In relentless pursuit of freedom.
This week’s Inner Game of Startups is coming to you entirely free in its entirety.
If you want to get these every Friday, it’s just $5/month and it would boost my fragile ego. You’ll get every issue fresh, access to the archives, and you can send any questions you like and I’ll try to answer.
Enjoy your free issue today.
Isaac
It’s not a numbers game.
It’s an attention game.
The popular approach to job hunting is to make a resume and blast it 100s of times to 100s of companies and hope maybe you’ll get an interview. Seems to make sense. More shots on goal means better odds of success.
But when you put yourself in the shoes of each individual hiring manager, you spot the problem. They don’t know anything about all your other resumes. They only see the one in front of them. And it’s in a pile with, on average, 250 others. How are they supposed to tell who is worth an interview? Better bullets and formatting?
What if instead you showed them something impossible to ignore?
What if you picked 5 of your favorite companies, spent a few days researching each, tracked down the name and emails of the right people, created a small project for them, and sent a tailored pitch showing what you can do and requesting an interview? And what if you shared those 5 pitches on social as well, just in case some other company you hadn’t thought of sees it and is also impressed?
You don’t have to guess what would happen, because I can tell you! Those five pitches will get you more results than 100 resume applications.
Ask Joey.
He built a profile, then picked a handful of companies and created pitches for them. He sent the pitches to them and shared them on social and asked for any help or recommendations.
He won interviews with the companies he pitched and others who heard about it. And he got hired.
A lot of people think the job hunt is up to luck or fate. It’s not. You can win it if you get creative and show more than a passing interest with a generic resume. You can blow them away and nab the job of your dreams.
I’ve written before about how fear of failure isn’t the thing, it’s fear of failing alone.
At Crash, we’ve seen dozens of people make amazing tailored pitches for companies they want to work for. And we’ve seen it work incredibly well!
So well, in fact, that I have complete confidence that two weeks spent creating and sending 10 tailored pitches to 10 companies will yield better results than spending even a month applying via a resume and normal channels to 100 similar jobs at 100 companies.
People are on the job hunt already. It takes some work and effort. The pitch approach takes no more effort on net (probably less), but it takes a different kind of effort. It’s not normal. So it’s a hard mental hurdle to overcome.
It feels pretty comfortable to do the same thing over again even if it doesn’t work. As long as everyone else also does it and thinks you’re totally normal for doing it. I’ve meet people blasting resumes for 6 months with no change in outcomes, but taking a week to try something radical feels scarier than to continue failing the normal way.
Screw normal! Your life is yours. Find what works for achieving your goals and do that. Unless you goal is to be the stale statistical output of some social aggregate, get off the beaten bath and whack your own.
The adolescent version of loving something is reactionary.
The feeling is a fog that takes over, whether you want it to or not. It’s a calling, a mission, a force of nature, destiny.
That kind of love is fun, full of passion and pain, ups and downs, and is bounded by a safety net. The net is the feeling that fate, not you, is in charge. You can lean on that and abdicate some self-searching and decision making.
But that is an unsustainable kind of love. Like a drug, its effects loosen over time requiring higher dosages to the point of loss of function. It must grow up.
Grown up love isn’t fate but choice.
It’s you, not the universe, as the motive power. You must stand and make decisions rather than wait for the wind at your back. You have to awaken to the full force of your freedom. This is good – better, deeper, and truer than young love – but it’s not easy. The transition involves a kind of mourning for lost innocence and simplicity.
Grown up love doesn’t happen to you. It’s a choice to master it. It requires work and growth. Its passions must be dispassionately engaged. That is what makes it so strong.
As long as love by choice does not result in love without risk, it is right and proper. The only real danger of moving from destiny to choice is the possibility that you make weaker choices when you feel free to do so than when you felt you were being pulled.
And that, of course, is a choice you have to make.
Be rational, but stay foolish.
It’s called “The Inner Game of Startups”.
Obvious tip of the hat at the phenomenal book, The Inner Game of Tennis, about the mental side of the sport.
Here’s the description from Substack, where it will be hosted and you can signup:
This weekly newsletter isn’t just for you. It’s for me too.
Building a great company is hard (Crash.co is my current company). And it’s kinda lonely too. I’m pretty open and transparent, and try not to put a spin on our progress and challenges. Still, the vast majority of startup experiences happen between the ears of the founders. You go through so much that no one really knows about. All the things you almost did but didn’t, the things you second guess, the deflating or inspiring conversations with investors or customers, the changes in plan, and the constant effort to manager your own mental game.
