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.

Why do I believe

Despite all the evidence

The Lions will win

You’re starting to hear more mainstream people in the VC and startup world talk about homeschooling/unschooling/alternative approaches to government factory schools and their private mimics.

The first question is usually, “What new startups will grow huge while serving this growing market?” There are ideas around rented facilities, online courses, social networks, and more.

These are all interesting and potentially big ideas. But I can’t help but wonder, after decades around homeschoolers in several cities and states and in several clusters (classical, unschooled, art focused, science focused, philosophy focused, tech savvy, tech hating, religious, atheist, conservative, hippy, etc.), whether the idea of homeschoolers as a “market” is just too far from reality.

Education is just something that happens in life unless you stop it (the best way to prevent it is often with school). So saying, “What company can you build for people who learn stuff without school?” is kind of like asking, “What company can you build for people who eat?” or, “People who live in houses?” It’s not enough of a unique commonality to create a defined niche community or market. Homeschoolers are very fragmented and this will only increase. And it’s not for lack of a social platform or network to bring them together. It’s because learning stuff the natural, non-coercive way is too broad a thing to have in common.

Schooled people think homeschooling is so exotic they imagine homeschoolers as a unified block of outsiders. But reality is nothing like this. All the unified blocks are too small for a massive category king type of company, and home/unschooling in general is too broad to serve with a single product/channel as distinct from products that serve everyone else anyway.

I might be wrong, but this is my contrarian question. What if homeschoolers aren’t a market? What if you’ve got to get tighter?

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I swung into Bojangles this morning for a box of hot chicken and biscuits.

When I realized the meal I ordered didn’t come with quite enough for everyone, I went back to buy a few extra biscuits. The woman at the counter waved my credit card off and said, “I got you honey”, and added a few biscuits free of charge.

The error was mine, but she easily and gladly bore the cost and made sure I was happy.

I’m also dealing with the SC dept of revenue this week. Some clerical error has them believing that all of the 2017 revenue for Praxis was to me personally, and that I owe unpaid taxes on it. I can show them articles of incorporation, bank documents, and every other proof that it was company income which was taxed and reported already, but since some form two years ago had improperly been tied to me, they can’t just fix it. It’s still unclear whether the mistake was on me, them, or Intuit Quickbooks. But even though the rep there knows it’s not correct, she’s powerless. I can show her stuff but she can’t undo the paperwork. I could offer her money to fix it and she still couldn’t.

Unlike the Bojangles employee, the woman working for the bureaucracy has no agency. She has no ability to read the situation, adjust, and do the simple thing that gets the spirit of the law right despite errors in the letter.

This is what drives people to madness when dealing with bureaucracy. They aren’t dealing with humans or common sense or decency or logic.

Bojangles is better than the government. Why? Competition. Voluntary entry and exit. The need to win customer dollars instead of take them with armed agents.

That’s it. All the other stuff emerges out of that ugly fact.

Bojangles doesn’t throw you in a cage if you don’t buy their product. Government does.

A bunch of people are clamoring to ban vaping, ostensibly because young people are doing it and it’s bad for their health.

Young people aren’t stupid. They know it’s not good for their health. Neither are sugar, caffeine, alcohol, sitting around all day, or school. Driving a car dramatically increases chance of death or injury. They know all this too. And, just like all humans, they choose a level of risk they are comfortable with.

If you ban one form of risk, they’ll make it up with another. People tend toward their acceptable risk level. See the Peltzman Effect.

I tend to think kids do things like sneak off to smoke or vape or drink alcohol in part because they have so little freedom. They are force-fed through a prison-like school system their entire lives. Even using the bathroom freely is prohibited. So they look for ways to flex their freedom. When productive ways aren’t on the table – say skipping school to create YouTube videos – they go to the more dangerous or destructive stuff. In fact, the more self-proclaimed authorities tell them something is bad, the more attractive it becomes as a form of maintaining and expressing some small sliver of freedom and rebellion.

I’m particularly surprised by the concern over vaping. Kids mostly do it out in the open. Its negative effects seem fairly mild compared to most risky youth activities. When it’s banned, it gets pushed to the shadows, where other shadowy stuff is also going on. This is not a preferable situation if your concern is for kids well-being.

Kids aren’t stupid. Your busybody efforts to control them are.

There’s a lot of phony bullshit out there.

Don’t underestimate it. You can get a lot of dopamine from building a brand on bullshit social media posts, articles, and PR. You can get fans, followers, and invites to podcasts and conferences where bullshit is the main fare.

But you might become shackled to the shit. You might become a slave to the craving for more hits of social status crack that come from endless bullshit peddling. A caffeine or cocaine high might feel great for a bit, but it’s a losing battle. Over a longer period of time, it can’t hold a candle to a solid, healthy diet of real nutrients. It hollows you out inside.

At some point, everyone with any modicum of public success must make a break. You get a choice: surrender to the siren song of bullshit, double down on phony branding for endless attention while it boils your innards into jelly, or say screw this shit, it’s a little fun, a little stupid, and a lot irrelevant to building something real.

Hating it, or shaping your identity around rejection of bullshit is another form of slavery to it. Transcending it means not being threatened by the bullshit game or lured into full immersion in it.

The best way to do this is to stop looking at the bullshit stream and turn your attention to something you want to build that is independent of it. Something you can build whether or not anyone notices. Something that can win or lose whether or not the bullshit peddlers like or dislike you.

