I write haiku when

I don’t know what to do in

My daily blog post

Daily blogging changes people.

It doesn’t change their essence. It chips away at the gunk that builds up around that essence. It burns away chaff and unleashes a stronger, clearer, more refined and robust person. It makes people better versions of themselves.

I was just browsing the Praxis participant and alumni online community. There are hundreds of Praxians, and nearly every one of them has completed 30 days of daily blogging. But dozens have gone much further. I started thinking about the transformations I’ve seen in some of them as they show up to hit publish every day.

Their writing has improved, yes. Their content has deepened yes. They’ve developed a voice. They’ve created a valuable signal on the market with a body of work. But most of all, they’ve obtained a strengthened personality and built massive confidence that bleeds into every aspect of life. That’s what showing up every day hell or high water does. It makes you proud of yourself in a healthy way. If there is at least one thing you will complete every single day no matter what else happens, you suddenly feel like you are acting upon the world, instead of responding as the world acts upon you.

The act of creation bleeds into all aspects of life. If you refuse to let anything stop you from creating words on a page every day, what else can you will to do? If you can arrange your environment and incentive structure to maximize the odds of keeping that one commitment, how else might you set yourself up for success?

Curiosity begins to win out over fear. Belief over doubt. Productive mischief over bored obedience.

Daily blogging is the simplest form of personal alchemy I know of.

No, not that kind of Number Two. The business kind. The other business kind.

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One of the things I’m not very good at is repetition.

My pursuit of progress and interestingness means I look for change and get bored with sameness. I value the stability of my core beliefs and the mission of my company. That doesn’t change. But in action, and especially words, I bore myself if I repeat things too much.

It’s easy to believe that everyone already knows what’s already been said, so rather than repeating or rewording it, let’s move on to saying some new stuff.

But it’s not true. There are few things more powerful than repetition when it comes to trying to make a dent in the universe.

My MO is to write or speak about something I’ve been stewing on, put a lot of energy into it, then be done with it and move on to the next thing. I assume it’s fully integrated into everyone’s brain and everyone remembers it. But they don’t. It requires repetition.

That’s hard for me. I’ve got to find the balance between rejecting repetition just because I’m bored and becoming repetitive to the point of phoniness and stagnation. Since I don’t struggle with the latter, I suspect fear of it is just an excuse to not get better at repeating myself.

It’s not a value in and of itself, but for some of the stuff I want to accomplish – like changing the way people approach their careers – the odds of success are much higher if I get better at repeating key messages.

I don’t want to become a bore to myself, but I could probably get a bit more repetitive before I reach that threshold. The paradox is that I dislike repetition because I like change, but deeper change requires repetition.

Think of the most exciting possible inventions and discoveries you can imagine.

Deep space travel. Telepathy. Wireless electricity. Anti-gravity. Cold fusion. Terraforming. etc.

If you poke around YouTube or podcasts or badly designed websites, you’ll find people working on them. Devoting years to research and experimentation. You’ll notice their passion and conviction. But you’ll also notice something else: most of them are kinda crazy. Whether or not they are discovering anything true, you suspect they would be the last people on earth capable of bringing their idea to market or even credibly explaining it outside their niche circles.

But if you poke around places full of high achieving people with sharp minds, big vision, and lots of ability, you won’t hear them say stuff like, “I’m working on faster than light travel. I think the current model of physics is all wrong, and I suspect it’s possible so I want to prove it.”

Most of the best, most respected minds seem to be employed on the more mundane stuff. Sure, they’re doing cool valuable stuff (except when they go into politics), but how often does it question the most fundemental assumptions?

We know so very little about reality. We don’t even know what we don’t know, or whether what we know is actually true. And the most fundamental stuff – the nature and origin of the universe, our planet, our species, the basic rules of the physical strata, consciousness, death and beyond – is the stuff most of us spend the least time on.

Except the crazy people. They live there.

Part of the crazy label comes because they are working on this stuff. To examine widely accepted beliefs is often considered crazy. Part of the label is because most of the time these people are crazy. So it feeds itself. People who don’t know how to be normal are more likely to go into crazy stuff because they have less to lose. The more they do, the more the belief that “only crazy people study that” is re-enforced and better minds are repelled.

