Building the Crash career launch platform is a lot of fun. It’s also super hard.

The hardest part isn’t so much figuring out what to build to solve users pain points and help them launch careers, though that is a challenge. The hardest part isn’t building the things we come up with either (especially for me, since the engineering team does most of that;-).

The hardest part is committing to NOT build a whole bunch of awesome fun stuff we want to make and that some customers would probably really like.

Choosing those “not yet” items, and sticking to the stuff we know we need more is way harder than you’d think. None of the trade-offs are clear cut. Lack of a super slick and sexy new feature might not impede customers from accomplishing their goals, while a really boring and tiny bug might. And in most cases, you won’t know if either do or don’t!

Sure, you try to be informed by the data, but early on, data is fairly thin, and choosing what to measure, how to measure, and to put in the time to create the ability to measure is not a data based decision, but a point of view, philosophy, gut decision. Plus data is useless without a theoretical lens through which to interpret it.

So you have to do a lot of thinking. Then clinch your teeth and say no to all the awesome stuff you want (and may even need…but who knows?)

I don’t imagine this gets any easier with more resources. It just levels up the awesomeness of the stuff you have to say no to.

Scarcity is a pain in the ass. It’s also the sole source of creative innovation, so there’s that.

I need a minimum level of disorganized mess to get meaningful results.

It’s hard to type that. I don’t want it to be true. I hate messes, disorganization, tons of balls in the air. I like minimal, clean, organized, prioritized, listed, ranked stuff. “Delete, Shred, Destroy” is one of my mottoes.

The problem with my compulsive organization and integration habits is they kill progress if they go too far. When I have a flurry of ideas, it builds up productive pressure that seeks an outlet. If I immediately record, organize, de-duplicate, list, schedule, and assign every idea, the pressure is relieved. It’s necessary to translate the ideas into something more legible and actionable, but if I do it too well there’s no pressure left to push me to dive in. Making a list can become a substitute for completing the items on it.

I’m trying to reign in my drive to organize every impulse. I need some ideas not written down. Some processes not documented. Some conflicting hypothesis unresolved. I need to create the space for my subconscious to do some of its magic, and not let my lists suck all the juice from the creative act.

I can only tolerate a very small amount of messiness. But I need at least some minimum level to keep the pressure high enough to produce.

My maximum mess threshold is near zero (this very moment, I’m adjusting my phone on my desk to be exactly parallel to my laptop because the chaos of it being askew was clouding my ability to write peacefully). But my minimum mess threshold is greater than zero.

View at Medium.com

 

In startups, product-market fit (PMF) means you are in a good market with a product that can satisfy it. Early companies are mostly searching for PMF, adjusting both their product and the market they attempt to serve to find it. Once found, it’s all about pouring on growth gasoline, but until you do, investing in growth activities is futile.

It’s easy to think about finding a good product but easy to overlook identifying a good market. Your solution may be highly valued and easy to sell in one market, while the exact same solution may be worthless in another.

The concept of PMF can be applied to your early career development too. You are your own startup. It’s easy to think about investing in professional growth, but unless you have PMF this will mostly be a waste of resources. You’ve got to do some testing and exploration, learn the problems various markets have, and work on you (the product) to find out how to solve them.

A great product can only be maximized in a great market. So if you are amazing at detailed analytics and data visualization (good product), but working in a sandwich shop or trying to get hired to do landscaping, you don’t have PMF. You’re in a market that’s too small or not a fit for your product. And when you don’t have PMF you don’t really grow.

This is why moving to a new city or exploring unknown industries is so important early on. This is why getting out of the classroom and discovering what kinds of markets for your skills exist is so crucial. Most young people have nothing resembling a clue as to what markets exist or what skills are valued to what degree in each.

What’s crazy is that right now, this very day, there is almost assuredly somewhere someone who values the skills you already have. Things you think not that professionally useful are highly sought somewhere. Sure, the product you have can always be improved, but even as is there is a market for it. The introduction to and exploration of the markets out there is totally absent in the education system. Most people spend the first two decades of their life completely outside of any useful info about markets.

