No threat from Mahomes

Chiefs will not beat the Lions

They will beat themselves

I love my books.

I don’t like physical possessions in general. I’m always trying to get rid of stuff (much to the chagrin of my wife and kids). I want a laptop, phone, guitar, and roof over head. Everything else just seems like maintenance and mess.

Except books.

I’m a sucker for physical books.

I do purge them regularly, trying only to keep books that either a) I would read again, b) I will read for the first time, c) were so instrumental in my life I will reference or give them to others.

Still, it leaves a lot of books. Most of them are at the office, and the rest are scattered between different shelves in different rooms of my house. It drives me nuts. My preference is to have one contiguous wall of shelves where all my books can be arranged left to right top to bottom in order of my intellectual journey. I have done this probably half a dozen times in several different houses. But then my kids always pull them down, put them back out of order, etc. Then I loan some, then need some at the office, then we re-arrange rooms and bedrooms, and before long they are a scattered mess.

I’ve toyed with getting rid of the lot of them and going all digital. After all, I use Kindle and audiobooks now 75% of the time anyway. But I just have so much attached to so many of my books! I dream that one day my kids will scan the shelves and get excited by the same books I did as a teen. This probably means that they can sense this hope in me and will therefore be repelled by my books. That’s how it is with my kids. ;-)

For now, I’m keeping them and resigning to them being in a state of semi-disarray. My pain is great.

Today’s post is the latest issue of the Inner Game of Startups newsletter, where I write totally awesome stuff you’re missing out on if you don’t subscribe. All the cool kids do.

Here’s a teaser.

I feel like I’m losing most of the time.

In fact, it’s usually only in retrospect, when considering a condensed clump of the past when it looks like I’ve made progress in my various battles. In the moment, it feels like losing 90% of the time.

When I started Praxis, every conversation and effort to build a college alternative felt like a losing battle. The relentless onslaught of defensive status quo bias never ended. We just never seemed to win. But when I look back over what we built in six years and what Praxis is today and the hundreds of success stories, it’s clear we were winning at least some of the time.

Crash is not too different. Opening people up to the world of opportunity in front of them, helping them see their career and job hunt in a whole new way and approach it like an entrepreneurial puzzle rather than a rule-following routine feels like losing most of the time. Most people shrug or say it’s not possible or ignore it. It’s pretty tiring.

There are some little wins here and there. I’ve learned to not hold back joy and celebration for each of those, because they are rare and it’s important to get a mental boost now and then!

The timescale on which big battles are won is so different from the mental timescale of feeling the need to get a win. Those daily feelings of struggle compound and take a toll, even though they are making long term progress, the lack of a short term feeling of winning is hard. It’s when I’ve got to manufacture meaning. Turn on some epic music, weave my narrative in a way that makes the body blows feel worth it.

I’m sure there is such a thing as a series of wins stacking up with unstoppable momentum. I think that happens and when it does you’d better be ready to seize it. But the way to be ready is to not give up when the long wins feel like short losses.

Had a really great conversation with Micah Merrick on his new Skill Podcast!

Check it out here, or iTunes, etc.

Notes on what we cover from the episode summary:

• Their shared experiences being homeschooled as kids
• What are the benefits of homeschooling, compared to public schools?
• How the nature of work may change how many kids are homeschooled in the future
• Are homeschooled kids, “socialized”?
• Isaac’s experiences in high school and college, and how they influenced his thinking on higher education
• Why Isaac chose the private sector to pursue social change, despite spending time in the non-profit, government, and higher education worlds
• The founding story of Isaac’s first company, Praxis
• Why students choose college over other, more compelling, options
• What should we call students and their experiences who don’t go to college right away, if at all?
• The idea that might help fewer students choose college in the future
• Be Your Own Credential
• How you can build a signal that is more powerful than a college degree
• The founding story of Crash
• How Crash helps people find new opportunities
• The early tweaks that Crash made to its initial product that rapidly improved growth
• Crash’s early results helping people find work
• The difference between “waiting for your chance” and “winning in the market”
• Isaac’s nefarious super villain plot
• How Isaac harnesses serendipity with Crash
• The difference between “personal marketing” and “authenticity”
• How Crash works for hiring managers, and not just for job seekers
• Isaac’s parting words of wisdom

I’m not a techie. It was all I could do to track with Paul Ford’s epic article What is Code (highly recommended).