I’m sorta tired of keeping it to myself. Writing is my favorite activity and a kind of catharsis.
So every week, I’m going to share exactly where we are, and what I’m thinking and feeling in real time.
This is not a “How to” newsletter. Tons of people have had far more success than me building companies and many great books and podcasts exist with those kinds of publicly consumable tips.
This is a “How it is” newsletter. I’ll be sharing my own, totally subjective experiences as we work to build a truly great company we can be proud of.
I’d love to have you come along.
I’d especially love questions from other founders, aspiring founders, customers, or investors. It better will help me tease out my own thoughts.
Thanks!
Isaac
I want to do something different with this, so I’m charging $5/month.
The goal is not to make a killing on a newsletter, it’s to create a filter so that subscribers are those who are keenly interested in knowing the weekly struggles of startup building, enough to put in a few bucks. I think this will create a better quality audience, and keep me more attuned to what readers find valuable.
I’ll write a new issue every Friday.
You can subscribe here: https://isaacmorehouse.substack.com/
I look forward to seeing you Friday!
Air travel: being
free from earthly gravity
Trapped by human dumb
There seems to be a strange willingness to destroy real individual human lives in defense of abstract imagined threats.
Watch the way people get excoriated on social platforms if it is believed that their actions, words, or even thoughts, are potentially not proactively in line with whatever imagined doomsday threat is en vogue. They don’t have to even do anything concrete or harm any specific individual in a specific way. They themselves only need to be perceived as a threat to the crusade against some big unsolvable boogeyman that no one actually really cares about but everyone pretends to.
What if we reserved active disdain for only those times when a real person took an action that caused us firsthand harm?
I cannot imagine any way in which the world would be worse.
The burden of proof would be on those rallying everyone against a public stranger to demonstrate such harm and show why additional parties ought to consider themselves part of the harmed in explicit provable material ways.
The danger of bad individuals – even “evil” if you insist – is utterly dwarfed by the danger of self-righteous mobs seeking to crucify them.
Mobs aren’t human.
They represent a reprehensible sub-human animal spirit that lurks behind mass man at all times. It is the spirit that believes some men ought or need to rule others. It is the spirit that suppresses the individual will with a nebulous collective death cult. It is a spirit that revels in the suffering of those envied more than individual progress.
In religious terms, it is Satan. In political terms, it is The State. They are essentially the same spirit. They exist only based on belief in and fear of them. Their incantations are collectivist words like “We” and obligatory words like “Ought”. They place an unfulfillable burden of responsibility on everyone while making accountability for anyone obscure to the point of impossible.
Their message is always one of what cannot be done without them. Their psychology is that of an abusive spouse angling at co-dependent manipulation. They desperately and cruelly whisper and shout a repeated hammer drum of what horrors and impossibilities await those who don’t yield to their necessity. They don’t pretend to be good. Their lie is that they are necessary. That without them you would die. But they are death. Of soul even when not of body.
Don’t give in.
I don’t mean being the dominant player in a market. I mean here a much tighter definition of monopoly: legal monopoly.
Governments suck.
The reason they suck is because they are monopolists. The good news is, this means opportunity to outcompete governments for all the stuff they do badly. (At least the parts that anyone actually wants done).
The challenge of competing with governments is of course that they can kill anyone who doesn’t want to be a paying customer. This gives them a huge customer base.
It turns out, people don’t like to be killed. So they pay government to avoid it. They take the services since they had to pay for them anyway to avoid being caged (or killed if they resisted being caged).
But this provides the opening for competitors.
It also turns out, you don’t get good information about how to make your product valuable when everyone is buying it out of fear you will kill them if they don’t. So governments plod along delivering unimaginably stupid services in unimaginably backward ways with terribly high costs and the worst employees in history.
It’s so bad, in fact, and so hopelessly, systematically deaf to information on how to improve, that people clamor to pay even more money to service providers who can do better, even though they are forced to pay government for their services already.
A customer willing to double pay for your service is a great customer!
Companies that deliver services to compete with government get quick feedback from the market on how to do it well. If they don’t act on it, they don’t survive. It’s very tough out there when your customers don’t have the looming fear that you might kill them. But that’s also what makes real value creation possible.
I am bullish on competing governance services. I love them.
