I imagine the dogs in Pavlov’s experiments, if they were like modern scientistic people, would produce some charts.

“Look Fido, everyone knows food is caused by the ringing of bells. This chart shows the instance of bell ringing and the instance of dinner. It’s definitive proof that if you want to obtain food for yourself as you go out into the world, you need to learn to ring bells.”

Actual dogs, once out of the lab, would remember pretty quickly that food is obtained through foraging or from someone putting it into a dish. They may still salivate at the bell, but they wouldn’t starve to death waiting for it to feed them.

But not trained expert scientistic dogs. With the proper modern mindset, dogs could go on chasing bells and preaching the necessity of doing so while starving or remaining malnourished for three or four generations.

You’ve got a big giant dream. You decide to pursue it. This is exciting.

The planning is done. You start to get down to those first few steps. How do you actually execute and move forward on your big sexy vision?

By doing something so small and stupid it’s almost embarrassing.

I want to learn to beat people up, why am I waxing cars?

I want to learn to shred a face-melting solo, why am I playing scales?

I want to build a house, why am I cutting wood?

I want to own a worldwide bakery and cookbook franchise, why am I doing a bake sale?

The first step never looks like the big vision. It’s kinda boring. It’s very small. It’s not unique. It’s not going to impress anyone much. It’s easy to get mad and try to cram the first fifteen steps into one. But you can’t. You’ll lose. You need to take the first, smallest possible step by itself. Then the second. Then the third.

Taking that first small, unglamorous step feels like a kind of death. You have to let your awesome reputation for your big sexy leap idea die in order to ship the first little step. People will praise your awesome vision. They won’t be impressed by your first concrete step.

The difference between big results and small isn’t the size of the steps, it’s how many are taken.

The difference between fast growth and slow isn’t the size of the steps, it’s how quickly they’re taken.

And some steps will always be missteps. The smaller they are, the easier to re-take them properly. You’ve got to do this a lot and fast too. And never stop doing it.

Take the smallest possible step. Get it right. Take the next. Do this as fast as possible as many times as possible adjusting to bad steps as ruthlessly as possible. That’s the way. There’s no cheating the small steps.

Toddlers want to act

While the skills they mostly lack

Teens can do but won’t

It’s important as a company to know your ‘why’. It’s also important to know your first principles.

At Crash and Praxis, our ‘why’ is to help people discover and do what makes them come alive.

In the pursuit of that mission, are there any things we won’t do? Are there any “side constraints”? That’s where first principles come in.

I think I can boil the company first principles down to one: create value.

Value creation is the result of voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange. Its outcome is greater than the sum of the inputs. If I value an hour of my time at $100 (a liquid representation of my subjective opportunity cost), and you value an hour of me fronting your rock band at $120, you bring $110 to the exchange and I bring an hour of my time and value is created. I started with $100 of value (an hour of my time). You started with $110 of value (your cash). I walked away with $110 of value (the cash I got) and you walked away with $120 of value (the hour you bought). The exchange turned $210 of value into $230. That’s value creation.

If I sold for less than I valued my time, value would be destroyed. If you paid more than you valued my time, value would be destroyed.

Because value is subjective, it’s a constant searching and testing process, and sometimes losing exchanges are necessary to learn how to make future winning exchanges. But the first principle dictates that the company should always be striving to create products and experiences that are valued more than the money paid for them. That goes for customers, employees, vendors, shareholders, etc. That’s a guiding principle.

Note that forced exchange is precluded. Value isn’t created when it’s not voluntary. Because value is subjective, the only way to verify value creation is if the parties to the exchange choose to enter it. Their actions reveal their preferences.

So using the first principle of value creation, a company must steer clear of involuntary exchanges. That means no government contracts or subsidies.

It also means a lot of other good things, like a fun office environment, flexible hours, benefits, or certain cultural goals or preferences are subordinate to the first principles. To the extent they are necessary inputs in the process of achieving our ‘why’ through value creation, they are great. But they are not ends in themselves. They are not first principles. They should be judged to the extent that they create value.

This helps put a lot of things in their proper place. We have on-site staff and remote staff. We’re not dedicated to being a remote team or on-site team as a first principle. We will do whatever makes the most sense and creates the most value.

