They’re too easy.

I’m skeptical of any argument that says X or Y are worse than they used to be. Not because things can’t get worse. I don’t hold to the Whig theory of history. I’m skeptical because the ‘things are getting’ worse framework is always accepted and no one demands evidence.

Whenever an assumption is universally shared and never plainly stated my skeptenna goes up.

I had an interesting conversation recently about how hard it is to find amazing people of high character and intelligence (part of the reason such conversations are enjoyable is because those having them get to silently assume they are among the few and feel warm about it). I was in full agreement that great people are rare. But I didn’t agree with the claim that there are fewer amazing people today than ever before.

It’s too easy for it to appear that the past had a higher percentage of amazing people, and too hard to know how to find the truth.

Think about your own life. What stories are you most likely to remember and retell? The good ones. What people will you best remember? The good ones.

We look back on the past and most of the evidence that remains is about extraordinary people and events. Your daily life, on the other hand, is mostly monotony with average people. You don’t read histories of the nature and causes of boring people buying and preparing ham while talking about the weather. Ninety percent of history is about one percent of who and what actually happens. No wonder it appears there were more great people.

It is possible that people of high character and intelligence are fewer. But it would require evidence, and more than a cursory review of recorded history.

The thing I’m more wary of than the accuracy of the ‘things are getting worse’ story is what it does if I accept it. It’s a comforting notion, but comforting in the dangerous way. It lets me off the hook for lacking imagination. Since everyone parrots it, you can go along without forming a view of your own. You can ignore the challenge of optimism. You can let the world be framed for you instead of creating a frame that best helps achieve your ends.

There is some value in thinking things are getting worse. For one, it may be true, and if so it can be good to see what’s coming. It also might inspire you to act heroically if you feel you’re in the End Times.

But it shouldn’t be uncritically accepted that things are worse than they used to be. The evidence on most issues strongly suggests the opposite, and the dangers of mental laziness outweigh the potential gains.

I have no backup plan. This relaxes me.

Optionality is stressful. It always sounds like it would relieve stress to know you have lots of plans and sub-plans to choose from. But I find instead it just creates existential overhead that makes it harder to be bold, deliberate, decisive, and really bet on myself with abandon.

I’ve written before how desire for options can blind you to opportunities.

As part of my general don’t do stuff you hate paradigm, I put all the focus on removing bullshit and negative activities that make me feel less alive, and don’t really worry about the details of what’s left over. If I don’t hate it and it doesn’t make me less free, go for it. Over time this gets easier as the list of stuff I hate grows with self-knowledge.

I sort of hate goals, but I sort of have some too. They’re more like big giant directional life goals. I want to live free. I want to make other people free. I want to help people discover and do what makes them come alive. I want to help launch 10 million careers by 2024. That last one is as close as I get to concrete, mid-term goal-setting.

I had a great conversation with Marvin Liao from 500Startups recently. He said every year he assesses the previous year, thinks about if he liked what he did, and thinks about what he wants to do for the next year. Then he does it. That’s it. He doesn’t worry about what that next year might parlay into five years down the line. He just takes the best opportunity available for the year ahead.

Turns out I’ve kind of done that same thing, on almost the exact same time frame (I’ve made a few 6 month decisions, and a few two year decisions, but I almost always think in year chunks). I liked the way Marvin approached it with some deliberate reflection. I’m going to add that to my mix.

I had another conversation last week too, about how to find product-market fit with a startup. I think product-market fit is a great way to think of your own career journey too. The guy I was talking to has done this dozens of times and is a shrewd startup thinker. You might expect him to have developed a twelve-step blueprint to PMF in his decades of experience. Instead, he said, “I’m a big fan of just stepping into the unknown and trying to get lucky.”

He described his preferred process as a reverse timeline. You look at your runway and see how long you have to try stuff. In your career, this might be something like an honest assessment of how long you can afford to make little or no money, or how long you can handle not having a clear role or city to live in etc. Say it’s a year. You work in two week increments. You’ve got 24 cycles to test stuff and find happy accidents.

The two week increments are focused and deliberate, and you pay careful attention to the feedback. But you don’t think about something 2 or 10 years ahead, or even more than the next two week increment. You pick an assumption you’re making about your product and/or your market, starting with the most fundemental, and you spend two weeks putting in the minimal effort and risk to find out if that assumption holds. Take in the feedback, adjust, on to the next assumption.

Two weeks is probably too fast for your personal career journey, but something like this might work well. You don’t know when you begin what your product is. What do you offer the world that they want to buy? Or what your market is. What people in what industries value your unique skillset and at what price? So you try some stuff out.