But I’m utterly fascinated with software and the way it progresses and the shifting nature of its use and all the competing paradigms around it. So here’s my shoot-from-the-hip assessment of the near past and present state of software development.

I’ve got to use an analogy I can easily grasp, and that is LEGO, the glorious little blocks I spent my youth playing with instead of going to school or learning math. It might be a forced analogy, and I don’t pretend to have an accurate chronology of developments in code. This is entirely from a non-tech user’s perspective – the world of code unfolding over the past 20 years or so as I have experienced it.

Bits and Blocks

First you have individual pieces. To make anything, you need to do all the work. There are no pre-fabricated hunks or simple instructions to follow. It’s all free-form and at the lowest possible level of resolution. You have to build everything (well, almost everything. You do get some pieces that are 2×3 or 1×4, instead of all strictly 1×1).

This is how I first encountered LEGO and code. Either little bits with no meaning but that which you construct, or someone else’s finished masterwork. The obscure part is everything in between the basic blocks and the beautiful display.

In my first exposure to computers, the Dos prompt felt like working with individual LEGO bricks. You had to just know specific things to type. I could cobble together four walls and a roof, but was utterly stupefied how people took these characters and made things like Brick Breaker, or later Windows (feats of equal import to me at the time).

Sets and Systems

A little later, everything came in sets. You had instructions. The right pieces were there. It wasn’t super hard if you were good at following rules. Not a ton of imagination, but reliable end results. You could turn the blocks into the end product you wanted and it looked good! There were even a few plan B or C variations sometimes.

Of course, some people would hack the sets apart and make their own stuff, but it almost always had an inferior aesthetic quality even if it was more creative. The sets were designed to look nice, and cobbling them in new ways had a less shiny sheen.

This is sort of like HTML to me. When I started blogging, posts were not pre-formatted. You could get font size changes, bold, underline, and even add in images (sometimes), but only if you followed some prescribed instructions. Platforms delivered these basic instructions and you could build things within the limits of the platform. Again, if you were a real hacker, you could do all kinds of rule bending, but normies like me had our hands full just remembering to put </p> in the proper place so it would come out looking like advertised.

Custom Crimes and Creations

Enter custom pieces.

Custom LEGO pieces are cheating. But also amazing. It began with things like pre-molded rope bridges and weirdly shaped glass windshields for spacecraft. These custom, one-off pieces lacked the adaptability and interchangeability of core building block pieces, but they made up for it be granting the ability to make things with way more beauty and art.

No more windowless airplanes. No more importing non-LEGO items like Scotch tape to complete a creation. No more bending pieces into curves, or breaking the handle off a medieval shield to make a laser pistol.

The introduction of custom pieces made just for specific sets brought a lot of controversy to LEGO creators. What else are you supposed to do with a molded shark or palm branch, besides the one Pirate Island set it was made for? On the other hand, it looked pretty cool. On the other other hand, what kind of idiot couldn’t make their own solution for palm trees, and one that could be re-used elsewhere? Isn’t that the whole point? Where would this lead? Someday we just buy one single piece of perfectly molded plastic with no blocks or building at all?

Being a normie, I lack firsthand experience of the parallel angst in the world of code. But I can see just enough how all the tools that let dumb, uncreative users like me make reasonably good looking shit out of the box might make some real coders squirm. I love WordPress. I don’t need to know HTML anymore (and hence forgot it all), but I can drag and drop all kinds of stuff into a blog post, or even a webpage. I can use prefabricated buttons and widgets to make a site that looks kinda cool.

Yeah, it’s less flexible and modular. But no Scotch tape or deep skill is needed!