Our ‘why’ is our target and our motivation. Our first principles are the guard rails we check ourselves against along the way.

TK Coleman and I are about to begin recording for season three of Office Hours. Recording the episodes is one of the most fun things I do. I look forward to it every time. It’s not a chore at all.

Most podcast interviews are at least kind of a chore. Whether I’m hosting or being interviewed, there’s some work and some sense of, “Oh yeah, I’ve got to knock out that interview.” Office Hours is the opposite of a chore. It’s like a break. It’s recess.

Maybe because there’s no guests and the logistical component doesn’t factor in. Maybe because TK and I have rapport and it doesn’t require any prep or conversational judo.

I know at least part of it is that TK has a way of drawing stuff out of me that doesn’t come out otherwise, or at least not in the same way. If you find a friend that can do this, I recommend spending a lot of time talking to them.

It’s easy to underestimate the value of unexpected delight.

Tiny little fun surprises can change your countenance, your day, and your relationship to a person, product, or company.

I remember back when Snapple hit the scene. The first time I got a bottle and opened it, I noticed something written under the cap. It was a witty little phrase I can’t recall. But what I do recall is the feeling of, “Ah! Look at this thing hidden here!” They didn’t have to do it. It didn’t add to the flavor of the beverage. But they did. And they didn’t do it to get noticed or sell me on the product, because they hid it. They did it, it seemed, just because they thought it was fun. You could almost see the mischievous smiles on the production crew as they discreetly added the under-the-cap-detail.

Secret levels and hidden items in video games are the same. So are clever references in movies, or objects from one Pixar movie finding their way into the background of another.

Elon Musk talked about Easter eggs in the Tesla. Apparently there are fun little games with music and light the car will perform if you figure out how to access them.

Again, these aren’t really about the core function of the product. Nor are they primarily about getting attention and sales. They are little gifts you get after the purchase, and they let you in on an inside joke. They give you a sense of joy that the makers have about their own product. You imagine their delight in imagining your delight as you discover the Easter egg.

It’s easy to get stressed about building products and projects and relationships and focus on all the most important stuff but forget to have fun. Inject a little mischief. Some of the best stuff has no obvious justification.

“Everything you had to do to get this thing where it is is totally different from everything you have to do to get it to the next level.”

Another company founder told me that. It’s something I’ve started to find more and more true.

To start a company requires bullheadedness bordering on delusion. Ignorance is an asset. The less you know about your odds of success and all the challenges to come, the better. You need a ton of confidence in your vision, and a stubborn refusal to listen to all the common sense approaches.

If you listened to the market, it would tell you, “We’re fine thanks, your company isn’t needed. If it was, someone would’ve done it already.” So you don’t. You follow the future you can imagine, and only work with those few who see it too. Taking advice is very dangerous, and erring on the side of rash and brash is an advantage.

That’s how you go from nothing to something. That’s how something truly new enters the world. It’s willpower and belief followed by dogged execution in the face of doubt and defeat.

But when you’ve got something and you want to turn it into something bigger, the necessary attributes for success shift. You still need some of that fire, but you also need a more open mind. Early on, you can’t afford to ask questions like, “Will this really work? What proof do I have?”, but later you can’t afford not to.

Early on you can’t be objective about your company. It’s your baby. You only see it as the dream vision despite the world telling you otherwise. You have to. Later, you’ve got to be objective about your company. You’ve got to assess what’s stupid and fix it. You can’t fear any question. You can’t fear any information. You need to take the horse blinders off. They were necessary to get started – without them the world would overwhelm your attempts to forge ahead. But now you need to expand the context within which you operate.

This is hard for an entrepreneur. It’s easy to get wrong. It doesn’t mean you turn into a focus-group junkie. It doesn’t mean you give up on the idea that, “Consumers don’t know what they want until we show them”. It doesn’t mean you mold yourself after the competition.

But it does mean you stop the extreme practice of willful blindness needed at the outset.

It’s similar to growth in other areas. The first time you pick up a basketball, you can’t afford to know all the things you’re doing technically wrong. Too much info from experts would reveal how bad you are and you’d never get started. You need to be dumb enough to think you’re good, or at least have a chance to be good. That’s how you get good.

