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.

1) The School Sucks Podcast is awesome. And it’s about so much more than just the suckiness of school.

Well produced, deep, thoughtful, rebellious, and fun. It was one of the earliest shows I listened to when I started doing podcasts. Brett Veinotte knows his stuff.

Give it a listen.

2) Follow Your Different is also awesome.

I was introduced to this more recently, and Christopher Lochhead’s combo of interest, intelligence, and ADHD make for an uplifting adventure in every episode. He brings on some high-profile and out of the ordinary guests too.

Give it a listen.

Oh yeah…

As an added bonus, the most recent episode of each show is about the new pocketbook Crash Your Career! (Available now on Amazon).

Yes, I’m gratuitously riding the coattails of two great podcasters.

Seriously though, these are both excellent shows if you want some new listening.

There’s nothing quite like a convo with Christopher Lochhead.

We cover some of the highlights of the new pocketbook and talk about Crash more generally.

046 How to Crash Your Career with Isaac Morehouse

“I know this is going to be a life changing program, because I’m choosing to have my life changed by it.”

I’ll never forget when the first Praxis customer told me that as he joined the program. We have consistently seen that participants who adopt this approach have an amazing experience and exceed their own goals and expectations. Those who come in with more of a “Let’s wait and see what you can do for me” approach don’t tend to have the dramatic results, or enjoy the process as intensely.

If you believe something is worth doing, don’t go in with your arms crossed. If you make a choice, make that choice good and hard. Commit to the outcome you want. Demand that outcome of yourself and the universe.

I used to tell Praxians the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel all night because he wouldn’t let the angel go until he blessed him. That’s the kind of attitude you want to bring to each new endeavor. I will gain from this. I will walk away better than I entered. It’s not a prediction, it’s a commitment.

It’s amazing how much you can squeeze out of life when you do this. The benefits are as a big as you decide they will be.

There’s nothing like a physical book. The smell of the paper, the feel of the pages. Mmmm.

This thing is super slim and slick. We call it a pocketbook because it can fit right in your pocket. Nothing cooler than one of these babies in the back pocket of your skinny jeans/yoga pants.

Now available on Amazon in paperback. Pick one up. Or buy a stack for graduation gifts!

Crash Your Career pocketbook on Amazon.

Think of something you’re really good at.

Chances are, whatever it is, you taught yourself.

An insight or tip here and there, some books or videos perhaps. But for the most part, your most valuable, high-return skills and know-how were gained from your own self-education and experience, not from a teacher.

Someone who asks for a teacher as the first step to learn something new is someone with a low likelihood of mastering it. Someone who wants to jump right in and try, and only seeks a teacher after some level of mastery has a much higher likelihood. In fact, you might say that the return you’ll get from something is inversely proportionate to the amount of teaching you require.

Given the 80-20 rule, it means most of the high return stuff is the stuff we’re best at, which is also the stuff that requires teachers least.

Things that seem idyllic to us from the 1950’s were probably commonplace or even annoying to people then.

The alley full of kids playing kick the can was a dirty mosquito trap. The sandlot was an eyesore. The drug store was just a store. But to us, these are idyllic representations of things we long for.

What normal or annoying things today will seem idyllic in the future?

I started wondering this while sitting on a bench in front of Wal-Mart with my son. We were waiting for my wife and looking at a small fenced enclosure between us and the vast, nicely landscaped parking lot. The enclosure had large trees full of chirping birds. SUVs meandered in and out as we watched the birds and people coming and going from the parking lot.

Retail parking lots seem unsightly and annoying to most people. But as I sat I realized it was all quite pleasant. It reminded of some of the greatest attributes and ideals of our culture. Peaceful commerce. Exchange. Strangers greeting each other. Efforts to make parking both convenient and nice looking. Order, community, spontaneity, and individualism all at once. Convenience and attention to detail.

The suburban shopping scene is taken for granted or looked down on today. Someday, someone will see it in a movie and long to experience such an idyllic setting. They won’t be wrong.

I’m really, really excited about this new pocketbook.

I’m calling it a pocketbook to properly set expectations. It’s short. Very short!

I love short books. It annoys me when a solid idea gets wrapped in 150 extraneous pages just to fit the industry standard of book length. Get me the meat and fast! I also polled readers like you a few times whether you prefer a really long blog post or a really short book, and short book won hands down.

This pocketbook is the most stripped down, compact version of my approach to career launch I could possibly write. It’s a guidebook for getting your next (or any!) job, how to think about the world of careers today, and it’s the core philosophy behind the Crash platform all in one.

It reads fast and fun (I hope!). It opens with some groundwork on the idea that you need a career signal, offers a brief history on why degrees and resumes are now bad signals, then lays out a simple process for building a better one.

I’m honored to have an intro by Christopher Lochhead, a legend in the world of marketing and startups, a two-time best selling author, and host of a top 30 podcast on iTunes. Chris embodies what the book is about too. He was kicked out of high school and had create something better than paper credentials to launch his career.

There some amazing people who endorsed the book with a blurb for the cover too. Penelope Trunk, Taylor Pearson, Michael Ellsburg, and Mike Maples Jr. That was pretty cool for all of them to review it and say, “Hey, this is awesome!”