You can do all of this while you have a day job to pay the bills. You could wait tables while you take a month to test out whether people value your writing. Blog every day, see if you can get anyone to read anything you post. Submit a few of the best to third parties. Maybe you get readers. Maybe next you could spend a month testing whether someone would be willing to pay you something for your writing.

The process should be fun. It’s open-ended, but directional. You have a North Star, but you don’t have a specific course to get there, just one segment at a time.

The analogy of you as a startup is a really good one. Take some time to learn a bit about the world of startups, how they try to go from idea to first version of a product, to first traction with customers, to revenue, to potential investment, to scale-ability, etc. Think about leverage, MVPs, entry points that are small but expandable, etc.

A Tweetstorm.

1/ The signaling theory of education is correct.

Except a degree is not a signal of employability.

It’s a signal of adherence to the dominant social status religion of the day.

2/ Evidence is everywhere.

The mother who pressures her successful, happy, entrepreneur child to get a degree, while she proudly brags about her depressed, unemployed, basement-dwelling degreed child.

3/ The human capital theory of education is clearly bunk. Most people then conclude that degrees are bought because they are an employability signal.

This is also untrue, though it’s easy to see why it can appear that way sometimes.

4/ Not only are there classic correlation problems (e.g people with sports cars/degrees have more money on average), but social status games play a part in other games, like workplace politics, etc.

5/ The signal of social status games has overlap with the signal of employability. Some people prefer to hire other people who play the same social status games.

But employment signal is not the fundamental, causal mechanism for why people buy degrees.

6/ This is proven in so many ways but it’s hard to see until the blinders fall off.

People go into debt and suffer boredom for years “because I have to get a job” without ever asking what it would take to get a particular job.

7/ Imagine someone training for and running a marathon “because I have to to get customers for my artwork”, without every exploring the market to see what customers would need to make it worth buying your art?

8/ That is precisely how 90% of students/parents approach college. They have no idea what they want to do and whether college will help or hinder, yet they go in totally blind to the employment signal ROI, and spend irresponsible amounts of money on the degree.

9/ Why? Because they cannot resist the shame/envy/fear of being outside the dominant social status doctrine.

Again, pride for unemployed degree-holders dramatically exceeds that for successful drop-outs and opt-outs. Not even close.

10/ Multimillion dollar athletes and entertainers go back and buy degrees later in life and get treated as heroes. The employment signaling theory cannot explain any of this, because it’s not the dominate cause of degree buying.

11/ Degrees are a purchase made almost always for other people, not for you. They are made to make those around you feel comfortable with your opting in to their envy games.

12/ If an individual has a career goal and they plan the next few steps to it, if it doesn’t involve a degree, everyone pressures them and tells them they are a loser.

It it involves a degree, no one demands any plan, or any successful outcome at all and they get praise.

13/ Those who opt out of status games are a threat to the herd. They cannot be manipulated, they are unpredictable, they are bold.

They are also the only ones who every create progress and improve the lot of the herd.

14/ Make each step your step, not the step that makes everyone clap and give you cheap praise.

Make your goals about you.

Go build the life you want, don’t seek the badges that keep everyone happy.

15/ Your individual scoreboard is more important to your flourishing than your relative status on the collective status scoreboard.

16/ Fin.

Addendum:

I think it once was primarily an employment signal and status second. That became a religious belief and the social status part flipped to dominant.

Like buying a home was a good investment, that advice became religion, then ppl bought homes based on status.

(And subsidies and propaganda)

I got in the Lyft ride expecting Stephanie.

A cool looking dude with a big smile said, “Isaac?”. I said, “Are you Stephanie?” He laughed and said in a high pitched voice, “Yes!” Then told me no, he was covering for his wife.

He mentioned all the traffic from protests and other stuff happening downtown. Then he said something awesome. “But I like it all. It’s all interesting to me because I meditate.”

A few questions later, and we were all-in on a raucous conversation about the extent of the individual’s sphere of control, whether truth and freedom are the same thing, psychedelics vs meditation as a mind-opening process, whether you can be both transcendental and materially successful at once, and the role of the conscious and subconscious mind.

We exchanged emails. Even if we don’t communicate more later, this ride lit up my day. When you’re in the presence of someone who is fully alive, you just feel it. The energy from our conversation was greater than the sum of what we brought individually.

