Check out this article on Medium and let me know what you think.

I’m excited to push the future of career launch.

View at Medium.com

Nothing on my mind today but the awesome batch of talent on Crash.co seeking their first professional jobs.

Go help them out!

That’s my mantra for this year.

On New Year’s Day I took a long, quiet walk around my neighborhood. Mindlessly looking at the buds on the leafless trees, a phrase kept running through my head. ‘Stay above the fray.’ I wasn’t thinking about any particular fray or experiencing any particular stress at the time. Still, the thought was simple and settling.

I decided to make it my phrase for 2019. Something personal (well, at least until I blogged about it today) I come back to from time to time to keep me from getting tangled in energy-sucking lose-lose situations.

It’s been freeing and effective. I’m not prone to drama as is, but the preponderance of potential frays I’ve encountered this year is disproportionately profuse. (Perhaps that last word was a preposterous alliterative indulgence).

Humans want to be on the side of right. We want to stand for justice. But most of the time, we actually don’t. I mean, we want to want to, and want to not be passive in the face of bad stuff, but in most cases we aren’t willing to bear real costs for a cause. That’s nothing to feel guilty about. If I were Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting, this is the part where I’d give you a big hug and say, “Scarcity is not your fault.”

The worst thing to do in the midst of constrained ability to care is pretend. Even worse is to play at caring when you lack clarity on whether any of the sides are right, let alone the energy to pay a price for one or the other.

It’s not so much the particular battle at hand, but the fray itself that’s a danger. The belief in the need to enter every fray is a vortex that reduces you to only what your willpower can sustain. That’s pretty small compared to what you can be at your best, when incentive structures are aligned with interests to maximize your potential even though you’re not a saint.

When my Spidey-sense tingles and I smell a fray, I repeat my New Year’s Day phrase. Stay above the fray. Stay above the fray. It kills the boil in my blood and brings me back to my better self.

I don’t want to descend into frays. I want to ascend to my own definition of progress. In the process, I have to overcome challenges, some of which resemble battles and incur costs. But those are my battles on my chosen path. They’re not frays at large that pull me in. Staying above the fray isn’t about running away from the good fight. It’s recognizing that most fights aren’t good, even if some of the people in them are.

My wife asked me at dinner what I thought the difference is between a visionary and a crazy person.

The best I could think of on the spot was how useful the stuff they do is to other people.

Whenever I’m thinking of doing something that exposes me to more risk, I think back to previous risky decisions I’ve made.

What I’ve found so far is that I have never once regretted any of the decisions I made that involved taking on more risk. I have regretted some decisions that involved taking on less risk.

It’s instructive for me. I haven’t reached my risk tolerance maximum. I’m more likely to err in the other direction, which is enough to push me over the edge towards the riskier move most of the time.

I get why VCs always say they care less about the bets they made that flopped than the bets they didn’t make that succeeded.

I’ve been daily blogging for a long time, with a few reprieves here and there. What amazes me is no matter how long I’ve been doing it, I still enter phases where it’s hard but for totally different reasons than the previous struggle phase.

You get through one struggle and it’s easy. Then a new one comes and you smash through that one keyboard-pounding day at a time and it’s easy again. Rinse, repeat.

The current phase is challenging for a few reasons:

1. I’m on Pacific Time this summer, and no matter how early I get up, I start the day behind a slew of emails and messages from ET people. I tend to the urgent ones and before long the day is in full swing, I have meetings, and I’ve got to find a slice of time and mental space to blog smack in the middle of it.
2. I’m doing a lot of writing and idea working for Crash right now. Mental energy going into decks, articles, emails, and other writing-like work means I have little left over for writing a daily blog post.
3. I’m Tweeting a lot more. This means ideas get an immediate outlet in a Tweet or Tweetstorm, and the blog is left with less to work with.

Still, every day I make myself sit down and hammer out a post, I walk away feeling like I added to my personal value by 0.001%. Whatever else happened that day, I’m not stagnating, I’m compounding my worth. Whatever else I experiment with, I’m not quitting or bailing on my commitment to daily blogging. It’s a damn good feeling.

A big difference between being an implementer or solo driver and being a leader pitching and rallying others around a vision is how many steps need to be skipped in the story.

When you’re selling an idea, you need to cover the top level stuff really quickly. Your narrative needs as few points as possible. This means you’ve got to describe your history and process in a way that’s really hard for the implementer inside you.

Say I’m working on a pitch deck. I want to show what our company has done so far. I get one slide to show traction, so I display numbers from our beta period and our live period. The story is a simple A to B journey. We got a little something with a beta, and moved to a launch and got a little more. It makes sense.