Brands and Bigness

Custom pieces are one thing. But LEGO kept going. Kids these days have no idea what it was like to make Star Wars stuff with normal pieces. They don’t even know what it’s like to take other spaceship pieces and make them into Star Wars ships. Now, they buy prefab pre-branded Star Wars sets, and LEGO building is barely different from model building!

Every movie and comic books and cartoon gets a branded LEGO set now. Most of what kids buy and interact with is totally prepackaged with a full aesthetic and identity. You can’t even really disassemble the mini-figures to make new faces, because they’re all molded spider legs and bat wings and weird shit from specific scenes in specific sequels to specific movies.

There are still niche users who buy the old plain bricks, and niche magazines to serve them and their custom, highly respected but somewhat antiquated art form.

This phase is sort of like the coming of age of social media platforms. People don’t even follow instructions and use custom pieces to make a WordPress site now. They just jump on the fully constructed and branded Facebook or LinkedIn or Medium platform. Big giant brands hand you a fully completed product. You barely build anything anymore. Instead, you do that thing true LEGO kids like me hated…you “play”.

The kid who would interrupt a mega city build to say, “Can we stop building and play with them now?” was such a pain. “Play”? What does that mean? Make a bunch of plastic characters dance around a set? Who cares! We’re building here!

Software entered the “forget building and just play with it” phase too. Most users didn’t do any building at all. Everything was built (and overbuilt).

Even in business applications, the move to giant one-stop-solutions emerged. HubSpot, SalesForce, and other tools began trying to do everything. No more cobbling sets together, let alone individual blocks. You just buy the damn thing and play with it.

Sets to Stacks

Signs of hope. Backlash ensued. Even the LEGO movie went out of the way to re-embrace the glories of unstructured, unorthodox, unbranded builds.

Some kind of harmony seems to be emerging. Big branded sets aren’t going away. Lots of LEGO normies like them. They look like the movies. But more open-ended sets are coming back on line. More basic bricks. A resurgence of basic builds. More ways to connect sets to each other.

The layers of LEGO history form a kind of “stack”. My kids have a glorious stack. They have bins of my old, faded, basic blocks. And my old, semi-custom pirate or space sets. They also have totally custom branded stuff from movies. And you know what they do?

First the build the branded set. They marvel at its beauty for a day or two. Then they start layering in the rest of the stack. They patch together old and new, custom and basic. They make the sets and pieces get along and connect to create new functions and forms.

The old unbranded agnostic pieces perform a Zapier-like task, helping the rest connect. Cinderella and the Avengers can enter a yellow and red castle and fire broke-shield laser pistols and a pirate shark. It’s all possible, across the spectrum from novice to expert, branded to original.

This feels like the emerging world of “nocode”. Normies like me can actually build a lot of really cool stuff. We don’t need to know how to start from scratch, nor are we restricted to big branded sets made by someone else. We can patch Airtable onto WordPress, throw a custom logo from Canva into a living doc by Notion. We can make Zapier tell Slack to notify us when someone hits Webflow and opts into Mailchimp.

We have a stack. A combo of small agnostic pieces and big giant branded platforms we can work into whatever we want.

And purists can make their piece (get it?) with the coexistence of big branded custom stuff and the old school basic blocks.

OK, I’m done. Coders can pick apart my cumbersome analogy, but LEGO detractors don’t come at me. I’m right and you’re wrong about all things LEGO.

Applying to a job generically creates work.

What a hiring managers wants in a new hire is someone who makes them feel like you reduce work for them. You solve problems and make life easier.

Not just when you’re on the job and fully trained. It begins in the hiring process, though in subtle, subconscious ways.

An email, application, or resume that presents a list of your skills creates work. It screams, “Here’s some data on me. You figure out what to make of it, what it might mean about my abilities, and how those might apply to the company and what the result might be.” That’s a ton of work. And pretty much every applicant does this. It’s impossible to go through them all and deeply unpack and imagine if/how each person might be valuable to the company.

Contrast that to the something guy or gal.