The thing is, I’m one of those people who wants my drivers to leave me alone. But that’s because nine out of ten times they make boring small-talk, complain about weather or traffic, or spout off half-baked political rants.

Not Russ. He reminded me that it’s not conversation itself that’s exhausting when I’m traveling. It’s not conversation with strangers either. It’s mustering the will to interact with people who aren’t alive. That kind leaves you less alive too. It’s a net drain on your energy and sense of life.

But when you have an encounter with someone fully alive? You could talk about meditation, sports, geology, or airplanes. It doesn’t matter. If they’re wide awake and alive about it, you feel it too and leave the encounter with more fuel in the tank then when you started.

Here’s to living fully alive and the Remnant who do.

It’s easy to get into the weeds of your work and create an internal language and way of seeing things among the team.

That’s when outside perspective is good. It’s valuable to talk about what you’re working on with someone who’s not in the day to day grind, because they will come at it without all the shared assumptions. They’ll provide a perspective you don’t have and make you see things you didn’t see.

When their ideas are an improvement over yours, this is great.

But when their ideas are worse than your team’s?

They’re still valuable.

When you and your team talk with someone who brings a whole new, and not very good, perspective, it galvanizes you. After the encounter you might vent your frustration with how incorrect this person was, and all the sudden you’ve got the whole team presenting answers, alternatives, and exciting reasons why you have something better than this outsider’s approach. It shakes you out of taking it for granted, makes you defend your vision, and rallies you around an underdog, chip-on-the-shoulder, something to prove narrative.

That can be just as valuable as good advice.

Every time we’ve moved to a new city, there’s a moment when the locals look at us like we’re crazy for visiting some place nearby.

In DC, it was crossing the Potomac from Northern Virginia to DC or vice versa. If we casually mentioned we were going to an event on the other side, people acted like we were Louis & Clark, about to embark on a life threatening journey. We thought this was odd and amusing. To us, driving a few miles over a bridge seemed totally reasonable. Sure, there was traffic, but that’s to be expected. As newcomers, our tolerance for inconvenience was higher. We had no benchmarks, norms, or expectations against which to compare. Where we came from, driving 30 or 45 minutes (usually crossing 30 or 45 miles in the process) to meet a friend was normal. So driving 30 or 45 minutes in DC seemed fine too, even if it only covered a few miles.

By the time we left DC two years later, we were beginning to absorb the locally accepted definition of inconvenient. We started to see crossing the Potomac as a chore best avoided. I don’t know why this happens, but it does.

I used to drive 30,000 miles or more per year across the state of Michigan. I commuted from our farm house to my work 80 miles away, every single day. Long drives seemed normal. And in the local context, it was. But now that I rarely drive long stretches, it seems weird.

Recently, friend of a friend drove down from Myrtle Beach to Charleston. She thought the two hour southerly trip was a fun little jaunt. I felt bad like maybe she didn’t know how far away it was. I felt inconvenienced on her behalf, but she did not seem to mind.

When I visit big cities for work, I have a lot of meetings with people who live there. I always tell them to pick the place to meet. They always ask where I’m staying and then make a big to-do about how I’ll never want to travel to meet them where they are. I always say it’s fine. It’s normally an Uber and less than an hour. I often have a rental car and don’t mind driving a longer distance in a new city anyway. They seem very stressed by this. Like if I’m not staying in the same neighborhood as them, how can we ever meet?

I think it’s healthy to bring an out-of-towner’s perspective to the place you live sometimes. Your world can start to shrink if you too easily adopt the inconvenience scale of the locals.

I wrote recently about the need to let your reputation die so you can remain free and not become a slave to the good opinion of others.

But is concern for your reputation only dangerous, or does it provide value as well?

If strangers don’t like you, I don’t think there’s a lot of value in trying to change that vs continuing to follow your own North Star.

But if those who know you best begin to think ill of you, maybe there’s something to learn from it.

It’s undoubtedly true those those closest to you and with the best intentions can be your greatest hurdles. The respect and pride of those who love you can lead to a mush of sellout choices and a victim/martyr life. But there informational content in your reputation among your close friends. It’s like a mirror that lets you see things you cannot from your inside-out perspective.

The danger isn’t in examining the information reflected back to you by your reputation. The danger is in seeing the opinion of those around you as a destination, rather than a reading of your trajectory. Don’t let it tell you where to go. But don’t ignore information about yourself that can come from the way those who know you see you.

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent”
— Alan Turing

This quote got me thinking. I asked TK Coleman what he made of it and we had a pretty interesting discussion on the relationship between being right and being intelligent.