But the implementer’s left eye twitches on this slide. They want 10 slides. Because really, we started with plan A, got it halfway there, than altered to plan A2, making our previous success measures irrelevant. A2 moved to B, then we switched to C but it was a gradual morph from BC with no clear change point. After all this shifting and changing and measuring different stuff, we got to D, our current product and way of measuring it.

But A-A2-B-BC-C-D isn’t a vision. It’s a treatise with footnotes and bibliographies. No one but you understands or cares, even though the process was necessary from an implementation standpoint and what you learned going through it is valuable.

To sell your vision, you’ve got to simplify the past and fit it into the present paradigm. You collapse everything before point D into one and call it A, apply your current measures to it, and make point D your point B. Everyone gets it. You started at A and did such and such numbers, moved into B and are doing such and such numbers.

You have to make a bigger leap in your story than you made in your experience. And you can’t take time to explain that leap. “You see, what A really means is that we did this and this and this” is too much. Let it go. A contains a whole universe of lived experience, but it’s just a small point in your narrative and vision. Let the details die. You can always revive them in your 700 page biography later.

The people following your pitch don’t care about everything that went into A or they take it as a given that A is shorthand for A-A2-B-BC-C.

There are so many things you can do when trying to build a product and company.

It’s easy to really focus on some key metrics and go all in trying to get those up. This isn’t bad, but early on you never really know for sure the metrics that matter are the metrics that matter. There’s a lot of fuzzy in-between.

What to fill it with?

Fun.

If in doubt, do the thing that customers find more fun. Do the thing that team members find more fun. Do the thing that you find more fun.

Having fun adds energy and exploration and determination. Not having fun, you can only get so far on sheer willpower.

Life naturally falls into segments. Personal and professional, hobbies and vocations, intellectual and practical, etc.

These are useful mental categories. Maybe not so useful to divide them when it comes to action. Early on in my life, they were all bolstered by being mostly separate. The further I go, the more fruit I get from breaking the barriers and letting them talk and bleed into one another.

I don’t think melding to the point of undifferentiation makes sense. Action becomes too hard. But refusing to dice up actions and units of time expenditure into wholly one or wholly the other seems to be an aid to energy and ideas for me.

I’ll have to think more about why de-segmenting seems like a bad idea early, but staying fragmented seems like a bad idea later in life.

Read the full thread.

Massive challenge for young people trying to find/win their first career job.

-jobs are badly described so they don't know what's a fit
-they have no way of signaling the right stuff to the right people

we're trying to solve that with Crash

— Isaac M. Morehouse (@isaacmorehouse) July 7, 2019

Years ago TK Coleman told me something like, “The universe will expand to accommodate your dreams.”

It’s a great quote. It’s easy to not give yourself permission to have big dreams because you don’t see any room for them in the universe. The quote reminds that it doesn’t work that way. The universe is literally the sum of people’s dreams. Dream first, expand the universe by bringing it to life.

But something else happens. Dreams are a way of adding substance to a feeling or desire. Your gut has a longing, and your mind adds flesh to the bones by creating a tangible plan, product, or goal around that longing. That’s a dream. But it’s always limited by the information you have access to. A kid dreams of being a firefighter. They have very little info about ways to enact desires in the world as an adult. They desire adventure, risk, heroism, proximity to powerful machines, or cool costumes. Given their limited info, those desires are best expressed through the dream of firefighting. As their info expands through life, they realize that was a limited version of living out those same desires. Maybe they realize founding a company or making movies does it even better.

As your universe expands based on pursuit of your dreams, your information expands. When you information expands, the ways to enact your desires into dreams also expands. In other words, the targets change.

This can be difficult. Changing dreams may cause those around you to think you’ve given up, sold out, or failed. But you can’t let your past control your future. Your 8 or 18 year old self with limited info had different ways to pursue the same desires. Why should that self dictate your present and future self with expanded info?

Every plot twist seems out of character at first, but that’s just because you’re in the middle of the story. Step back and view the entire arc and you can identify the driving force consistent throughout. Michael Jordan quit basketball and ruined his story. Then he came back and revealed that it was all part of a unifying thread and his story is better because of it.

Don’t be afraid of dreams too big for the current universe. It will expand. And don’t be afraid to adjust your dreams based on your new universe. You should expand too.

Statements mean nothing

Compared to revelations

From actions taken

We had a question from an Office Hours listener about why Crash was created as a separate entity than Praxis. (For those who don’t know, I started the Praxis apprenticeship program 6 years ago, and created the Crash career-launch platform with some Praxis team-members about 6 months ago).

