Daily blogging is the single highest ROI activity in my life. It has changed everything for me and opened more opportunities than I can count while leveling me up.

And it’s therapeutic. But from time to time, I pause it. Usually when I am embracing a new kind of creative challenge and want to keep the ideas bubbling up in me for a bit longer and let them come out a bit stronger. So I’m pausing the daily posts again. Feels weird, and it’s always kind of hard for me to do now that daily posts are so much in my blood. But I like change.

You can see new stuff I create in several places still. I may post here from time to time. I’m also doing a new season of the Office Hours podcast with TK Coleman, I have a weekly email newsletter called The Inner Game of Startups, and you’ll see some articles on Crash.co and Medium from time to time. I’m also pretty active sharing stuff on Twitter.

Don’t miss me too much.

Victory Detroit

Always makes me wonder if

Setup for defeat

I don’t understand the desire to have governments take complete control of guns.

Familiarity with history and human nature unequivocally demonstrate just how ominous this is. The enslavement, oppression, torture, genocide, forced starvation, concentration camps, and wholesale mass murder wrought by governments on unarmed citizens utterly dwarf by orders of magnitude harms, crimes, and accidents done by armed citizens to one another throughout history. Armies of one government slaughtering helpless individuals living under another in war. Armies of governments slaughtering helpless unarmed citizens of their own. These account for hundreds of millions of deaths and far more in suffering the last century alone. It is the greatest human tragedy in history and always has been.

Complete government control of guns leads to an incredibly obvious and horrific lopsided condition: the worst, most dangerous people gain a tremendous physical power advantage over every decent person. Unchecked governments, organized crime, and unorganized thugs get all the guns. They will always find a way. Good people have nothing. To enact a policy that concentrates all physical power in the hands of all the bad people and takes any defense away from the good people is suicidal. It’s hard to imagine anyone seeing this as a good idea given human history.

The freedom for individuals to access and own weapons is on a very real level the most fundamental freedom of all and the final backstop against all of the worst horrors of human mobs.

Today’s post is the latest Inner Game of Startups newsletter.

Subscribe to enjoy it here!

I feel young, but I’m not that young anymore. I’ve reached the stage where doing stuff isn’t “bold” or “ambitious” or “plucky” because I’m some young up and comer. It’s just business.

It’s a good thing. Getting credit for ontological status makes it harder to see clearly. When big moves are just seen as an expected part of life, you level up.

There is so much opportunity all over the world.

Whatever you do, whatever skills you have, there is a place where it’s valued more than you realize. The problem is those opportunities aren’t always legible. They exist outside your sphere of information, or they exist in a form you don’t currently recognize, or both.

I think it was Chesterton who said, “The world is not wanting for wonders, but for wonder.” (Paraphrasing) It’s a mindset shift within the individual, not a change in the world at large. Likewise, the world is not wanting for opportunities, but eyes to see them.

It’s a lot of work to untangle the mess of information and see opportunity in the patterns. It takes time to improve the skill. The best way is to start treating everything as if you had to find an opportunity in it. What would you do? How would you? This leads you on a question quest that trains your brain to get better and seeing opportunities the way Neo saw code in the Matrix once his eyes were open.

I’m very type A.

My inbox is always at zero, my tasks lists are neat and consolidated. I’m great at saying no and removing clutter. I get things done very fast.

But there’s a downside. I can clear stuff off my plate so often and so quickly that I run a bit dry on ideas and eurekas. I’m so minimalist that sometimes I lack a sufficient stream of new ideas and information to have energy for progress. Sometimes my life lacks sufficient chaos to generate creativity.

When that happens, I have to get a little more reckless. I have to say yes to more stuff, let my inbox get a little crazier, ignore tasks for a while, start multiple things at once, open more tabs, and generally inject chaos and disorder into my work.

It’s very hard for me to do. But I know when I need to. I need more raw material, more scrambling, more time-pressure, less clarity and quiet and simplicity. I need more signals, but the only way to get them is to open my receptors to a lot more noise as well.

I’m one of those people who gets mad at stat worship in sports. I believe what my eyes tell me way more than stats.

Greatness is a mental state, and a way of responding to specific situations when responding any other way could’ve sent things in a terrible direction. You can see moments in games where players make great plays that change the game more than anything else but don’t show up in any stats.

One of my favorite examples is “hidden yardage” in football. When a play is blown and a running back is about to be tackled for an 8 yard loss, but instead they break a few tackles and make it a one yard loss, that’s 7 hidden yards. It goes down as -1 on the stat sheet, but it might have been both the most difficult and most important yardage of the game. It might be the difference between field goal range and not, or go for it on fourth down or punt. It might just be an emotional gain that takes the fire out of a defense ready to erupt after a major tackle for loss. Games turn on these things.

Some players are quietly amazing in the hidden yardage department. Whether or not they make big stats, they rack up hidden yards where and when it counts most for their team. They turn a huge loss into a forgettable one. Or they take a knee five yards early to stay in bounds and keep the clock running, or go out five yards early to make it stop. Or maybe they turn a blown coverage into a pass interference penalty, preventing a touchdown. All of these show nothing or negative on stat sheets. All of them are regulars for great players.

Visible success gets all the credit, but avoiding invisible failures is just as important.