Yes, governments can come threaten to kill such service providers if they don’t stop. But luckily governments move slow, are always trying to figure out the laziest way to maintain power, and often lack the foresight to realize a competitive threat before it’s too late.
The real bear case against competing upstarts is that they will succeed, get tired of competing, and morph into one of the many fat sloppy formerly-private rent-seeking appendages of the government. Yuck.
I’ve been pretty stressed the past several weeks, with health stuff, business stuff, travel stuff, etc.
Last night, I was chatting with some friends for hours about really goofy, unrelated stuff. Today, everything feels lighter and less stressful. It’s so simple but easy for me to forget how important it is to have fun. And when what I’m doing directly isn’t fun, venture off and dive into some activity or conversation that is.
I’m a pretty happy guy so I sort of assume I don’t need fun reminders. But I’m also pretty intense, and as stakes get higher, it’s easy to get tighter.
I bombed today giving a short presentation.
Luckily, it was just a practice presentation. Still, it was weird. I completely missed one of the key points, and worse yet, instead of moving on anyway, I stopped and acknowledged the miss.
Very uncharacteristic for me. I love presenting and I’m pretty good at it. And I know this stuff cold. I was a little disturbed by it. Afterwards, running over it through my head, I couldn’t even get it right then.
I went and grabbed dinner and realized I hadn’t eaten in 10 hours.
After I ate, my mind was clear and clicking again.
It’s so easy for me to forget how much calories matter for clarity.
A College degree was a proxy for employers to help them see if people have what they value.
The cost of tuition plus the time it takes to complete the degree were the key ingredients. Not anything learned.
The logic was, if you can pay the cost and complete it, it’s probably because you are ambitious and resourceful and reliable enough to get a job, get a loan, get a scholarship, borrow from relatives, etc. and stick through it.
So ambition, work ethic, consistency, resourcefulness, basic professionalism, were traits sought. Not degrees. There were not easy ways to prove those traits, and the thinking was you probably couldn’t complete college unless you had them.
But we can now go one level closer to source with a much better proxy for talent. We now have access to demonstrable activities much more directly related to those traits. And the degree is a worse and worse proxy for them.
Being able to spend a ton of money one college is a weaker and weaker proof of these qualities, because college loans are handed out like candy, parents have way more education money for their kids than they used to, more scholarships, grants, etc. In fact, spending a lot of borrowed money on college is now as likely to be a sign of poor judgement, and a lot of your parents money is as likely to be a sign of not being independent or responsible.
Being able to spend a lot of time to complete a degree is weaker as well. Not only because it’s easier to defer earning due to more access to money, but because the college experience itself is less challenging and less connected to the marketplace, and because being able to do the same thing for a long time is no longer highly valued in the workplace. Jobs are far more dynamic and less monotonous, and average tenure is short.
So degrees are dying proxies for desirable traits like ambition, work ethic, consistency, resourcefulness, basic professionalism.
Good! Because now you can show them in better ways. Now you can have a proof closer to source. Proof of work. No long guesswork involved in assuming the action is a real indicator of the trait.
Now you can learn things, build things, and do things out-loud for all to see. You can create a digital footprint that gives a window into your character, skill, and ability. That’s what Crash profiles, pitches, and job campaigns are all about. But there are many ways.
It’s not just about showing expertise or the product of skills, it’s also about showing the process. You can list “Ran a marathon” on a skills profile, but better yet, you can share a series of blog posts breaking down your decision to do it, you training regimen, etc. This provides deep insight into the way you think, pick challenges, engage in self-improvement, overcome obstacles, show up consistently every day for a long period, etc.
You can communicate a history of personal progress as well as the current state of your skills in powerful ways today, and these projects and pitches and media are more directly related to the traits desired than purchased paper.
That’s the world we’re already in and I love it!
Years ago, I read a Sci-Fi book called The Unincorporated Man. It was only so-so as a work of fiction, but it had a core idea that I am super interested in. Trade-able shares of individual people.
I love markets in everything. Well, the truth is that everything already is a market if you broaden the definition, it’s just that most are very bogged down with bad information, bad incentives, and inefficiency. Institutional monopoly interventions and prohibitions cause lots of really clumsy markets, where they could be orders of magnitude better. Allowing exchange of everything, even money instruments, in markets we don’t associate with money, just allows better ways to express and attain desires and allocate resources.
So shares of you. What’s the idea?
You are “Me, Inc.” You will produce and create a ton of value in your life. And you’ll capture as much of it as you can. But you might have a cashflow problem. When you produce it may not line up with when you need or want to capture it. What if you could access the value you produce on your entire life timeline at different times?
