Calls and meetings are so weirdly draining.

If I have more than one call or meeting in a day, I might as well have 10. Especially if the day starts with one. There’s a “talk mode” that gets activated with meetings, and it takes about 20 minutes before the meeting to get into it, and it lasts about an hour after the meeting. This means I can’t flip back into other kinds of work quickly. Talk mode is kind of manic and basically consumes the day.

Good meetings are even worse. They get so many ideas spinning off that focus becomes incredibly hard. Followups and notes after the meetings are all I can muster.

I can get into it, but I always long for the quiet days.

Child labor laws sound sensible but they are not.

Places poor enough to need children to work will have child labor whether governments ban it or not.

If banned, it will be unenforceable if it’s widespread, or if enforced, will drive child labor to far worse activities than if it were legal.

Unfortunately, you cannot legislate away scarcity.

Places that do not need children to work in harsh conditions will not have them do so. Laws banning it do not bring this about.

But let’s be clearer about the idea of child labor. It’s very much alive today, even in countries wealthy enough to not need kids laboring.

In the US, children are forced to labor at a desk in cinder block rooms for 13 years. It is mandatory and very difficult to escape. They have no choice over the work or the schedule. They earn no pay. They gain few skills that are valuable later in life. They are shamed and punished if they don’t enjoy it, aren’t good at it, or slack.

These same kids are prohibited from voluntarily offering to work for pay. They can’t go hang around a greenhouse and ask to make a few bucks an hour watering plants. Even if they love plants and learn a ton and the owner would like to have them. It is illegal for them to earn money working at their parents business, or selling YouTube editing services to small companies.

Some still find loopholes and ways to do some kinds of work without getting caught. But the majority of the most interesting and valuable kinds of work are way too legally dubious for companies to mess around paying young people. And minimum wage laws price them out of even the simplest roles.

No wonder young people emerge from colleges in their mid-twenties and enter the workforce with little skill and even less idea what the market values. They’ve been forced out of it for more than 20 years.

Children love to play. And they love to work on goals and things they value. They love being around adults and learning from them. They love helping. They love earning money and the confidence and independence that comes with it.

Instead they are raised away from the free market in a low value master-slave setting and banned from breaking free.

No wonder most people have such an unhealthy relationship to work and wages and commerce and companies.

More freedom to work and less coerced labor in school would be awesome for everyone.

I have a really long post outlined and I was excited to write it today, since the rest of the week is packed with meetings.

But I had trouble sleeping last night, got behind with emails and calls, and now am playing catch-up, all while trying to decide if I should go in to see a doctor about this persistent weird sore/swollen neck/throat.

So I’m writing this post instead of a the meaty one I had in mind.

Not gonna lie, feel a little frustrated and bummed about it. But I’m not gonna miss a day of blogging, even if I can’t hit it out of the park. Sometimes small ball repeated is better than strike-outs in anticipation of home runs.

Kill chance to work free

Kill chance to prove skill and win

Opportunity

(Related video: Free Work is not Exploitation.)

People don’t mean what they say.

They think they do, but words and criteria are best efforts to get needs and wants out of the brain and into the world. They’re imperfect.

Job postings are my favorite example.

In a world of no constraints, facing no actual candidates, a hirer will list out a bunch of things they think would indicate someone suited to solve a problem.

These are all proxies. Years of experience, education, particular skill sets, etc. They may or may not actually correlate with someone suited for the job, and they are almost never causal.

Realizing everything is a proxy for a deeper desire rather than a hard rule opens the world up. You see that the real key is to understand people’s needs more than to listen to the proxies they choose to define them.

You can get creative and show them something they hadn’t considered.

You don’t need to have the stuff listed on the job posting if you can show something better.

Every time I get ideas and advice that reinforce my strengths and rev up my activities and inclinations I feel invigorated. And it works.

Every time I get ideas and advice that pull me into my weaknesses or away from my zone I feel stressed. And it doesn’t work.

Double down on your different.

I have always been an extrovert.

I’ve taken so many personality tests. Every time I take Meyers-Briggs I get ENTJ.

Still, over the years I have grown more and more fond of time alone and more and more tired by time around people. In fact, I do not look forward to calls, meetings, podcasts, media appearances, or talks. Right up until they begin, I feel like I’d rather not do them and instead read or write or work alone.

But then the lights go on, or the call begins, and a switch is flipped. For the duration of the social interaction, I’m totally into it, feeling the flow, energized. I love it. Until it ends.