If you’re always wrong, you’re not smart. But if you’re never wrong does it mean you are smart? TK said no, and I think I he’s onto something.

Imagine someone who plays Trivial Pursuit. Getting a lot of answers right is impressive. But if someone gets every single answer perfectly correct every single time, something’s up. They memorized all the correct answers. They’re unerring, but also kinda dumb.

Why is it dumb?

For one, it’s on odd use of time. Who would determine that getting every answer right in Trivial Pursuit was worth the time to memorize all the cards vs all the other things you could do with that time? Probably someone who has a perspective that’s out of whack. Maybe they overly value winning a meaningless board game. Maybe their opportunity cost is low.

Another problem is that it signals a misunderstanding of the point of Trivial Pursuit. It is meant to be a challenge. It’s fun when you know some, but not all the answers. It’s fun when you have to work to remember and make associations. To memorize all of them and never miss is to not play the game everyone else is playing. It shows a kind of social stupidity.

It might also imply fear or arrested development. If Trivial Pursuit cards can be memorized, why not apply that brain power to a new, bigger challenge? Why stick with games you are guaranteed to win? Engaging only in activities where you’re the school yard bully signals something missing in your motivator.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but you get the general idea.

So maybe what Turing and TK are getting at is that intelligence is more complicated than knowing stuff. Maybe it’s about ability to learn. Maybe it’s about change and progress. Progress can’t happen without new challenges. New challenges are, by definition, full of unknowns. Unknowns mean you won’t know the right response every time. You’ll get stuff wrong. You need that feedback to incorporate into your worldview so you can alter your understanding, then get it right. The process is intelligent, even if the answers at individual steps are sometimes wrong.

Maybe to be infallible is to me immobile.

I’m not sure if this is what Turing meant, but there’s something in it.

I’m a big believer in agnosticism. (See what I did there?)

There are so many things that don’t require a strong opinion or position, and don’t warrant dying.

It’s very stressful to be confronted with questions and claims about culture, physics, politics, psychology, health, economics, history, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy and feel the need to have a clear answer. Especially when answers immediately get interpreted as sides and you’ll get lumped in with some tribal collective blob and be associated with whatever bundle of biases they may have, real or imagined. It’s like behind every possibility lurks a mob shouting, “Are you with us or against us?!”

This is bad for curiosity, learning, and fun.

Besides having fewer opinions and focusing on individuals instead of collectives, another way I’ve found relief from relentless pressure to pick is to think in probabilities instead of binaries.

“Do you think eating gluten is bad for you?” is the kind of question that makes you feel a bit uneasy. You know about the weird tribes in this debate and don’t want to be in them. Still, maybe you’re interested in the topic for yourself or as a general curiosity. If you’re not content with, “I don’t know”, try assigning probability.

“I think there’s a high probability that too much gluten is one cause of my digestive problems” is way more relaxing. You don’t have to give up the examination. You don’t have to stay out of the conversation entirely. But you distance yourself from binary conclusions and tribes, individualize your opinion, and leave open the possibility that your sliding scale of probability can change with more information.

You can’t fake it though. If deep down you’re a hard-liner (which is not all bad in every situation, just very, very dangerous), pretending to be probabilistic to seem sophisticated will only make you more stressed. If you can begin to unwind the reactive need to pick a yes/no and assign probabilities, you will find a release of tension and an expansion of curiosity. You may even be able to read Twitter debates with a smile instead of rage!

Sometimes, the best bench player in the league cannot be a starter. He’s at his ceiling.

Sometimes, a middling bench player can become an all-star starter.

This is what makes talent identification so hard. Sometimes A players in a role are maxed out, and if they get promoted to a bigger role, they flop. They were already at their global maximum.

Other A players have many levels left before they stop being A players. They’re at their local maximum in their current role, but have a much higher global maximum.

But the harder part are those playing at a B level in role 1, who when moved to more difficult role 2 become A players. How are you supposed to spot that?

It’s a weird thing. You might see the fifth-best cashier end up becoming a great manager at the grocery store, where the top three cashiers could never cut it. The best player on the high school basketball team is probably a smaller point guard who works hard but has already pushed his body to its limits, while the slightly less polished and aggressive big man who has another five years of physical development left might go on to play in college.

People with high potential tend to have a lot of pride and work ethic, and they tend to find things they’re good at quickly, so it’s rare to find a really awful or persistently weak person in a role who has big upside elsewhere. But it’s not at all uncommon to find a good but not great person in one role who has a higher global maximum than the best at that role.