What if you could securitize your future value as a tradeable asset?
I started thinking about this about a decade ago with small businesses. There are so many successful small businesses with great revenue and profit margins whose owners are getting older and have no clear succession or exit plan. SMB’s are hard to exit, and furthermore, most owners don’t want to exit entirely yet, but they’d love to be able to take a chunk of the value they’ve built off the top and buy a vacation home and spend a little less time at the office. But there’s no large market for selling shares of an SMB. In other words, their value is not liquid.
When I launched Praxis in 2013, my original idea for tuition was a $5K downpayment then 5% of starting salary for 5 years. I didn’t go with it because it seemed complicated and there weren’t many instruments that helped make it easy. I also found it hard enough to sell the idea of skipping college, and selling a new funding mechanism was also confusing the early customers I asked. Now the world has come a long way and everyone knows you don’t need college. Now the payment structure including a cut of future earnings is in use with many code shools and has investors set up to make it work. They’re called Income Share Agreements (ISAs).
ISAs so far are tied to specific services. You get accepted to a code school, then sign an agreement to pay a percentage of future earnings to the holder of the agreement. The school sells that agreement to a pool of investors to get the money to serve you, and the investor collects later when you’re hired.
But what if it didn’t have to be tied to a specific school or program? What if we could individualize it, and free it entirely from intermediaries?
What if you could go directly to investors and show them evidence of your future earning potential and sell some shares in it and get the money directly to use for whatever you want?
What if you could IPO?
There are many ways to trade future value for current, over many different lengths of time with different risk factors and upside. It could be a share of your income for length of time. Or it could be a percentage of your will upon death. (An aside: I know a guy who used to buy life insurance policies then sell them to others so they’d pay the annual premiums but collect the payout when he died. He’s an old guy and jokes about all the people who want him dead. Strange, but not a bad idea!) People could own a chunk of the equity in your home. It could be any number of things. You could sell your shares, and buy them back. A true liquid market in your individual value.
But don’t just think about it from the seller standpoint.
Imagine being able to invest in up and coming YouTube star? Imagine a fund of 100 AAU baketball players?
My mind gets going on this and the possibilities are endlessly exciting. The entire structure of life and career could open up with so much more flexibility. And of course, no one would have to sell any shares. But true self-ownership means ability to exchange your value, services, and property. Expand the scope and make it easier!
Of course, this would require a way to show your value and prove why your shares are worth buying and your current market price. A dynamic profile to showcase what you’ve done, your ability, interests, skills, connections, etc. (Oh, hello!:-)
I love seeing what creative stuff job-seekers come up with on their job hunt. We built Crash to reframe the whole concept of discovering great roles, building a skill profile to signal your ability, and pitching yourself to companies through both the “Shotgun” and “Sniper” approach to your job hunt campaign.
The Shotgun is a loud, public campaign to let the world know you’re on the job hunt, rally your network for upvotes, shares, comments, and job recs on your profile, and broadcast your signal. It’s how you find out about roles you never knew existed and get in front of more hiring managers.
The Sniper is a targeted approach where you find your favorite 10 companies, research them, and make them a tailored pitch. Nothing stands out like coming to me with something that shows you know and love my company/role, and you took the time to pitch me specifically, not “Dear Sir or Madam at [Insert Company Name]. 10 of these beats 100 applications in ROI hands down.
You’ve got to read this breakdown of how one Crasher is running her job hunt campaign. It is awesome. It’s clear she’s getting results, and it’s also clear the process itself is both fun and a valuable learning experience building her skills and network!
Read it. Share it with a job-seeking friend or relative. There are opportunities all around if you’re hungry enough to win them!
http://amandajones.site/3-tips-to-market-yourself-on-social-media-and-land-interviews/
I’m not a fan of goals. I’ve written about this before, but the TLDR is goals don’t inspire me much and mostly seem like baggage, distraction, and stress creators.
I prefer to just stick to some simple heuristics (don’t do stuff you hate, don’t do stuff you suck at, create value for people, make yourself/company more valuable every day than the day before, etc.) and let the wins compound over time to whatever heights, instead of defining a specific height and date.
I also don’t go much for concrete personal goals in terms of wealth or lifestyle.
Still, here are a few life goals I can get behind:
I may or may not achieve all of these (though I have achieved some already), but they’re the kind of goals that seem fun.