The pocketbook ends with a “Gallery of Career Crashers.” These are 20 stories from real life people just like you and me who launched a career in the manner described in the book. These are not super geniuses or people with talents far out of reach. These are sharp people, people willing to buck the norm, and most of all people willing to put in a little work and approach their career as an adventure. Their stories are about a paragraph each and told in the first person and, I think, the best market proof for the pocketbook.

This weekend, I’m making the book free on Amazon for Kindle readers as a little bonus before the paperback comes out in a few days.

Check out a sample and go download the book!

I put a premium on interestingness. Venkatesh Rao has helped give voice to an instinct I’ve always had when he talks about the zone of maximal interestingness.

In business, this tends to be a high-risk, high-reward approach. I’ve often stumbled upon business models we could move to that would be easier, more practical, and very solid surfaces for respectable growth. But I always opt for the harder, riskier, but way more interesting model. I like to do stuff that, if it works, alters everything. I like approaches that rely on the fewest possible status quo assumptions and require the most new behaviors and mindsets.

Of course it’s a game of constant compromises navigating where to go for interesting swings vs. boring bunts. Not everything is interesting. I like to ask myself, “Even if X was wildly successful, would it excite me?”, and, “Even if Y totally failed, would it excite me?”. If answer one is no and answer two is yes, I go for Y. The interesting one.

Building a better version of something that already exists and changes no patterns of human behavior and opens no new vistas of possibility doesn’t do it for me most of the time. I do not look down on it. That’s mostly how the world progresses. I love that people do this all around me. I almost wish I had less of an appetite for interestingness. But I just know I’m not going to be happy if I’m not working on something that has the potential – even if a longshot – to upend everything.

So I opt for that as much as I can. When it doesn’t work, you don’t gain much. When it does, you gain everything. But I find a bit of recklessness necessary for my sanity.

I’m a very laissez faire manager. Sometimes too much.

I’m never going to fight against my dominant style. It wouldn’t work and I’d hate my life. But I have learned to watch out for and try to curb the excesses.

I look for great talent and let them fly. When I trust someone, I take their word and let them work. This is good 90% of the time. But the 10% can be disproportionately costly. Many times, I’ve paid a steep price for letting someone do their thing without really checking their work or process in detail, only to find out when the outcome was a major problem. When they’d say, “Yep, this project is on track” I’d just be happy they were on it and I didn’t need to get involved. But I did need to get involved. Just a bit of steering early in the process can have a huge impact on the outcome.

But if I operate from a place of panic, distrust, or micromanagement, nobody wins. So how to make the call?

Here’s a simple decision matrix I use:

It’s pretty simple.

First you’ll notice that when the cost of failure is low, I opt to keep a light touch, even if the cost of getting involved would also be low. To me, there’s no point in hiring someone if I am going to spend time on low risk activities in their aegis. The difficult tasks aren’t the most important ones to hand off, the low risk ones are. The more of my decisions are higher risk, the better I’m using my time.

That’s pretty standard. For the bottom row of the matrix, I used to default to no involvement in both cases. I would wait until someone told me something was wrong or asked for help to get involved. That was often too late.

Many managers get involved when the stakes are high every time. I still stubbornly refuse to go that far. When it takes a lot of time and resources for me to get involved or monitor things in detail, I want to think through very carefully whether to be in the weeds. I want to give people a chance to make some higher stakes decisions without me micromanaging or micro-monitoring. That’s how you see what you’ve got and watch people rise to the occasion or not. But this cannot be a quick default position. This is a soft default. It requires case by case thinking, and I can’t let myself off the hook too easy. If my main motivation for being hands off is because I think it best for the employee or company, it’s probably good to stay light. If my main motivation is because I don’t want to get involved out of laziness or boredom, it probably means I should.

The low cost of involvement high cost of error quadrant is one that requires no thought. I get all up in that business every time. I didn’t used to. I used to waste a lot of mental resources treating this as a judgement call too. But the cost of thinking about it normally outweighs the cost of just bucking up and being a hands on manager anyway, so I’ve tried to remove all thinking from this one and just do it every time.

This matrix represents my approximate ideal. It’s subject to change, and I do not always stick to it even though I think I should. I have learned I’m not a very good or wise manager (unless it’s for people who don’t need to be managed:-), so I have to employ a few heuristics like this to make it easier on myself and stay disciplined.

Most pro sports in the US are built around business models that make no market sense. They are quasi-monopolistic guilds classified as non-profits but run for profit.

The incumbent advantages and tribal fandom means they aren’t going anywhere soon. Still, there’s so much room for innovation, and I love thinking about changes to existing leagues, or brand new leagues, or even brand new sports.

The first thing I like to think about is more market mechanisms and fewer central plans. Price floors and ceilings and collective bargaining could get scrapped. The draft order being pre-ordained for losing teams could be scrapped. Imagine if draft picks had a true open market, and rookie contracts too. Teams would be forced to choose whether to keep a player or sign a new one. Picks would be weighed against free agents equally, with no bargain deals for new draft picks. This would be great for sports fans and media, because we’d get to have endless debate about whether a guy coming out of college was really worth picking up at the same price as an aging star. Comparison is the cash crop of sports talk.