It’s a great question, and one I don’t think I’ve ever formally answered all in one place. Many, many conversations with both teams, investors, and my kitchen cabinet throughout the process, but never a full explanation. As I thought about how I would answer on the podcast, I realized there’s a lot there and it might be worth organizing my thoughts and writing it out.

The Origin

We built Praxis from nothing with no team and no money in 2013 to a kickass, growing, profitable, world-class team, highly effective elite program in five years. Every month, every year as we grew and improved all aspects of the program and company, I looked for ways to take the core of what works so well for Praxians and bring it to millions. Starting about three years in, every six months or so we’d have a little brainstorm retreat for a weekend and play around with different models that could deliver the Praxis special sauce to orders of magnitude more people. We came close, but never quite found a model that made sense. We kept on a strong linear growth path with Praxis, but I couldn’t stop thinking about variations on the model that could be lighter touch but broader reach.

In 2018, I began talking with a world-class tech investor who was impressed with what we’d built. We had some great conversations and he asked me really big, challenging questions about growth potential of the Praxis approach and ideas. I had mostly bootstrapped a non-tech business, he had built and invested in venture-backed tech businesses. But he saw something in our point of view on education and career, and I saw something that had been missing from my other attempts in his view on networks, scale, and the process of building something really big. Our conversations and the books he recommended got me out of my own head just enough to inspire a model I thought could be huge, and one that made more sense as a venture-backed tech play than our current self-funded low-tech growth model. (It took me some time, because I am heavily biased against raising venture capital. I think the default for entrepreneurs should be not to do it, and only rare exceptions with business models and teams that really fit the model should. But that’s another article for another day).

I decided to go for it and pitch him and several other investors on building a career launch platform out of the Praxis components. It was an interesting fundraising process. Some investors were incredibly impressed with what we’d built with Praxis, others didn’t get how it fit with what we were trying to build with the platform. I’d try to focus entirely on the platform and still all the questions would be about the apprenticeship. It wasn’t very clear to them what I was building, and whether it really was a tech platform or some tweaks to an apprenticeship. It probably would’ve been easier to raise for one or the other, but I told an integrated story of how this was the next phase of Praxis and a way to morph it into a platform. Despite the lack of total clarity, we raised a great round from awesome investors.

We hired our lead engineer (actually before we closed the round, because I like risk and I like to put myself into must-win situations) and got to work in late 2018 mapping out this platform. It was going to be part of Praxis and branded and run as such.

It didn’t take long to realize that this was a problem. A single company, brand, and team for two very different processes and approaches caused a lot of stress and confusion. This was a really, really hard time. I did a lot of soul-searching, long walks, and many sleepless nights trying to figure out how to do this. It led to a separate name, brand, identity, and team. I realized to maximize the success of the Praxis program, which has so much more of the world to conquer, and the Crash platform which is barely finding its place, they needed to live independent (though very collaborative) lives.

Here are some of the reasons it made sense to split them.

Tech vs. Non-Tech

Building a non-tech company is very different than building a tech company (I’m early in learning this). The processes, the goals, the workflow, the amount and rate of change, and the importance in level of detail are totally different. In non-tech, you can overcome weaknesses with additional elbow grease and human touch. You can live with them for a while, patch over them, and figure out a solution. It’s not sustainable long-term but necessary. In tech, product or model or market weaknesses will kill you quick so it’s all about finding them ASAP and hunting them down and destroying them. In non-tech you don’t need answers immediately. In tech you do. This creates two very different team styles internally and it’s hard to do both at once.

Pre vs Post Product-Market Fit

Startup people talk about a company achieving Product-Market Fit. It’s a fancy way of saying the company knows what the hell it’s doing. When you have PMF, you know who your customer is, what problem you solve for them, how you solve it, and how you make money in the process. Most startups spend years trying to dial in PMF before they can start to really grow. Praxis has PMF. Crash was in search of it.

A pre-PMF company operates very differently than a post-PMF company. Pre-PMF is all about testing hypothesis as quickly as possible. With Crash, we knew the high level vision and philosophy. We knew the goals. And we knew some of the necessary parts – that “secret sauce” of helping people launch careers we learned in the Praxis trenches. But we didn’t yet know exactly who the smallest starting market was, what the initial MVP would be and which smallest bite of the problem we would solve first. It’s all about whittling down the unknowns until they stop outnumbering the knowns. Praxis is all about building on the knowns and searching for new unknowns.