I’m not trying to place blame or cast judgement. I’m trying to understand this phenomenon. It’s the same thing that causes most conversations with neighbors and acquaintances to be so boring. Most of us – myself included – are not willing to dive into crazy stuff most of the time. If your reputation is shot, say, because you’re crazy, it’s easier.

Conformity is a powerful force. I try to do a little something every day to combat it. A world of crazy questions is much more interesting than a world of probably wrong answers no one wants to talk about.

Literally.

Last night I dreamt (whoa, spellcheck doesn’t like “dreamt”. This prompted Googling. Apparently some do not accept this spelling. Weird.) that I was at some event somewhere, and some guy showed up. He was there either as a maintenance man to fix some kind of large trailer, or he was there to interview the attendees. It was a dream, so maybe he shifted between both roles.

Anyway, he made some comment about libertarians being recalcitrant. I asked what he meant. The rest of the dream was a discussion between us. I told him the classical liberal tradition is long and broad. You might begin at Hesiod, then Aristotle. You might include interesting figures most have never heard of, like Auberon Herbert, as well as luminaries like Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

As any good conversation about liberty ought to, it turned to the question of anarchy. Not in the positive, bomb-throwing sense. Anarchy simply meaning society without a political ruler, or without the initiation of violence. I shared with him a deep and rich body of thought, from Linda and Morris Tannehill, to Lysander Spooner, to Frank Chodorov, to Roy Childs, to David Friedman (Milton’s son), to Spencer Heath MacCollum, to Murray Rothbard, to Leo Tolstoy, to Leonard Read, to Randy Barnett, to John Hasnas, to Bruce Benson, to Robert Higgs, to Edward Stringham, to Peter Leeson, to Jeffrey Tucker and more.

Then we discussed the lived experience of a great many societies at a great many periods in history – some long, some short. We talked about the Hanseatic League. We talked about free market money in Scotland. We talked about the not so wild, wild West in the U.S. before government and military arrived to “civilize” it with violence. We talked about the nearly three-hundred years of peaceful anarchy in Iceland.

We talked about every major function of the current government – from police, to courts, to rule-making, to defense, to infrastructure, to money, to education, to health care – and discovered how every one of them emerged as a market function that was only co-opted by violent monopolists late in the game, and that the monopolized version is in every way morally and practically inferior to its voluntary foundation.

I haven’t had an ideological debate or attempt to persuade anyone in years. I’ve moved into the world of action through entrepreneurship, trying to build a freer, better, more peaceful world through voluntary exchange instead of arguments. But this dream was a ton of fun. I woke up with my mind reeling through all the other stuff we didn’t even touch on. My intellectual and experiential journey to anarchism took nearly a decade and thousands such arguments, books, lectures, observations, points, and counterpoints. It felt like I crammed a few years worth into a single conversation in a dream. It was kind of a rush!

Oh, and then I was suddenly in a large apartment/warehouse trying to stop a flooding bathtub, flood a large kitchen, and pull a houseplant out of a different flooded room before rescuing an old refrigerator from the driveway. Dreams are so strange.

Build your own book.

I’ve had this idea for a few years, and I’d love to see it happen (though apparently not enough to make it happen yet). I’d start with my blog as a guinea pig and play around with it.

The basic idea is to have the reader be able to select posts to add to their table of contents. Then they could arrange their preferred order and it would generate a formatted book with a TOC, chapters, etc, all ready to upload to Kindle Direct Publishing for paperback and ebook.

It would be a completely one of a kind book curated by the reader. The reader could choose the title, cover design, select the essays, sections and order, write an introduction (or dedication to make it a very personal gift to someone), even section or chapter intros. This makes the author the provider of the raw material, but allows the reader to re-arrange the content into any combination they want.

Now imagine it’s beyond just this website or any one blog. Imagine a browser plugin that lets you tag any blog post or article and it automatically adds it to your book. To avoid legal issues, it would probably only allow public, non-paywalled articles and blog posts, and would have to add attribution to author and source for each chapter.

You could have an entire new expertise in democratized book curators, just like Amazon reviews spawned a new expertise in book reviews. Like your friend who used to make the best mix tapes, you’d have people with a keen sense of what essays by what authors make a great book combo. If resale created too many legal issues, you could at least have a great new way to personally consume content or give very cool gifts. Imagine a chronological sampling of the blog posts that impacted you most?

I may try to make this happen someday. Or you can try it and let me know.