Traits for role success aren’t always the same as traits for life success. There’s a difference between how high you go in a role or phase vs how many roles or phases you can make it through.

It’s for this reason that I don’t get as excited about domain expertise as general potential. Someone operating near a local maximum is cool, but I’m always more interested in people who have the largest global maximum. Sure, you beat level 4 with no damage and max bonus points. But how many more levels do you have in you?

We live in abundant times. This presents an interesting conundrum when it comes to succeeding.

Success is not the result of pure luck or genetics. Success is a discipline that can be learned. You can deliberately build your ability to succeed. Pick a challenge. One that’s hard but not too hard. Persist until you figure out how to overcome that challenge. It builds confidence that you take with you to the next, slightly bigger challenge. That’s how you learn success.

But what if you begin with a challenge that’s too big?

You can just as easily learn failure. I don’t mean learn from failure, which is what happens while you’re persisting at a challenge that’s big enough but not too big. I mean learn failure as a habit or mindset. If you take on a challenge outside your current capabilities, you will in all likelihood get disheartened, internalize your insufficiency, and extrapolate it broadly.

Thus the conundrum of an age of abundance.

If we accept some form of Maslow’s hierarchy, the most basic human challenges of food, shelter, and safety are taken care of. We’re born into the middle of the pyramid. This is not a bad thing. I don’t want my kids to have to scavenge for food and clothing. But because success compounds, those born into abundance can miss out on the first, most basic forms of success, and then find the rest out of reach.

The extreme example of the kid born into great wealth and status is familiar to us from books and movies. The first challenge that kid is faced with is self-actualization. All the smaller battles have been won on her behalf. That is a really massive challenge. No wonder there are so many dysfunctional trust fund babies.

But it’s not just the uber-elite. A lot of young people feel like failures and struggle to succeed at anything. In the world of careers, with which I am very familiar, you have people in their twenties taking on their first job and experiencing existential trauma because they feel the need to find work that speaks to their deepest calling. They’re starting with self-actualization, which is too big a challenge.

They never had to fight the small battle of just learning to finish a task without praise. They never had to fight the slightly bigger battle of earning their first five dollars. They never overcame the challenge of learning to show up on time and not get fired. They never learned to overcome escalating social challenges like being ignored or misunderstood.

Well-intentioned parents save their kids from all the small, early challenges and point the kid to big ones. The kid who never learned how to cope with not being chosen first in basketball is told “Get into an elite university”, or, “Become a doctor”, or, “Make me proud.”

So a lot of people are wandering around feeling lost because they don’t know how to “make a dent in the universe”. It’s not because they are failures. It’s because they skipped too many steps. Figure out how to walk before you try to run.

Imagine if we tried to help babies out by building mechanical legs and hooking them up to IVs. “Poor kid was crawling on the floor, barely mobile, and totally reliant upon his mother for food. We’ve solved that, now he can move around and tackle bigger, more creative problems!”

It would destroy the development process. The kid would never walk, never bond, and probably have digestive health and psychological issues forever.

When we remove grunt work, low pay jobs, skinned knees, hurt feelings on the playground, and all the small challenges that kids confront first, we remove the first rungs on the success ladder. When we place big epic battles for meaning as the first our kids ever face, we make failure easier to learn than success.

Fight smaller battles. Win them. Then fight slightly bigger battles.

Don’t worry about slaying dragons until you learn to swat flies.

I took my son to get a prescription the other day. We knew exactly what we needed and just had to jump through the protectionist hoops of the cowardly medical cartel to get it.

When the doctor asked about his symptoms, he described at length over a long span of time everything he’d experienced. I wanted to interrupt and just tell her the one-sentence I knew mattered to her in the whole story, but I decided not to. I remember when doctors asked me similar questions in the past, and I thought they needed every detail (probably in part because I assumed they were House-like detectives who would gain insight from the details, instead of mostly disinterested pill pushers.)

With time and experience, I learned which bits of information didn’t really matter. Not just talking to doctors, but everywhere.

I worked for a guy who had me scan and summarize every piece of incoming mail as if they were of equal importance. He’d double check to make sure I hadn’t discarded anything without running it by him. It was a huge time suck. Then I worked for a guy who was the total opposite. He’d get annoyed if I brought anything to his attention that wasn’t totally and completely interesting, urgent, and relevant. That’s when I realized that probably 90% of incoming mail is useless.

In fact, 90% of pretty much any incoming information is useless.

If not useless, at least not actionable, and certainly not worthy of mention in conversations or meetings meant to drive action.