Just as with a startup, finding PMF is a process of test and iterate. You can’t just think about it and then emerge with perfect PMF. You don’t need to know exactly what skills you should invest in and which market to focus on right away. You just need a rough starting point and a process of trial-error-feedback-adjustment to dial it in.

Not all skills are equally valued in every market. Not all markets are equally valuable. Where your PMF is, there will be your growth.

Someone asked me if they should still bust their butt and go beyond the call of duty at their job. It was their last week and they were never going to work with these people or in this industry again. What’s the point?

I told them I thought they had it backwards. You don’t go above and beyond to invest in the people around you, hoping it brings a return. You go above and beyond to invest in yourself, knowing it will.

Boogie Cousins got picked up by the Golden State Warriors on a one-year deal at a bargain price. He’d suffered a bad injury, so this was his year to rehab and show the market he’s still got value. It’s pretty clear he won’t be back at Golden State after this year, and nobody expected he would going in. Boogie missed half the regular season rehabbing, then got injured again and is currently sitting out in the playoffs. His future depends entirely on his body getting healthy and his ability to prove it on the court. It would be easy for him to check out on the team on focus on his individual future. He gave them the minutes they expected and played well.

But instead, he’s cheerleading, he’s hyping, he’s standing by his team and fully engaging in the huddle, locker room, and off the court. He’s being a great teammate. The business return to him for this is negligible. But you can see the difference in a guy who takes personal pride in making a team better, whether he’s on the court or not, and one who checks out. They do better. They have more fun. He’s investing in himself.

When you join a company, team, or project, you don’t owe them anything but the minimum you agreed to. But you owe yourself the best investment of your time and energy. Building social capital isn’t just about returns from others. It’s also about returns from within.

Try busting butt and being the best person in the world to work with. Then tell me you don’t feel more awesome, confident, and content. Tell me you gain more from doing the minimum. I won’t believe you because I know it’s not true.

Don’t go out of your way to help others out of altruism. There’s never enough of that to muster. Do it as an investment in your own personal pride and self-respect.

Some people think they’re getting ripped off if they do more work than required. I think you’re ripping yourself off if you don’t.

I used to believe that making a big impact on the world required a movement. I thought you had to get a bunch of people to believe certain things, and get those people to get more people and so on.

I don’t like movements anymore. In fact, I like the opposite of movements.

Think about the iPhone, or Apple in general. No movement existed or was needed to make them change the way the world interacts with technology. Sure, there are pockets of True Believer Apple fans, but what actually moves the market isn’t a Movement, but a great product. They just solve a problem and create value for individual customers. Really well.

Wal-Mart’s an even better example. There are no fanboys or fangirls. In fact, there are many movements that exist for the sole purpose of disparaging or destroying Wal-Mart. Yet Wal-Mart is here, and has done more to raise the standard of living across America than every movement combined. They just solve a problem and create value for individual customers. Really well.

Movements are exhausting, and inevitably degrade to inward-looking, ingrown, inbred, inner-circle posturing and purging. They are self-righteous and generally annoying.

Things that actually move the world in a positive direction relentlessly focus on making something that makes someone’s life better every day, offering it to them to accept or refuse, and adjusting to what people choose.

I want to create products and experiences that make people’s lives better, as evidenced by the fact that they willingly part with their resources to obtain it, whether or not they know what they are a part of philosophically.

Adam Smith’s great insight was that we didn’t get our meat from the benevolence of the butcher, but by his regard to his self-interest. Yet lover and haters of Smith alike spend so much time appealing to benevolence, instead of creating stuff that makes it in our self-interest to engage.

I don’t want fans. I want customers. I want to make total stranger’s lives better, not just rally a mob.

I don’t want a movement, I want to move the world.

Well yesterday I couldn’t resist writing a Steph Curry based post. Steph made me do it again today.