But after you develop some skill you can’t be ignorant of your shortcomings anymore. It no longer helps. Now you need to look closely at your technique and find where it lacks. Now you need to learn from people who have mastered the game better than you. You don’t need to lose your unique approach, but you do need to objectively assess your performance and adjust your game.

This is a hard phase for me. I like the thought of holding nothing too precious to assess and improve. But I also hate advice seeking and analysis paralysis. I’d rather fail being different than succeed being the same. Half of that is a good instinct I shouldn’t discard, half of it is laziness or pride. Hard to tell which is which sometimes.

I’m an outgoing guy who likes to be left alone.

The inner tension that has come to define most of my existential struggles is between the hermit and the evangelist.

In history, both loom large.

The hermits, mystics, gurus, and holy men are detached from the daily grind. They do not seek to engage with or persuade anyone anywhere of what they are already persuaded. They seek only a deeper experience of the truth they value. They have profound but secretive lives.

The evangelist is tirelessly interacting with the world, seeking the Remnant who understand the vision that inspires them. They are driven by openness and sharing. The challenge of argumentation and the excitement of transformation propel them. They want to live what they believe, and they want to show others the possibility in their own lives.

Both make a different kind of sacrifice to pursue their path. The hermit gives up fame and status in the social context. The evangelist must always put their own further pursuit of inner depth on semi-hold as they operationalize their findings.

I want to be a hermit.

But I’m an extrovert, and I love to talk and write. I share everything openly and do most of my thinking out loud.

All the things I want to accomplish seem to require that I live the life of an evangelist. And when I’m doing it – when I’m giving a talk, or interview, or writing, or making a video – I enjoy it. I get in the flow state. But as soon as I’m done I never want to do it again. I’m tired. I’m tired of playing games that involve moving parts outside my own head. I don’t want to persuade anyone of anything. I hate movements.

But I want to build cool stuff. And I want to work with great people. And I only want to do it if it creates real value in the real world (best measured by profitable business). Those require not just an inner vision, but an outer articulation of that vision. They require broadcasting the vision. They require marketing and sales. They require evangelism.

And most people, when they see me evangelizing, assume it is of course natural and proper and what I should be doing and what certainly makes me happy.

But I don’t feel that way.

I have a love/hate relationship with it. The flow state is fun. Plus the amazing people I get to work with as a result of evangelizing are awesome. Had I never given a talk at this or that conference or gone on this or that podcast, I’d never have some of the friends and colleagues I value most. But every thought of evangelism still makes me tired. I want to be done. I’ve said enough. I don’t care who cares. I don’t want to do any marketing.

I want to be a hermit.

But if I pursue hermitage, I won’t be able to build and do some of the stuff I’m interested in building and doing. And the idea of evangelizing for a while then retiring to a tropical island to be a hermit sounds off. I don’t like the idea of retirement. I always want to be doing interesting, meaningful things. And if hermiting is the most interesting and meaningful thing, why wait? Why not do it now?

This is the inner conflict that confounds me every day. It never used to. But my inner hermit has been gaining strength for years now, and is finally equally matched to my inner evangelist. They jockey for position. All victories are temporary.

Both stem from what I consider my life mission: make people free.

It’s a weird way to phrase it, since the word “make” pairs oddly with the word “free”. But I didn’t sit down and formulate it. It sort of came to me in an inner dialogue in my late teens, and I knew it defined the kind of stuff that motivates me. At any given time, I’ve got a mission or three. But “make people free” is always my meta-mission.

It sounds like an evangelist’s mission. Until you think about it a bit. People includes me. I have to live free too. In fact, even as a strategy, living free myself probably does more to help others live free than anything I can say with words. So living free and helping others do the same presents the same hermit/evangelist dilemma. If I go all in on living free, I live very much like a hermit. If I put all the emphasis on expanding the freedom of others, I live very much like an evangelist.

The obvious answer is to do both. But that’s a bit weird. It’s a constant state of disharmony and unresolved tension. It feels like a perpetually clenched fist.