As soon as it’s done I’m tired and want to be alone again.

This wasn’t always the case. I was the kid, teen, and 20-something who always wanted to be where the action was. Somehow in the last decade I’ve become this strongly bifurcated person who feels introverted as the resting default state but flips to my inner extrovert as soon as the action starts.

I wonder if part of it is because I’m now aware that I talk too much, and I’m always trying to reign it in. Since I pretty much always fail to do so, maybe I prefer to avoid situations where I know I’ll get too verbally energetic.

Regardless, being aware of this Jekyll-Hyde is kind of relaxing.

I love doing Office Hours with my friend TK Coleman. Truly one of the best parts of my week.

We’re trying something new tomorrow evening, and doing the season finale LIVE.

Should be fun. Register here. 8:30PM ET.

There’s a huge difference between being an employee and an owner.

It’s not about the work itself. Employees can do everything owners can do, and often more. It’s about the mindset. Employees get to maintain one of the most comfortable illusions in human nature. The illusion that there is a set of answers.

No one believes those answers are always correct. But the idea that they exist is a mental backstop that relieves a ton of stress. I might not know the answer, but it exists, and someone knows it. I can disagree with it, but it’s there.

The realization upon becoming an owner is that there is no such thing as answers that exist out there in the universe. You make them up. You make all of it up. And there’s no way to know if it’s right and no one to judge it or reward or punish you. There is only you and reality and whatever you make up to mediate and navigate between the two.

It’s unsettling. But it’s true. Everyone is making everything up.

It’s true in other areas too. Your health, for example. If you have some symptoms it’s not like somewhere some guy has the answers. Whoever you consult with, they will take in the facts they can gather as they see them, and make up what they think is going on. It’s comforting when they have more experience in making up such things than you. But at the end of the day, they are just making it up.

There are no guarantees.

To be an owner of anything – a business, your health, relationships, and life – is to realize you are making it up. Winning is getting comfortable with that fact.

I’ve never disliked Mondays. But now, I get super excited for them.

Why?

Because few things get me as jazzed as people taking leaps and making progress in their careers. That’s why I started Praxis and then Crash. And now, every Monday, a new batch of talented people are launching their hunt for a new job.

They aren’t settling for blasting resumes to faceless HR people on the other end of generic job postings. They are

• Building a unique skills profile
• Proving what they can do with real projects
• Creating tailored pitches for their favorite companies
• Turning their job-hunt into a public campaign on a reverse jobs board
• Getting great feedback, support, and interviews via their network

Make your Monday awesome.

Go check out, upvote, comment, and share the profiles of the newest batch of launchers at crash.co.

 

 

When it’s really hard.

Sign you are in the wrong place,

Or challenge to win?

I’ve been hearing a lot of smart people lately talk about “We”.

“We have too many people studying X”

“We need more people to learn Y”

There’s all kind of discussion on problems “We” face in the macro economy, and debates about which uses of violence will best help “Us” achieve some imagined state of aggregate balance.

I hate these discussions. Like the thief in Dirty Harry, I’m always asking, “Who’s ‘we’ sucka?”

It’s one thing to make an argument that more individuals would get greater returns doing X than Y, or that common ideas about economic or cultural value are off base. These are great discussions. But when they move from individuals to aggregates, and especially when they move from exploration or persuasion to policy, they descend into stupidity. Or more precisely, what Hayek called the Fatal Conceit.

The good news is nobody has to know the answer to these complicated debates. And that really is very good news. No matter how much brain power you have, there’s no way you could ever know the ‘correct’ number of individuals who should be doing X or Y. But back to the good news. You don’t need to know these answers – nobody does – as long as there’s a discovery process where they can emerge and adjust in a constant evolutionary dance.

And there is such a process!

It’s called the market. It’s anywhere people are not prevented by violence from peacefully creating, building, trading, and saving. These miraculous things called prices emerge. Prices are information wrapped in incentives. If an activity wanes in value to people, its price will decline. When its price declines, fewer people will be attracted to that activity and go do things where the price is rising due to higher value-creation potential.

Of course the market process in any snapshot of time will never reflect the impossible to define ‘perfect’ mix of things from any one individual’s subjective point of view. That’s not possible of any system and if it was we’d all be dead. It’s stupid to judge things against that standard. What it does reflect is reality. And it allows for you and everyone else to act to change reality based on your preferences always all the time, granted to you don’t do it by using violence against others.