He entered last night’s game with a bashed up finger and an ultra thin bench. Everyone rose to the occasion. Except him. He went scoreless in the first half. This has never happened. Not in this era anyway.

Still, his team managed to keep them neck and neck. His third quarter was OK. He got off a few shots. But his team also got outplayed and fell behind. Steph had 10 points.

Then, in the final five minutes of the game, worn down, exhausted, embarrassed, doubted, hurt, and in foul trouble, Steph took over the game and single-handedly outscored the whole Rockets team. He finished with 33 points. Every single one in the second half. 23 in the fourth quarter. 16 in the final few minutes.

That thing I wrote about moments? Yeah, it was that. It was historically that.

This morning, I watched three videos and read eight articles recapping the game. I watched every post game press conference from every player. I watched highlights. Several times.

When you witness greatness, you take it in. Like Kobe Bryant’s final career game, this was 100% heart and will. The body was unwilling, but the mind was stronger. It wasn’t just basketball, it was a celebration of the human spirit.

The Warriors didn’t hide the fact that this win, without two all-star starters, was sweeter than most. Every one of them said the same thing: it was so good because it was so hard.

Curry’s dad texted him to the same effect after a brutal, nail-biting game 5 where Steph again pulled himself out of a slump at the last minute to clinch it. Dell Curry said, “You wouldn’t enjoy it if it wasn’t so hard.”

Damn. If that doesn’t inspire you. This is so, so hard. Trying to be great is brutal. You don’t get the calls, you don’t get the breaks, you get all the flak and criticism, you get everyone’s best game and worst wishes. You must earn every single inch. And it is not easy.

And that is precisely where the love comes in. The hard moments mean greatness is at your doorstep.

Forget the stat sheet. It can’t reveal moments. And moments are all that matter.

Steph Curry has struggled since dislocating his finger. He’s put up decent points on terrible shooting percentages. That’s what the stats show. Watching the games unfold shows something even more troubling. Lapses on defense, missed free throws, open shots rushed or delayed in a rhythm-less way. Steph has looked lost. Like someone who knows something is off, but not exactly what or why.

Then the moment happened. The first really big moment of this series. King Killer Kevin Durant went down.

The Warriors had blown a 20-point lead and were trading buckets, mostly through back and forth isos, a style that favors the Rockets as a team and Durant as an individual. A style that hurts the Warriors and has made them look out of sync this series. Still, Durant has been the only answer for the Rockets, whether he’s risen up to compensate for Golden State’s struggles or caused them is hard to say. What’s not hard to say is that KD has been dominant.

He went down. With the worst bench in the NBA, an ice cold pair of Splash Bros, and Draymond Green flirting with foul trouble, Oracle Arena’s collective heart stopped.

Then Steph was Steph.

The moment came, and he rose to it like a true champion. Battered, injured, tired, embarrassed, questioned, and statistically terrible. None of that mattered. That’s all non-moment stuff. In the moment, he took over, turned the Warriors into a quick, sly, gritty, fast-striking, fun-filled force that just won’t die. You could see the change immediately. Golden State wasn’t just good, they were fun again. They were free again. Steph did that.

Game stats, series stats, pundits and breakdowns don’t matter. If you watched the moment unfold, in all the tense context of the game and series, and you watched Steph step up and own the moment while everyone else waited to see what would happen, you saw greatness.

Stats don’t matter. Moments matter.

Venkatesh Rao has been writing for some time against what he calls Waldenponding, a righteous disconnect from the stream of tech-enabled media and info. Everyone seems to agree that we’re too keyed in to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, the news, or screens generally. And there’s truth to it.

It is easy to get hooked on the dopamine hit of every like or retweet, or the mind-candy of life by scroll. It’s easy to be so tuned in to the content of gurus and pundits and pop culture that you don’t actually produce anything.

To combat this, some people unplug and go down their productivity hole. This can be great. But it can be dangerous. I’ve talked to some people working on products and companies who are so deep in their weeds, and so disconnected from the stream of commerce and culture, that they have no idea how uninteresting their thing is to their would-be customers.