Like a hermit, I went for a walk and thought about this. Like a hermit, I have no call to action. Like an evangelist, I wrote it out and posted it publicly.

One of the things that makes hip hop great is that songs are a productive embodiment of emotions.

You have the dis-track, the rap battle, the stick-it-to-the-haters song, the nobody-believed-in-me album, and the stop-begging-for-my-money-and-attention verse, and so on.

Rappers deal with beefs and frustrations through their art. The product they make is also their therapy. This is an amazing thing. I want to find out how to do this in other kinds of work. Yeah, success is the greatest revenge and all that, but general success over a long time span doesn’t quite pack the punch of a specific song that charts. Most kinds of work don’t have individual, tangible products that have so much room for direct expression of thought and feeling, tangential to the product’s main purpose.

Sometimes I try to think of the work I do like a hip hop album. An email might be the “I’m still in the game” track; a decision could be a particularly fire set of bars.

Of course daily blogging is a way to express these things, but it’s a bit too direct. You want a product that has the plausible excuse of just being a product, but really it’s also a delivery mechanism for something you need to say. A rapper just saying what they think about their former record label is one thing. Releasing a song that says it cleverly in a way enjoyed even by those outside the know is another thing.

I aspire to that kind of mastery.

Operant conditioning gets a bad rap. It gets confused with classical conditioning, which gets associated with Pavlov, which makes everyone think about salivating dogs, bells, and rats getting shocked in search of cheese.

The dog and cheese stuff of classical conditioning is about creating involuntary biological responses. Hear a bell and the body produces saliva. Operant conditioning has to do with voluntary behavior and consequences more directly related to action. For example, getting a cookie when you sing a song may make you choose to sing more songs or feel positive about singing, but it doesn’t make your body involuntarily sing in the presence of cookies.

Both kinds of conditioning are scary in the hands of social experimenters. If anyone talks about turning the world into their lab and running giant programs to generate socially desirable behavior, run the other direction.

But operant conditioning is a great tool to use on yourself!

It’s really about creating and putting yourself into incentive structures where the kind of person who would be rewarded is the kind of person you’d like to be. It affects the kind of people you spend time with. If you surround yourself with friends that affirm you for sitting around not growing, you’re conditioning yourself to do more of that. If you’re around people that are more fun to share growth and challenges with, you’ll push yourself to grow more.

It means taking control of the reward systems you enter. Social media is a potent area. The things that get rewarded with likes, comments, or shares, are not always things that help you become more of who you want to be. It’s easy to chase likes while running away from a self you like. If you understand operant conditioning, it helps you see it and adjust.

Your behavior affects others too. When you see stuff on your news feed that makes your life better, you click like. When you see stuff you want less of, you ignore. This conditions other social users to behave in certain ways to get those lovely likes.

None of this is groundbreaking. It happens all the time whether we realize it or not. But conscious awareness of the process increases ability to control it. Conditioning is going to happen. Wouldn’t you rather condition yourself than be conditioned without knowing it?

I was asked to describe what Crash does in five words or less. (Still working on it.)

So hard. And so good to be forced to try.

Not just for companies. For yourself too. What do you do in five words or less?

“Fight to make people free” might work for me. Still a little vague and abstract.

Coming up with the most concise form of a value proposition or mission takes longer than anything else. The famous “I would have written you a short letter but I only had time for a long one” is so true.

My 13 year old neighbor joined me today as part of a job shadow project for school.

Nothing makes you realize the massive knowledge gap between what young people think work is and what work actually is like trying to create a non-boring and sensible experience for a teenage shadow.

Most of the day I’m on a laptop. Responding to emails, reading emails, on Slack threads, spreadsheets, slide decks, bank accounts, social media pages, and Trello boards. I can put that stuff up on a monitor so he can watch and I can try to explain what I’m doing, but it’s kinda hard to convey the purpose and meaning quickly without any shared back knowledge.

It’s hard to describe what I do, especially when it’s so different from day to day.

Steve Jobs said make a dent in the universe.

Lots of people say follow your passion, make a difference, do big things.

I agree with them. But what does that mean I should do today? If my lifelong goal is to do stuff so big it changes the course of history, how do I make progress towards it today?