My two year old loves talking about “working mans”.

Any kind of construction, excavation, or manual labor he sees gets him excited. I told him I used to build houses, so now he says I used to be a working man, and now I’m a business man.

I always assumed this kind of professional sequence, but never thought about it explicitly. When I was a kid, I had lawn jobs and paper routes, then worked in retail, etc. I knew this wasn’t what I’d do forever. I figured I’d work with my hands until I was valuable enough to work with my mind. It seemed a natural progression.

In a way, this progression is an embodiment of a philosophical shift over the course of individual human life. We begin in a matter before mind sort of world. We’re bumping into everything, grabbing everything, trying to understand the world with physical apparatus. Mental patterns begin to form based on the physical experience. Over time, the mental side becomes deeper, more complex, and more useful than the material side. We can envision a lot more than we can experience.

At some point, all the cliches about “Believe and you can achieve” start to make sense. We understand that belief is a precondition for action, and ideas are the birthplace of man-made objects. We move into a mind before matter world. The further along I’ve gotten in life, the more in this direction I’ve shifted. Nearly every issue has at its core something that begins in the mind. Most unhappiness isn’t rooted in or fixed by material conditions. Or if it is, the material changes necessary must first begin in the mind.

Perhaps humanity as a whole has moved along this continuum as well. Once matter has been molded in an instinct-for-survival sort of way, mind becomes more dominant. Consider speaking, writing, and coding. Things that reshape the material world by transforming thoughts into something that alters the thoughts of others, then actions, then material outcomes.

Bahm-Bawerk referred to economic progress as the deepening of the production process; an increase in roundaboutness that resulted in greater wealth. Material experience is direct and instant. Mental work is indirect and through time via long causal chains.

The working man becomes the thinking man, which is to say his work becomes less direct and also gains leverage.

The challenge with this shift is maintaining sufficient connection to the outcome that you don’t lose motivation. Seeing bricklaying as cathedral building is easy compared to seeing designing the dashboard for the software tool that the chemist will use to measure the additives going into the bricks that will get shipped to a contractor who will hire bricklayers as cathedral building.

This seems like a new phenomenon.

I have encountered a surprising number of young people who are trying to become “coaches”. I don’t mean in sports. They want to be a life coach of some kind. Why did this start?

It doesn’t seem to be in response to demand. I don’t see anyone knocking down their doors begging to be coached. It’s the other way around. They are all over social media, begging to coach. It usually takes the form of proclamations about professional decisions, peppered in with a lot of, “I tell my coaching clients”, or, “Clients ask me all the time”.

Are they really being asked these things? Do they really have clients?

I’m trying to understand what change has occurred in the world to make this such a common desire. I’m not talking about people who’ve had a long career and experience a late-stage desire to work with younger people. That’s always been around. I’m talking about early twentysomethings who seem to skip right over direct experience and just want to come out the gate coaching people.

Potential theories:

Social Media Mimesis – Many popular accounts are “coachy”. Perhaps young people see this, want the kind of likes and follows these people have, and try to mimic the style.

A Big Safety Net – This country at this time in history is absurdly wealthy. Young people are rarely in danger of losing material comforts. They’ve got little need for survival, so instead they play around with what looks to them like “higher” things.

Maslow’s All Filled Up – Expanding on the above. Perhaps the first several sections of Maslow’s hierarchy are covered, so young people start out immediately trying to wrestle with self-actualization.

If any of these have a grain of truth, I wonder what the outcome will be for these young aspiring coaches. I don’t think you can skip steps on the journey to create a meaningful life. If you haven’t learned how to earn a buck and survive at the basic level without attention or credit, no way you’ll have developed enough mental muscle to find true meaning, let alone coach others on how.

I want to guard against crotchety old man syndrome, but I suspect more independence (and not just upside independence, but the kind of independence that means you own the wins and the losses), less of a safety net, and higher real-world expectations (not academic expectations, which are all about envy, ranking, rules, and status) would be a good thing for most young people. It’d probably eliminate this drive to be (or more accurately I suspect, be seen as) a coach.

Or maybe I’m wrong and this isn’t silly at all. Maybe this is a wonderful development in human society, and some day we’ll all spend our time coaching each other on morning power routines and how to project confidence while software and robots do all the other stuff.

God, I hope not.