Hunter was the Trampoline Guy. One person that applied to work with me at a previous company was the Photoshop guy. He sent tailored pitches where he photoshopped himself into team pictures in a funny, playful way. Someone who applied for the Praxis program once sang a song and had a bird fly through the frame during her video.

Here’s the thing. Not all of them got every job or program they applied to. But every one of them was instantly remembered and shared around the office. We felt like we knew them, and when discussing candidates, in a sea of “Who was that person?” sameness, That Guy/Gal stands out to everyone. They made the process easy, because they did something different, genuine to them, and interesting. Whether they got the offer or not, one thing they all got fast was a response. They couldn’t be ignored. That’s what you want.

Be the something guy/gal. Otherwise you’re the nothing guy/gal.

If you apply to a job with nothing but one-click on some platform, one generic resume, or a standard cover letter/intro like, “Over 12 years enterprise and consumer facing experience building high growth strategies and optimizing key metrics across a variety of industries” You’re bullshitting yourself. That’s not an app. You don’t want the job and they can tell.

You’re basically saying, “Hey, I exist and I’m interested in someone paying me money. Here’s my name and static status, send me a paycheck if you feel like it. I can’t be bothered to figure out what I would do of value specific to you. That’s your job.”

Huge turnoff.

Get your shit together.

Pick only a few companies to start with. Companies you really love. Learn about them – the people, the products, the customers, the culture – then make something unforgettable for them. Do some part of the job before you get the job. Let them see in detail exactly how you’d make their life easier. Don’t just tell them, show them.

When you do, you jump to the front of the line. You get a response and usually an interview. They don’t have to do all the thinking and processing and work of mentally placing you in the organization, because you’ve shown them a preview and given them a taste of exactly what that would be like.

Do this 10 times and you will outperform 100 applications many times over.

 

The more thinking done

The more suffering is felt

When thinking is wrong

I’m out of town for my anniversary for a few days.

Nothing amazing. Just a hotel in a nearby city. Walking downtown, coffee shops, a nice dinner, a movie, reading, talking.

It’s wonderful.

Just the two of us with no kids or obligations. Just sitting in a coffee shop talking is delightful. The little stuff gets so valuable over time. No fancy cruise needed. Just some time with each other.

As is the new norm, my post for today is this week’s episode of The Inner Game of Startups newsletter.

Check it out and all previous issues here.

Through a cool intro, I ended up having an amazing meeting with a senior exec at Apple. This guy had been around for a long time and was personal friends of Steve Jobs, hired by him long ago. He emanated Apple culture and it was pretty cool to see up close.

He told me they sometimes had open positions unfilled for years. He said Steve Jobs used to say, “It’s better to have a hole in the organization than an asshole.”

I loved that advice.

We’re hiring at Crash for an experienced growth marketer.

https://blog.crash.co/noresume-build-a-digital-reputation/

You don’t want middle benefits for middle cost. That’s a death sentence. Wal-Mart or Bespoke. Taco Bell or steak house. None of this Applebee’s shit.

At least that’s true for me in several big important areas.

Take hiring for an open position. There are two ends of the candidate spectrum that can work.

1. The person who won’t try to get the job at all
2. The person who tries like hell with the most amazing pitch in history

Who doesn’t get hired? The person who submits an application like everyone else. They signal that they don’t care if the job happens to them. They can’t even bother to not want it. They have zero way to signal anything else. They sit in a giant middle cluster of unread resumes.

Person #1 is a candidate the company wants based on their reputation. They have to actively recruit them, and convince them to consider the role. This person is already doing something else valuable and needs to be sold on taking this new role. Employers will do anything they can to make the decision easier. No apps, resumes, forms, interviews, just direct call to convince them. If you are provably valuable enough at doing something others want, you won’t ever have to apply for anything. People will recruit you. That’s hard, but a big enough brand and reputation makes it true.

Person #2 realizes they aren’t person #1. But they also realize they are competing with person #1. Most applicants to jobs think they are competing against other applicants, and they think the way to win is just like you win in school: follow the rules and don’t stand out. They are totally wrong. Person #2 gets this. They must create something so interesting and valuable that they get into the conversation with person #1.