I think about college sports a lot too. They’re a total corrupt racket top to bottom, and the players get the rawest end of the deal. Not getting paid by the school is one thing, but being banned from accepting pay to do commercials or other off-field/court activity while the college forces you to shill for their fundraisers? Sheesh. More talent will and should opt out of this high risk low reward charade if they have an alternate way to develop skills and transition to the pros.

Obviously, competing with college by creating a minor league is an uphill slog. Few things run deeper than college fan loyalty. I’d love to see some enterprising university sell their sports team. Split if off. Privatize it. Let it run as an independent business, paying the players, negotiating TV deals, etc. Let them keep the records, tradition, history, and mascot. Let them play in the on-campus stadium. Let students get discounted admission, and pay the university some fee every year.

You could turn pre-pro sports into something far more rational. Pro teams and scouts could get involved without scandal. Shoe deals could be made. Players could be traded. Players would do so much better for themselves, and fans would get to keep the same loyalties and colors and rivalries. Colleges would lose their stranglehold of control over the team, it is true. But they’d get great PR, avoid dirtiness of dealing with scandal, exploitation, fake-passing athletes in classes, coaches high salaries making professors envious, etc.

That’s just scratching the surface. I have a whole mental folder of ideas for leagues and sports, including some far-future ideas about gravity-free environments and what kind of sport works best with an extra degree of movement freedom.

Once upon a time some busybody do-gooder paternalists said stuff like, “We need taxpayer money going to support music halls and concerts, because it is important that all citizens have access to good music, not just people with enough money.” (Never mind that most people don’t really care to go to the symphony or listen to NPR.)

Now for free anyone can listen to any music in the world on Spotify. For $10 a month, you can do all kinds of advanced stuff, no ads, special playlists, and hey, even listen to music selected by experts, bureaucrats, and NPR if you want to!

The idea that a monolithic monopoly needs to provide all kinds of services whether we want them or not is stupid. It’s always been stupid. But it’s easier to see the stupid now that our lives are comprised of a growing web of voluntary subscription services and Amazon delivers everything for free.

I look forward to the world of SaaS everything. Governance, dispute resolution, protection, insurances of all kinds, education, infrastructure, and more.

I’d like to pick and choose what services to pay for and at what level. The ability to do so will not only make every individual’s life better and cheaper now, it will create clear signals and incentives for providers to innovate and compete and build new stuff we’ve never imagined, easier, cheaper, better.

Sign me up.

I’m watching the Golden State Warriors. Klay Thompson got hot and now the entire team is going out of the way to do everything they can to get him the ball and set him up for a shot.

Golden State does this more extremely for hot Klay than any team for any player save the Lakers in Kobe Bryant’s final game.

I’m trying to think about relevant analogies in other areas. When does someone have the equivalent of the hot hand? How can a team go out if it’s way to feed the heat?

I used to treat music as a consumption good. (Unless I was making it, then it was an act of creation, maybe with a dash of consumption thrown in).

I chose music based on the mood I was in. I consumed as a reflection of my state of mind. I let my feelings dictate and the music followed.

In the last few years, I’ve started to reverse the relationship. More and more, I use music to create my mood, not just resonate with it. I choose a state of mind I want to be in, or identify one I want to snap out of, and go find the music that will do the trick.

Some music is so powerful that you cannot maintain a certain mindset while listening to it. TK Coleman claims it’s impossible to be unhappy or afraid with Christmas music playing. I’m not sure about that one, but I am sure certain music eliminates the possibility of certain mental or emotional states.

I still listen to music as a consumption good, but I listen as a capital good a lot more now. It’s an investment in my mindset, and when properly calibrated, works wonders.

“If I asked people what they wanted, the would’ve said a faster horse.” — Maybe Henry Ford

Changing the world means showing people something they couldn’t tell you that they needed.

Nevermind. They can and do tell you what they need. Just in the wrong language.

People will tell you what they need in a language composed of what they see around them. You need to listen carefully to the meaning but ignore the language. When they tell you “faster horse”, you listen and take it seriously as a clue to a problem while ignoring it completely as a solution.

Why faster? What does a horse do? Get you from A to B. OK. That’s a real problem people are telling you they want solved. Better A to B travel. Listen to that. But ignore the word “Horse”. That’s a solution word. For real innovation, you don’t want to listen to their solutions, only their problems.

If their solution was awesome, it’d probably already exist. But their problem is a source of all kinds of inspiration and opportunity.

This is a weird kind of listening. You can’t play the tortured creator who hates consumers because they demand things you think are crappy. The consumer is king and deserves utmost attention and respect.

But you can’t treat them as a solution generator either, and focus group your way to innovation by asking them to design it for you.

Your job is to be more keyed in on the problems people feel than anyone else. Listen to the pain. Your next job is to be less keyed in on the expected and proposed solutions than anyone else. Ignore the remedies.

That’s how you change the world. Introduce something nobody was asking for but everyone was asking for.

Easy, right? ;-)