All about the end of Act 1 and the start of Act 2.

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I need not
I want not
I care not
I am not

Sounds super stupid doesn’t it?

Like some kind of wannabe Zen master you’d find on Twitter, telling people Ego is the Enemy and to Be in Your Power.

It’s sort of out of character for me but I don’t always make the rules around here. Sometimes things pop into my head and they work. I’m a radical pragmatist, so if an outlook or idea works, I use it without worrying too much about its truth value in all cases.

Of course I need stuff, want stuff, care about stuff, and exist. But, crazy or not, this sequence of phrases has been a wonderful mindset the last week, and I’m taking in to 2020.

Let me back up.

On New Year’s Day 2019 I went for a walk. A phrase popped into my head.

Stay above the fray.

I adopted it for 2019 and returned to it often. Turned out to be timely and very useful. There were a lot of fruitless frays last year. I avoided the worst of them.

But 2019 still totally kicked my ass. Hardest year of my life. I won’t get into reasons (I’ll probably spend more time on it in my weekly newsletter for the low low price of $5 a month if you act now! I’ll throw in a squeegee and fridge magnet if you’re one of the first five callers. Just kidding. But you can subscribe if you want more stuff on startup struggles).

So last week, feeling beat down from the year, this new mantra just popped into my head. I said it out loud. Each phrase one at a time, slowly, my eyes closed, and really meaning it. I mean really meaning it. That’s how worn out I felt. I really got to the point where I could say, “I need not. I want not. I care not. I am not.” And actually feel the total detachment those words convey.

What the hell is, “I am not” even supposed to mean?

I don’t know. But I know that the stress vanished and I felt physically lighter. My shoulders relaxed. It was a like a mission was accomplished and I could let go. I wondered if I was going to die or something, because I had essentially made my peace with a total cessation of striving. Not like me.

Spoiler: I didn’t die.

So here I am in 2020. I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I’m not kidding. I can’t attribute it to anything that makes much sense on the surface, especially considering nearly all of 2019 was so damn hard. But I’m having a blast and feeling free. I’m not stressed, despite trying to build a second startup that is far from success so far.

I’m just here needing not, wanting not, caring not, and….being not?

Whatever. It works.

I don’t exactly know what to write.

Not for lack of ideas. I took a 3 month (I originally wrote “6 month” then checked and realized it was only 3. I’m bad with time.) leave of absence from daily blogging. It was really good and gave me perspective. But it was hard too. The daily catharsis has become so much a part of my life that when I choose to desist it takes work to adjust.

So I have several topics stored up, most of which I feel will require lengthier posts, or perhaps a series of posts, to think about. And that is what writing is for me most of the time. Thinking. I rarely think through an idea and then spend time putting it into the proper words. Instead, I start writing and use the process to pull dormant ideas out of my head and onto the page. The writing process is the thinking process in these times.

That’s why I like daily blogging. If I’m writing less frequently, or for a third-party publication, or a piece for Crash, it’s got to have a clear point and purpose going in. It’s not really fair to the reader to think out-loud in that context.

But my own personal daily blog? That’s for me. I write because it changes me. So here I am, thinking out loud to you once again. It feels good.

Daily blogging has changed my life many times. My relationship to writing is one of the most important relationships in my life, because it is a proxy for my relationship to myself. I’m excited to enter back in to daily writing and let it transform me and do its alchemy.

2020 is a big year for me. I’m not going to get into too much detail here, because I think it will be the focus of my Friday newsletter this week, but I have hit a clear and distinct transition in my life. I am beginning a second life. A second act. Or as Venkatesh Rao calls it, an Elder Game.

A lot changed in 2019. Exoteric change yes, but mostly esoteric change. Changes within myself kept hidden even from me until I begin the process of uncovering exactly what’s going on and in what ways I’m transforming into a new creature. This thrills me. If there’s one thing I hate it’s sameness and boredom. If there’s one thing I love it’s change and growth. I do not like to be shackled to past expectations, emotions, identities, and experiences. I like freedom. And freedom means change.

So here I am, hammering out the first in my next sequence of daily posts on the first level in my second life.

More to come. Happy new year.

Don’t settle for a boring job, and don’t try to win opportunities with a boring job hunt!

Find 20 great tips here.

Here’s to a great new decade.

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This week’s issue. Enjoy.