Turns out, it produces miracles beyond our wildest dreams.

For that reason, I don’t care what some smart people with the Pretense of Knowledge think about what money should be taken by violence from whom and what other people should be forced by violence to do some activity so their imagined aggregate equilibrium can be achieved. It’s a fool’s errand to plot it out and a sociopath’s to attempt to enact it.

Focus on freeing the discovery process from violent impediments. Ceaselessly and relentlessly. Focus on building and persuading through voluntary exchange. Everything else is the lowest form of barbarism and utterly anti-humanitarian.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t map 1:1 to stress.

I’ve never been in immediate danger of starvation or exposure, so I don’t know the stress levels associated with it. I have definitely had serious health scares and death among myself and my family. And that is deeply stressful. More than anything I can imagine.

But after the physiological needs layer of the pyramid, the stress levels with all the rest do not seem to follow a pattern of getting less as you move up.

 

In fact, it’s hard to discern any pattern at all in stress across the hierarchy. After physical survival, the other needs may ascend in order of importance, but the stress at each level is fairly constant, or at least has a similar distribution over events at each layer.

At each level, you imagine the next level up is easy street. If you’re struggling to have a steady job and live in a decent neighborhood, you feel like if you only had solid income, a safe house and car, and a rainy day fund, any problems beyond that would be easy and fun to solve. The stress would disappear. But it doesn’t.

When you’re physically and economically secure and healthy, you think just having great friends or a perfect mate would end the stress. But it doesn’t.

The stress over finding meaning, working out a moral code and purpose, spending your time in ways that feel significant is real. In fact, if you’re struggling to find meaning you might find yourself longing for the simpler times when you were just struggling to make enough money to pay the bills.

I don’t think stress is ultimately a function of our external position in the world. I suspect it’s really about our ability to make peace with existence itself, whatever our level of need. It won’t fully go away by achieving any external goal or meeting any other need. It must be continuously wrestled with. If you get good at dealing with and reducing the stress of your existence at the lowest levels of the hierarchy, you will also be good at dealing with new stresses as you move up. It’s a skill that translates.

Stress is best treated as an entity all its own that needs to be confronted on its own terms, independent of other problems you’re trying to solve.

1. Leaders in Silicon Valley are on the edge of the growing, emerging markets in tech. Yet they constantly fall all over themselves to win approval from the leaders of the stagnant, dying markets of academia and journalism. It’s like the rebel nerds won, but they still want approval from the conformist cool kids who lost.
2. Twitter and social media in general seem to have a growing gap. The world I see there looks less and less like anything I experience in the actual world of flesh and blood people. This has me wondering just how much social media is completely fake. Manufactured controversy. Fake likes and comments and retweets. Fake accounts. Fake stories. There seems to be just too much divergence from the reality I see off Twitter for the one presented on Twitter to not be manufactured in significant part.

From Tweet thread.

Framework I’m thinking about:

Marketing Debt

Startups talk about tech debt and management debt (building stuff now for expedience that can’t last long term and will cost you down the road to rebuild on solid footing)

These are not bad. Or good. They are tools with costs and benefits.

Too little tech debt means you’re overbuilding and sacrificing speed for early core users.

Too much and you create an unpayable backlog and might go tech broke.

What’s Marketing Debt?

When your public reputation gets out ahead of your customer experience.

Every early good story or case study is a bit of marketing debt.

Why? Because 100% of customers not likely to get same result. That means those customers may get upset by this.

That’s a lurking reputational liability.

It’s ok for not every customer to be thrilled or get best results.

It’s needed to tell stories of great customer success.

But be aware of lurking marketing debt.

The bigger the gap between your marketing customer story and your average customer experience, the greater the marketing debt.

If you avoid any marketing debt at all, you’d tell no stories or only those of you’re least happy customers. That way no one would experience anything below your marketing.

But that’s not accurate or fair and great potential customers may not try.

If you go nuts and way overhype a few customers you brute forced to success in a non-repeatable way and hide the less dramatic stories, you’re racking up a backlog of new customers bound to crap on your reputation later for under-delivering.

So be mindful in your marketing how big a gap it creates (thus how big a liability) between expected and average customer experience.

Be mindful which stories to tell.

Be mindful what kind of customers to pick.

And be mindful of the little things like phrasing. “One customer even achieved X!” Accrues less marketing debt than “Use the product and achieve X”