It’s the only way to be real in a world of shadows.

When there is sand in the gears and things don’t seem to be flying smoothly uphill, the best thing to do is sell.

Just get some deals done. Any kind. Making $1 from a customer is better than messing around with ten things that don’t make money. Getting a deal done is like daily blogging. It just builds on itself. Winning begets winning. Selling begets selling.

Go close something!

The crossover move

Is still an ankle breaker

Now my own ankles

The world is wild and zany these days.

Everyone is bombastic. The brands of public figures are extreme and do stuff that would once have seemed shocking. We’ve learned the rules of the internet and social platforms like Twitter and taken them near their logical ends.

When the three point line was introduced to the NBA, it took several decades for old talent and coaching to master the full implications of the rule change and take the game to its current state, the logical conclusion of spots on the court worth 50% more than others.

People master the incentive structures they’re in. But it takes time and sometimes generation shift.

Now that we’re fully exploiting the incentive structure of social media, we get what we’ve got.

Hot takes. Trolling. Subterfuge. Memes. Weird causes. Signaling. Outrage. Counter-outrage.

Every crazy sounding thing can be played as a subtle form of strategy, or a secret code for followers at the expense of noobs.

I don’t find this good or bad. But I do find it a bit boring.

What was novel and wild is now kind of tiring. Everyone sounds the same to me now. And they sound the same while not really saying anything. Or at least not anything interesting. They are shouting and flashing big neon lights but my senses are adapted to a noisy, bright environment.

It feels like a lot of pretend ideas, pretend concern, and scripted formats for communicating them for maximum punch. Which ends up having the reverse effect.

Maybe this is one of those “medium is the message” things, but I don’t think it likely. I think the message feels lost in the medium. I’m hungry for interesting messages, not just mastered mediums.

I’m not sure exactly what a less boring stream of discourse and idea would look like. I only know that I’m getting more bored by what’s considered controversial or provocative. Supposedly polarized people all sound the same to me.

Get it while it’s hot.

I like to be in control.

I also don’t mind being totally out of control.

What’s torturous is having a little control but constantly battling with forces outside my control to maintain that sliver. Like sitting in traffic. I control the vehicle, but am at the mercy of other forces for most of the progress that can be made. I’d rather be on an open freeway with total control or in an airplane with none. In the former, I get to call the shots. The latter I get to totally free my mind and laugh at whatever fate brings.

Closer to home, I like total control over my workspace. I want minimal, neat, orderly, clean desk and space around me. Total control of my environs. But outside my workspace – in my garage, kitchen, living room, etc. – I have fully surrendered control to my kids. I used to try to maintain some semblance of order, but the battle for semi-control was endless, fruitless, and exhausting. I would get mad, but the living areas would never be fully ordered as I wished anyway. I was putting in 80% energy for 20% return. When I finally surrendered all expectation of minimalism and order in spaces outside my office where I have total control, my life got a lot better. I can relax and let it go.

There are a lot of things in life that fit in the category of very hard battles for very small slices of partial control. They’re not usually worth it. I try to let go and ride the tide, or find those areas where I can have complete control. Fighting for middle ground wears me out.

Want to bypass the entire stack of resumes and stand head and shoulders above the competition for jobs?

Easy.

Send a pitch.

What’s a pitch you ask?

This.
And this.
And this, and this, and this.

Those are pitches.

Notice anything?

They are about the company. Tailored to THEM. They focus on the role, and the way the candidate could create value.

They aren’t rambling lists of all your accomplishments. They aren’t generic bullets. No, “Dear Sir or Madam”.

Getting an interview is like getting a date. Can you imagine walking up to every person at the bar, handing them a piece of paper, and saying, “To Whom It May Concern, this paper lists the ten reasons I’m dateable”? Think you’d get a lot of call backs?

Instead, if you’re interested in someone you show it. You take a minute to learn about them. You tell them the reasons you find THEM fascinating. You ask if you can get to know them better because you think they’re pretty great.

Companies are not so different. They don’t want a list of your status. They want to see your interest!

Show it with a pitch. You’ll get 10x the return vs a generic resume and application.

 

Here are some more pitches if you want more examples:

https://crash.co/austintaylor/passageways
https://crash.co/joepas/atlas-obscura
https://crash.co/roseackerman/omni
https://crash.co/chloeroy/restaurant365
https://crash.co/danaarends/bookfull

Had a really great and optimistic convo!

Here it is.

85% of jobs are hired through a referral from your network. That’s insane.

It means applications aren’t doing anything for you. Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? Don’t spend your energy on the activity that takes 80% of the effort for 20% of the results (or in the case of cold job apps, only 15% results!).

So how to get those sweet, sweet referrals?

Turn your job hunt into a campaign!

The first step is people telling other people about you so they can tell other people to hire you is letting everyone know your skills, interests, and the fact that you’re for hire. Start learning and working OUT LOUD. People can see what you’re up to and refer you to others.

Check this out. Amanda listened to a great podcast episode. She took notes. And she decided to Tweet those notes and tag the host of the show. It’s a top 50 podcast. Yet he Retweeted her, which meant lots of people saw it. One of those was a hiring manager at a media company. Right there on Twitter, her asked her to apply.

Now she has not a cold application, but a referral from one of the company execs! All from Tweeting her work.

(You can use Crash if you want some help.)