more time, and it’s right back.

I can’t spot an easy pattern in the, “Need to stay in practice to keep it sharp”, and, “Never really decays”, types of know-how (I’m not saying knowledge, because that seems more like info only, and I’m not saying mastery because I’m not a master at most of these examples). It’s like different kinds of know-how have different rates of entropy, and different refresh rates. It’s a lot easier for me to get back to up to snuff with running workshops than it is with basketball (even if I control for the physical decay of being slower with age. Shooting percentage alone is harder to re-acquire).

It makes me wonder about other kinds of know-how that I’ve never really ignored for long periods. What about social intelligence? What would happen if I was a hermit for half a decade? Would I lose my ability to work a room? How about writing? I’ve never not written regularly since I first learned. Is it more like bike-riding or basketball? If lost, how fast could I refresh and get back to where I am now?

I’ve always been fascinated with the process of learning, the act of creation, the art of obtaining tacit and explicit knowledge, the interplay of the conscious and subconscious in the brain, and the idea of “embodied” knowledge.

The more I think and dig, the less I understand the human brain (biologically) and human knowledge (epistemically and ontologically).

PS – It’s probably also true that I am not a perfectly accurate judge of my then vs. now skill levels. Self-awareness changes, and memory is imperfect. It’s likely I remember myself a better basketball player or speaker than I really was. It’s comforting to think after a lackluster performance, “It’s just because I’m rusty”, instead of “That’s about as good as I’ve ever been.”

The latest from my private weekly newsletter on building a startup.

Read and subscribe here.

I’m trying to get better at preparation.

It may seem weird, but prep gets more important the further I go in my career, not less. It’s true that with more experience winging it is easier. But it’s also true that with more experience there are far fewer low-stakes, dubious value activities.

I’ve gotten expert at saying no. That means the stuff I do is disproportionately high value, or high potential. If I’m going to do it it’s gotta be worth doing.

And if it’s worth doing, it’s worth prepping.

Even a 20 minute phone call is worthy of at least as many minutes of prep, background, research, outlining, goal-setting, and getting in the right frame of mind. Maybe two or three times as many.

I’ve only begun to realize this, and it’s a challenge. I’m a snap judgement gut based wing it kind of guy. But the prep pays. If I’m going to show up, I want to do it with intention and focus. I want to know what I’m trying to get.