The old startup advice, “Get out of the office and connect with customers” today means mostly jumping in the relevant social streams. Don’t get stuck Waldenponding. Once you emerge from the basement with your creation, you may find the problem you went down there to solve is no longer relevant to the world. Oops.

So you need to stay in the stream.

But you can’t let the stream do all the work. You can’t just float wherever it goes. You need it’s feedback, connection to the broader world and its needs, but you can easily get stuck in a swirling eddie of do-nothingism if you don’t have a paddle and a point of view. You’ve got to be going somewhere specific. Then the currents can provide meaningful info and guidance.

Don’t unplug. But don’t float.

When you’re young and early in your career, the cost of eccentricity is high. You can’t afford to be too weird in your habits and behaviors. You have to be willing to say yes to things others value more than you, and adapt to your environs if you want to achieve bigger goals.

Later in life and career, you can’t afford to not be a little eccentric. You’ve got to be comfy saying no to other people’s normal habits and behaviors and stick to your own odd routines. Your tolerance for low value adaptation should be low.

My goal is to become so successful that I can afford to be extremely weird and idiosyncratic. Every day, as long as I’m getting a little more valuable, I can get away with a little more weirdness.

A lot.

Words are like magic. If properly wielded, they confer the ability to own a thing.

I didn’t put a lot of thought into company names, even after creating Praxis. The name Praxis came to me all of a piece with the idea for the company. It was a package deal in one of the handful of, weird, almost mystical experiences I’ve had in my life. I knew what it means and I knew it was what I was naming the company. I couldn’t imagine entertaining any other name. It just wouldn’t fit.

But it doesn’t always happen this way. When we decided to split off a new entity from Praxis to pursue a different product and strategy, the name Praxis didn’t work. The entities needed to be different, free to pursue their own growth strategies without brand confusion.

I didn’t see this at first. Venture capitalist James Currier at NFX did. His article on the power and importance of a company name did the trick. Like all the best material, I knew it was true as soon as I started to read it – even though I wished it wasn’t at the time.

After fully committing to a new name for this new venture, it got surprisingly hard. In the past, names had chosen me. But now I had to choose a name. It felt clunky and forced. But I’ve done daily blogging for years, so I know that creation sometimes feels uninspired. I know the best stuff doesn’t always come from the muses, but from will and persistence.

We set about a process of collecting name ideas. Internally, the team came up with 50 or 60 contenders. I came up with another 80 myself. Then we tried using an online service called Squadhelp for more. All in all, I had a list of 350 name ideas. I began whittling it down day after day. I got to my top 30. I sent those around, discussed with staff, adjusted some more, and got to about 20. Some of them were sorta kinda close to ‘Crash’, but it was not on the list.

Several nights I lay in bed unable to sleep as names ran through my head. I had a notepad by my bed to write them down if I thought they were good. Often in the morning, I was surprised by how stupid some of them were, when in a dreamlike state I thought they were the bees knees.

One night at about 3:30 AM, I woke up with a bunch of ideas. Dash, smash, board, dashboard, crashboard, careercrash, crash. I wrote them all down and fell back asleep.

The next morning I looked at the list and really liked it. There was something here. I worked it over several times, played with the words and their uses and meanings, bounced it off a few more people, and finally decided that Crash was perfect.

Like Aslan in Narnia, it’s not safe, but it’s good. Perfect.

Here’s a few thoughts I jotted for the team on the name:

Let me quickly share a few thoughts on why I love the name Crash, despite it’s sort of edgy connotation with an accident or crash and burn!

Practically speaking, I love that it’s one syllable, a known word with known and easy spelling, no other known companies using it, it’s got both verb and noun useability, and it’s packed with action and makes you pause, it sounds nothing like any other boring ass education organization with names that come right off motivational posters. And stuffy weirdos will always be annoyed by it’s usage in a positive sense!

Spiritually speaking, I definitely like the idea of “crashing the party” or “crashing obstacles”, or anything with some kind of momentum or elevation.