I’ve seen my kids provide way too much information in several situations, and I have too. The inability to spot useless information is a sign of a young mind. The more intelligence is developed, the more information gets left out. People who tell you only the parts that really matter have a kind of genius.

I know time and experience are needed to develop this kind of omission intelligence. I’m not sure if there are other ways to enhance it, or to what extent certain people are predisposed to it. But it’s subtle and very valuable.

I’m sure you can think of all kinds of worries and dangers in becoming good at ignoring things. Perhaps there are some. It’s not the only kind of intelligence, but it definitely is a kind of intelligence.

(I wrote a little more on this topic a few years back).

Just before I fell asleep last night, I had a brilliant idea.

It was so good. It was a sequence of two big ideas that built on one another, I think. It was going to be one of the greatest blog posts I’ve ever written, I’m pretty sure.

The title alone packed a provocative punch, so I recall.

I didn’t have a pen and pad or phone or anything in the bedroom with which to record the idea. I repeated the bullet points to myself over and over in order, nesting them firmly in my psyche before I drifted off.

I awoke excited to reconstruct the epiphany and probably change the world forever.

But I forgot.

All of it was gone. I’ve got nothing.

I guess you can go read this post I published on the Crash blog today instead. It’s pretty good.

I’ve received some excellent advice in my life.

Most of the time, it doesn’t seem like great advice. It seems like simple, obvious stuff I already know, or close enough. Then six months later I have the, “Ohhh, now I see. Wow. That was great advice.”

I don’t know if this is because I’m arrogant or dense, or if this is an inevitable process. Information without enough context isn’t that useful. If a marathoner tells you that the last few long runs in your training regime will be harder than the race itself, you’ll smile and nod. It won’t seem that useful. Six months later, when you’ve got just two more weekend long runs at 20 and 22 miles each before the marathon, it will be the most comforting, inspiring advice imaginable.

This is why it’s hard to recognize good advice.

Bad advice, I think, is easy to recognize. It just feels stupid right away. Your gut knows it’s off. You can read misaligned motives and incentives. It makes you grumpy, and not in a challenge you want to rise to sort of way.

Good advice usually doesn’t feel bad right away, it just doesn’t feel that amazing. It becomes more profound with each passing unit of time+experience. Not all simple-sounding advice turns out to be profound. Some of it turns out to be no more than meets the eye. But some of it gets better with age like a fine wine.

Makes me wonder what great advice is currently marinating in my brain that I haven’t yet recognized as such.

Reputation is.

TK Coleman told me about a Catholic Saint who faced martyrdom if she did not publicly deface a crucifix.

(I should mention, a few minutes on Google and I couldn’t find the specifics of the story. It’s possible it’s different than what I remember from TK, but for purposes of this post, that’s irrelevant. The way TK told it stuck with me and illustrates something powerful.)

Being a saint, wholly devoted Christ and focused on a heavenly kingdom, she was ready and willing to be a martyr for her beliefs.

But that was too easy.

At the moment she faced the decision of death or defacement, she heard the voice of God tell her step on the face of the crucified Christ. She, a devoted Christian, was asked by God there, in front of everyone, to disrespect the cross. She was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice.

She claimed an unwavering devotion to God come what may. Death may not have been enough to make her turn away, but would the protection of her reputation?

This story presents an uncomfortable set of questions.

It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing we have unwavering devotion to something. We’d suffer poverty, pain, even death. But part of the reason we feel ready for them is because they are viewed as heroic by others.

The real test of commitment to a person, plan, or ideal is what the Saint faced. Would she do the thing she knew was right despite the fact that every single other person would view it as vile? Would she choose holiness even if it meant everyone else for all of history would see her as unholy?

You are willing to die, but are you willing to be misunderstood?

You can imagine versions of this today. Pick the thing you are willing to sacrifice anything for. A belief. Your family. A goal. It’s not too hard to imagine suffering or dying for it. In fact, imagining it can make you feel proud.

Now imagine doing something for it that you know with every fiber of your being is right and true, but no one else can or ever will. In fact, everyone else will forever misinterpret your actions as the worst possible kind. History will make you one of its villains.

Would you do what you know is right even if it meant you were forever thought by everyone to be a loser, a liar, a coward, a scoundrel, or the most perverted and disgusting criminal imaginable?

Scary stuff.

This thought exercise is one of the best I know of to discover the gaps between who we are, who we say we are, and who we want others to think we are.

I die a little ego death just thinking through it.