Lofty goals can make immediate action harder. Whatever you can do today will look like garbage compared to that lofty goal. I like to keep the lofty one in mind, repeat it every so often, write it down somewhere, and then file it away and focus on today.

One of my lofty goals is to make the world a freer place. How’s that supposed to guide daily action? Some days I begin by writing down the phrase, “Today I will live free.” That’s it. Just try to live as free as I can today.

I want to build amazing things too. Another lofty goal. But anything I’m capable of making today is going to fall short. So instead, I command myself to make something crappy today.

Of course it doesn’t have to be half-assed. Hopefully it’s at least sort of good. But the point is, making anything at all is better than dreaming about the perfect thing.

Check this out.

That’s a project created by a guy named Erick Muller.

It’s really easy to read and listen to stuff and be done with it. Thoughts roll around in your brain and you hope it made you smarter. But playing with those thoughts in a public forum is so much more valuable!

It helps crystallize the learning, clarify the thinking, and creates a ton of goodwill and unforeseen benefits. I did a challenge one month where I wanted to write 20 Amazon book reviews for books I’d read and enjoyed over the years. I spent a few minutes each day writing a short review instead of just letting my thoughts on the book live in my head.

It felt good, I felt productive, I remembered things from the books again, it prompted me to give some books to some people, and something else happened. I started to get new authors emailing me every so often and offering free early copies of their books. They had seen I’d done a decent number of reviews in similar genres, and decided to see if I’d help get theirs some love. In fact, a few months ago a publisher sent me a brand new copy of Stephen Landsburg’s newest econ book for free with a nice note saying I might enjoy it. I can only speculate that they pulled a list of people who had reviewed maybe five or more econ books on Amazon or had a certain number of “helpful” ratings and sent them a copy.

What’s cool about Erick’s project, besides the fact that it shows a lot of initiative, curiosity, humility, and eagerness to experiment and learn new things, is the way you can sort the content consumed. I thought the “People” tab was interesting (not only because I was on it…but partially;-). It’s a way to spot patterns you may not consciously notice. It might turn out that you find yourself consuming stuff by a person a lot more than you thought. This could prompt you to dive deeper into their work, or Tweet at them, or see what other people are in their orbit you might like. You get to analyze your own big data and make your own “You might also like” recommendations, instead of trusting Amazon or Facebook or Google to find the good stuff.

You’re already doing and learning interesting stuff. Take a few minutes to think about some ways you might share those learnings out loud!

It’s hard to own every choice and respect others enough to expect the same from them.

It’s easy to lazily slip into appeals to duty, what’s “normal”, guilt, or shame instead of relying entirely on mutual exchange of value.

If I’d like my wife to come on a walk with me, I can change my tone of voice to imply I’ll have hurt feelings if she doesn’t. I can say, “I always come on walks with you!”. I can try to make her feel weird, like other normal people go on walks. I can appeal to the fact that we’re family, and imply that she owes me a walk because of it.

All of these can be effective. But they’re lesser versions of the person I want to be. I don’t want to make choices in my life based on these things. Why should I ask her to? I want to live free and I want to treat her as a free person.

This forces me to get creative. It forces me to create value. It forces me to have a strong sense of self. I’ve got to ask her to join me in a way that makes it in her unmanipulated interest to say yes, but in a way that makes clear she can freely say no.

It doesn’t mean I have to hide my feelings. It’s the opposite. I can’t allow myself to hide my motives and desires under layers of false reason. Living free and treating others as free people forces honesty.

Humans are good at adding layers of justification and passive aggression to our words and actions. Pretty soon, it’s impossible to identify our own desires. Denying yourself the use of manipulative tactics forces you to come to terms with your thoughts and feelings. Why do I want her to go on a walk with me? How much do I value it? Why might she value it? What could make it more valuable than her alternatives?

It sounds cold and mechanical when broken down like this, but in practice it’s clean and true. It’s so much better than vague entreaties layered with ambiguous emotional consequences.

This is just one small part of living free. But it changes everything. Never accepting the role of victim. Never believing anyone owes you anything, or you owe anyone anything (except what you’ve freely agreed to). These force you to treat each interaction as between free people.

It forces you to break the shackles of your own bullshit.