Crash has a somewhat violent connotation.  Good. No one said it would be easy! We want to take that energy and channel it to positive progress.  Radical and practical. A Crash is the violent collision of things, resulting in a reformulation. That’s what real learning looks like.  That’s what real progress and change look like. To come alive, you’ve got to break some molds and expectations and assumptions.

We’ve been using the career launch metaphor – discover your interests, build your signal, launch your career – which can be sort of awkward to combine the ideas of crash and launch, but somehow I think it works.

“Crash course” is the fastest way to get the most important stuff needed to do a new activity.  It implies action over perfection.

A party crasher is someone who comes in to a stodgy, formal affair, ignores the stuffy dress code and has a good time on their own terms.  Everyone is drawn to and wants to hang around the party crasher because he’s more interesting than the suits on the guest list.

In basketball, you “crash the boards”, aka fight for rebounds.  It’s a gritty, blue-collar kind of activity that is crucial to the game yet less flashy than scoring.  Sort of a pride in the rough and tumble down in the trenches roll up your sleeves work.

Obstacles can be maneuvered around or submitted to – “I think college is a waste, but I HAVE to do it” – or they can be crashed through!  “Screw these assumptions! I’m going to blow the status quo to bits!”

That might help convey the way I think about it and why I love the name!

So we’re all in now. And it did have a kind of transformative power, at least for me. The insight and inspiration for Crash emerged from what we built with Praxis. But it didn’t take on it’s true form and possibility until we gave it a name.

No, the name isn’t the thing to worry about when you start a company. Solving a real problem is. Getting customers is. But a name isn’t unimportant either. If you’re long term goals are ambitious, you’ll need a name that can handle it.

The best stuff comes from unexpected bursts of inspiration. Lightning strikes.

But what separates all the bursts that fizzle into those that set the world ablaze? The conditions of the environment when the lightning strikes.

You’ve got to create the conditions for a brush fire. You’ve got to ready the tinder and kindling and forests. This is boring, tedious, inglorious, and doesn’t have much to show unless and until the lightning strikes. It’s the daily discipline, but without it, the lightning strike breaks a tree or two and no one remembers. But with daily discipline, the lucky strike leads to an inferno that forever alters the landscape of the world. In fact, if conditions are good enough, lighting may not be needed at all. A few good days intense sunshine could do the trick.

This belabored metaphor is all to say that creativity requires inspiration. But inspiration without discipline is useless, even destructive.

Get to work. Don’t worry about inspiration. Control the conditions.

Just a kid from Kalamazoo.

Never tell me what I can’t do.

Didn’t really have a normal dad.

Don’t ever say I had it bad.

Hard and good are synonyms to me.

And easy is the antonym of free.

Don’t pick the other side if you bet.

I haven’t even started yet.

The hardest things are often the best things.

Parenting is the hardest thing in my life. It’s a series of new situations that require new modes of thinking, always in moments where you are too pressed for time to do much thinking. So they are a test of instincts and habits. Whatever gut reaction comes out of you is usually the best you can do in the moment.

This puts enormous pressure on out of the moment self work. You can’t wait until situations arise to deal with them (my typical MO) if you want a high probability of a good outcome. Most situations are so new there’s no telling what your instinctive response will be, what recesses of your brain it came from, or whether it’s what you’d have chosen given time to reflect.

So the best parenting work is prep work. You’ve got to level up your habits so your gut reaction in the moment is the one you want. This is why subsequent children are easier than the first.

Creativity is tiring. Parenting demands lots of it. (Kid sleep schedules are also tiring. Add exhaustion to the pile of sub optimal decision conditions.) The easy solution is usually less effective than the creative solution. This is where side constraints are helpful. If you commit to abstain from certain actions, it forces you to get very creative with the options left on the table.

Of all the things I do, parenting is the one I’m the least confident of my mastery in.

It’s also the deepest and most interesting.

Nebraska is the only good album by Bruce Springsteen. But that’s not the point of this post. This post is about death.