Almost forgot post

Depressed by Detroit Lions

No solace in blog

I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day and the Weather Channel was on for some reason. I don’t imagine the coffee shop crowd overlaps much with the Weather Channel crowd, but it was on.

In the corner of the screen as it cut to a commercial I noticed it said “The most trusted news network in America.”

Not “weather network” but news network.

I mean, isn’t that kind of unfair?

How much trust does it take to tell me it’s raining on my head when I step out into the rain?

Imagine the All Day Gravity Network bragging about being the most trusted source of news. “Every day we provide hard hitting and accurate journalism pointing out the fact that heavier than air objects fall toward the earth.”

And yet…

Somehow, despite the odds, the Weather Channel manages to be untrustworthy. It’s quite an incredible story of overcoming the odds. The power of professional journalism is so great and so resilient that it manages to break trust even when the only job is to tell me what a radar shows. This is really something!

I live in a hurricane area. Every fall, the Weather Channel manages to show me the radar while at the same time telling me stuff completely at odds with it. “Here you can see this dying tropical storm 500 miles off the coast of nowhere with 20MPH winds doing nothing. In other words, board up your house because you will probably die.”

I think the Weather Channel should win every award in journalism. They have the hardest job. True professional journalism is all about creating narratives that ensure people are appropriately misinformed about the world. That’s not too hard when you’re reporting on some skirmish in some country no one’s been to. But to misinform people about the weather right outside their door day in and day out is next level journalism!

Hats off.

Today’s post is the latest in my weekly newsletter The Inner Game of Startups.

You can read it and all past issues here.

How to revive, and refresh, and renew

Something not alive, but not dead, and not through

Surgically remove the zombie on a chain

Or brutally dispose of the mind without a brain

Old stuff drags along, weighing down the new

But fused into the core, not easy to undo

The slow and careful way might not be quite enough

But fast and painful action may be just a bit too rough

There’s no two ways about it, progress means some pain

Killing old dead remnants, and fleeing the remains

If it’s not doing new thinking, it needs to be removed

Or at least flip the burden, until its usefulness is proved

I was listening to a podcast conversation about overcoming biases to make better decisions.

We all love the idea of unbiased information processing, evaluating, and decision making. We don’t want to be blinded by our prior experiences, tastes, and assumptions and miss something valuable or correct because of it. It is very valuable to ruthlessly examine your biases and make sure you aren’t misreading the world and failing to achieve your goals because of it.

But bias is not a bad thing. Nor is it good. It’s a neutral reality and an inescapable part of the way our minds work. It can be bad, it can be good, and it can be neither. Bias is nothing more than a way of seeing, or an inclination or opinion about causality. It’s not possible to have no bias, as any thought or action would cease if you were merely an open sponge taking in stimuli without forming any judgement about it. A fully unbiased brain is one with no synaptic connections. Yes, those neural pathways become hard to escape and that can prevent better thought, but having no neural pathways precludes all thought.

Your bias is what makes you unique. Anything you excel at, you do because you have particular biases others do not, and these enable you to more effectively navigate the field. Breakthroughs don’t come from unbiased people, but from people with a unique, counter-bias that doesn’t jive with the status quo.

The most successful people I know are also the most biased. Not in weird socially conditioned ways. But in profound and productive ways. They have biases about what works in their field, and they can spot opportunity and make decisions faster than those who try endlessly to evaluate every contingency and arrive at an unbiased opinion.

Of course the very real danger is that past success cements biases that are not useful for present or future conditions. This is the norm. It’s very hard to continue to question the very inclinations and mental shortcuts that served you well. But that’s what growth is.

So the trick is not to try to get rid of bias. The trick is to become aware of its existence and just how pervasive and powerful it is. The trick is to question your bias, to manually override it at times, to take charge of it and reprogram it. The trick is to use it as a tool to serve your goals, rather than be its unwitting servant.

The magnitude of anxiety seems to be equal to the delta between expectations and self-assessment.

That means there are two variables to work on to reduce anxiety. Expectations and assessment.

On the expectations front, sometimes it helps to step back and remind yourself that you owe nothing to anyone, status in the eyes of others is a distraction, and there are really only a few things that matter.

It’s good to have expectations that exceed current reality. The discomfort it creates is the necessary impetus for action and progress, without which life is really depressing. But expectations can’t be so far out of reach that they leave you hopeless.

Self assessment is a bit trickier. Trying to believe you are closer to your expectations is tough. The old positive thinking stuff doesn’t work very well. Just telling yourself you are good isn’t super effective if your subconscious doesn’t believe it. Your inner self needs evidence along with intention. One of the best ways to raise your self assessment is to pair positive thoughts with small tangible accomplishments. Just bite sized bits of progress along the dimension of who you want to be.

Reducing the gap between expectations and self assessment is the key to anxiety reduction.

 

It’s not hard to take risk when things are only ideas.

You can radically change models, assumptions, and directions when nothing has been built. But as soon as you’ve put ideas into concrete form, risk gets hard.

The reason it gets hard isn’t because you’re limited by the instantiation of the idea in some physical, inescapable way. It’s because humans form attachments to things they’ve built. Once built, you’re attached, once attached, you begin to defend, once in defensive mode, new ideas are treated like enemies, and that means risk-taking gets shut down.

But if you never build, thinking risky thoughts is useless. The trick is to turn your ideas into something real so quickly and so often that you don’t have time to form stagnating attachment to them.