When we split off a small chunk of the Praxis team into a “Skunkworks” for the platform, it was immediately clear that the pace we needed wasn’t quite there. We took too much of the Praxis approach with us. Likewise, our relatively messy fast-pace was bleeding into the Praxis team and making them feel like they needed to operate like a development team in a sprint.

Though there’s overlap in product and market, we just weren’t sure enough how much and where and how it would work. We needed the freedom for both entities to be their own.

Brand and Customer Confusion

Crash needed to be totally free to change on a dime. We might offer one thing or try one product for a week or two, then immediately kill it and try a totally different thing. Praxis customers know what they are there for. An intensive bootcamp and apprenticeship. If they kept seeing new Praxis products and approaches go live, then die, they’d start to wonder what the hell they got into. They’d feel like guinea pigs rather than customers. Crash needed guinea pigs, so we did and do often go to the awesome Praxian network and ask them if they want to help us test some stuff, but it’s clear this is a new thing we’re exploring with Crash and not a part of their Praxis experience.

Praxis has made a dent in the universe. It’s still got a long way to go to continue to blow up the status quo and launch more careers, but we have no interest in curbing or slowing it’s kickassery so that this platform can poke around and test stuff out. We don’t want to drag Praxis down with any experiments that fail on Crash, and we don’t want people who aren’t in the market for an apprenticeship to overlook the platform because they confuse the two.

What’s in a Name?

One investor I talked to had an interesting objection to my pitch. He said Praxis is the name given to this business I built over half a decade. It won’t do to just port it over to this new thing I’m trying to create. The Praxis name came to me all at once with the idea. It’s baked into the fabric of the company. It is the philosophy and the identity. There’s magical power in it. To borrow that name would be kinda like slapping your first kid’s name on your second kid.

He told me that a company name has power. It sends a signal into the world. It’s a rallying point for the team, like a flag on a battlefield. It’s a symbolic act to name something, and you only get so many goes at it. To casually slap an existing name with its five years of blood and sweat and hard won success onto a new idea is selling both short.

I was kinda pissed at him at first. I love the name Praxis. I love the logo. I love everything about it. But after he told me, I couldn’t sleep. I knew he was right. We needed a new name for a new platform. The naming process for Praxis was an out of the blue inspiration that came to me after ten years of my subconscious playing with ideas. It was not deliberate. The Crash naming process was a shitton of deliberate work. That’s an entire article itself, suffice to say that it was brutal and necessary. Coming out with a new name, logo, and brand identity was a big symbolic moment and it mattered.

T-Shirts

I love T-shirts and why settle for one cool company T when you can have two? ;-)

 

This is a long post. But this is only scratching the surface when it comes to everything that went into this grueling process. It probably sounds totally dramatic and overblown to an outsider. But ask anyone on the team who helped forge Praxis from nothing, who endured mockery and scolding and predictions of failure, who fought to introduce the world to a better approach than bloated college bureaucracy, who poured themselves into changing the lives of our first few hundred customers. The process of birthing something new out of your work, then splitting in two is a big deal.

It wasn’t easy, but it was good. Both teams are amazing, empowered, and excited about two great paths to two great futures. We fight side by side like siblings, we share a common origin and philosophy, and we work to spur each other on in our respective approaches.

Oh and all you haters? Buckle up. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Hirers: you really suck at making your jobs appeal to the right people.

Case in point, I saw an entry level posting: “We want someone passionate about conversion rate optimization”.

Wtf.

No entry level person knows what that is, let alone feels passion for it. That’s like, “Passion for stacking bricks”.

No. Paint a picture! You’re building a cathedral!

No one sees themselves in that description. Especially not the best people. Describe THEM, not the role.

Let’s give it a shot…Same job: “Are you the type to play around with likes and comments to get your video to move up the YouTube recommended videos feed? Did you conspire with friends to get more upvotes on your Mario Maker levels? We want YOU to help us build an awesome company!”

The wrong people will not be into it. The right people will say, “Hey, that sounds like me!” They don’t care about conversion rates. But they do care about doing stuff they’re good at and enjoy, which very well may be conversion rate optimization…help them see that!

Speak to THEM about THEM and what you want about THEM. Not a stupid list of “Must have X degree. Y years experience” and other boring stuff.

Would you go on the dating market the way you try to appeal to new hires? I hope not.

PS – We’re working on both sides of the market at Crash. ‘Cause let’s face it, seekers also suck at showing their skills in relevant ways. Let’s make the job-finding process awesome!

From a Tweetstorm.