For something good to happen, something has to die. Harsh but true.

When you get married, your single self dies. When you become a parent, your childless self dies. When you move into the future, the present dies to the past. Every time.

We see death every day in plants and animals and seasons. Its cyclical nature and preponderance to create something new seem obvious. But it’s harder to see the same process at work in our human lives. We associate death with, well, death. Really, we should associate it with life. For something new to be born, something must die.

This principle is so unavoidable and fundamental that every culture has myths and rituals mimicking it. Apparently, despite its universality and inescapability, we fear and misunderstand it so much that we need to make strange, regular recreations of this principle of nature just so we don’t forget or miss the lessons.

The ancient idea of sacrifices is the crudest and most obvious version, but all cultures are full of less extreme and literal representations of the death-to-life cycle. I remember hearing about a ritual among some African tribes, where adolescents were awakened in the night by masked parents, dragged into the woods, and buried alive. To enter adulthood, they had to dig out of the grave and find their way back to the village.

If you can put aside the oddness and cruelty of the ritual, it’s pretty profound. Adulthood is a kind of death. The ideas, beliefs, habits, frameworks, assumptions, and actions of a child are wonderful. And they must die. If you continue to see the world and the people in it as mostly built around you, owing and freely giving you protection and sustenance, the world will destroy you. If not in body, in spirit. An adult living like a dependent child is a soul-dead existence. To be fully alive as an adult, the child in you has to die.

The cold shock of masked people carrying you off to the woods, burying you, and leaving you to die is quite the metaphor. (The more intense rituals seem to blur the line between literal and metaphorical). It’s an awakening to the fact that the world doesn’t care about you qua you. You won’t be cared for just because you exist. You have to shatter the illusion that you are owed or will be given anything you don’t earn. The ritual is like a hardcore version of this timeless Cracked article.

New vistas, challenges, projects, and adventures beckon. We all talk about them, assume we’ll experience them, and plan for progress. Some people constantly achieve new stuff, while others don’t. It’s not always lack of goals and dreams that keep people from progress. Sometimes it’s fear of death. The difference between a dream deferred and a dream pursued isn’t so much the step into future as the killing of the present. You’ve got to cut the baggage of where and who you are loose and let it sink to the depths before you can become the next version. The old Dr. Who must die for a new one to emerge. (Very sad in the case of David Tennant.)

That’s why I don’t think it helps much when, at some momentous parting, someone says, “This isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning!” No, it’s the end. The status quo is dying. Never to live again. You must accept, acknowledge, and own its death.

Of course it is also the beginning of a new era, and one that’s even better. But to ignore the death part and quickly move to the new part is a mistake. You need to really kill it. Really let it go. If you try to let the old live subconsciously with the new, you’ll tear yourself in two. (You’re welcome for the rhyme). This is why those rituals exist, remember? It’s too easy to try to sneak one past old death. “Yep, nothing to see here, just moving on to be a new version of myself”, meanwhile the rotting zombie of your former self is snarling suspiciously under the desk. Time to take it out back and shoot it.

The reason it’s so hard for us to fully embrace the death step as a precondition to new life is probably because the one kind of death that looms largest for us is one after which we can’t see the next step. We don’t exactly know what happens after our heart stops. The unknown hereafter is a lot to ponder, so we tend to avoid it. This avoidance trickles and seeps into all the lesser forms of death that ought not trouble us so much. Like our physical death, we ignore the other deaths. To our detriment. It gets pretty ugly when you see someone dragging along a bunch of dead versions of themselves, insisting they’re still alive, refusing to bury them and give life to the new.

So, if you want to do cool stuff you’ve got to learn to die. There are all kinds of death, and each new level in each area of life requires a different kind. There’s ego death, reputation death, innocence death, ignorance death, nice guy/gal death, and so many more. A good life is a series of deaths. So you’d better find some ritual or process or belief that helps you make your peace with death so you can burst into life.

And who knows, maybe when you get comfy with lesser death, you won’t fear the big one quite so much either.