This uneven barbell shaped distribution happens elsewhere too. In a startup, founders kind of think of investors this way. You either want VCs who bring nothing but money to the table and don’t try or pretend to “add value” or take any of your time, or you want investors who add so much freaking value it’s insane and worth any time they take. You don’t want investors who bring some money and a little value and eat a medium amount of time. That’s a killer.

Jobs themselves can be like this. A totally thoughtless job just cranked out for the cash so you can do other stuff off the clock or deeply meaningful work that you never put down are both pretty useful depending on contest. Middling work that occupies medium mental space and brings medium rewards is a silent killer.

You want a cheap A to B car, or something truly exciting. You want a roof and four walls without maintenance or a dream home. The effort and energy spent on medium medium stuff is like the taste of nothing. Not even exciting enough to give an adjective.

Get so valuable that you are on one extreme. Until then, be so cheap/different/interesting that you can win on the other.

 

I love change. I hate passive acceptance of present conditions.

Most of the time, most present conditions are good and reasonable and don’t need a radical overthrow. And it’ always worth learning why they exist, a la Chesteron’s Fence.

But some do need to be ignored and supplanted. And I think it’s usually the complete reverse of those most people think. I think the big, giant, taken-for-granted, bedrock beliefs and assumptions are the most screwed up, and the vast majority of small, daily seemingly silly things are actually on-point.

I think the existence of elections, legislatures, governments as we know them, nearly all schooling, intellectual property, the medical industry, and other big giant accepted chunks of society are ridiculous and ripe for replacement. Then small stuff like the fact that people would rather be a YouTuber than an astronaut aren’t worrisome or worth changing. Same for consumerism, or workaholism, or most of the other popular things people think need to change. Those seem to have a pretty decent and open evolutionary market and work themselves out pretty well over time.

OK, so back to all these big changes. You can ignore some beliefs you don’t like – say some laws or informal dress codes – at various costs. Each time you ignore the status quo you will suffer, but you will also gain. Only the mold-breakers really do anything transformational, and lack of transformation stagnates into regress. So you have to pay a social price for progress. Note what this does NOT mean. This is not one of those “Have to break a few eggs.” You have to pay the social price. You can’t force other people to pay the price. If you do, you’re a government or any other less well organized gang of thugs.

Real change comes from people who see differently and act differently because of it to the point of paying a high price (and hopefully higher corresponding reward, but that’s not always the case) themselves.

But if you’re constantly challenging every aspect of everything, nothing works. For example, maybe you hate the cartelized insurance industry (I do) and you hate the current structure of incorporations (a little). You could create a company to disrupt insurance. Or a company to radically rethink corporate structure. Could they be the same company? Maybe, but probably not. Two giant status quo battles on two different fronts are really hard to win.

You can probably keep moving forward in smaller ways on many fronts – writing about your ideas, maybe advising some small startup trying it, etc. – but to go all in on a giant battle requires so much focus, so many resources, and the elimination of as many exogenous threats and liabilities as possible. The person trying to take down five things at once has too many attack surfaces and lacks sufficient concentration of upside in any one area to make up for it.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I’d love to upend so many big things at one time if possible.

If I write another book on the future of ed, career, and self-ownership, that’s the title.

It’s not just an option now, it’s a necessity. You’ve got to embrace a worldview in which you are the fundamental unit of economic production and professional progress. You can’t outsource it anymore.

Your vision, product, brand, operation, and growth are an entity in themselves. You don’t get jobs and wait for them to confer this, you generate and adjust it yourself every day. Some days you earn a paycheck from a company, some from customers directly, some from investors. The mix is in flux. But what matters is the mindset.

That’s why we built Crash. A platform to manage the company of you.

The world is so full of opportunity right now I can hardly stand it! The key is changing the way you think about it from rules and conveyor belts and invitations and permission slips to open opportunity if you identify valuable meaningful problems to solve and learn to repeat it.