“You’ve been nominated to be on this list of top people!”

I’m a marketer. I know the strategy. Give awards to people you think will in turn want to pay you for things. Buy some goodwill with flattery.

I know it. But I’m still flattered.

Anytime you find games that still work even when everyone knows it’s a game, figure out why, tap into the principles at play, and do more with those principles.

There’s the short-term, action-oriented, task-focused brain. Then there’s the deep-pondering, less-contained, creative-focused brain.

Sometimes, they’re the same brain.

What I find troubling is how hard it is to separate them. When I have finally created that mythical perfect environment to create – no pressure for time, quiet, the house to myself, maybe a whiskey or a pipe – I can start a great many things, but rarely finish them.

I don’t just mean not finish them in that moment. That would be fine. I mean when I come back to what I started, I find it extremely difficult to finish. Yet starting and finishing something in one sitting, as I do these daily blog posts, comes very easy for me.

Task-checking mode seems to drive a completionist sort of creativity. While creative mode seems to allow me to start things, but the mere act of starting relieves sufficient creative pressure that I’m too relaxed when I return to finish.

Should I just accept this tendency, and determine all I’m good for are shorter articles that can be written in a single sitting with no forethought, or should I fight the pattern and try to learn how to have ongoing longer projects?

I’m an emergent order kind of guy.

I think most of the time, when we try to plot and plan processes for everything from the top and beginning, we waste time and get it wrong enough that it will change anyway. Better to nail down a very few principles, and let the processes emerge organically from the interactions of real humans within the broad confines of these principles.

These emergent processes can later be codified for easier scaling. But by that point, the codes serve mostly for new people to speed up the acclimation process, and to handle edge cases more quickly.

Starting with a fat foundation of coded culture feels fraught.

However, I will admit I sometimes take this too far and fail to setup a clear enough and defined enough foundation. I rely on a few principles, mostly unspoken or ill-defined, and wait for the emergent order to come. It does come, but sometimes along the way everyone is irritated and confused by the vagaries.

Part of me wants to just blame people for seeking too much guidance, trained by schools and states to be rule-followers who fear their own freedom. Whether or not this is true, it doesn’t help anything. We’ve got to deal with reality as we encounter it, so people’s desire for more clarity and definition demands some bending on my part.

I’m still working on that.

Does it still count when

Night before the day begins

Haiku post is in

There’s almost no downside to going too big, too strong, more than enough for the job.

There’s always some downside to going just big enough, just barely powerful enough, exactly enough for the job.

Overkill is the way.

It’s not contract work. It’s not full-time work. It’s not fractional work. It’s not project based work. It’s not consulting. It’s not agency. It’s not employee.

It’s not remote. It’s not in-person.

It’s not public school. It’s not private school. It’s not homeschool. It’s not unschool, or outschool, or alternative school.

Increasingly, the ways we orient our lives around learning and career are blurring all boundaries and creating things that are hard to name and categorize, but make solving our problems easier.

This is great news!

Whenever I’m in the American West, it feels new and fresh.

The air is crisp. The buildings and bridges aren’t very old. The culture is young and wide eyed, removed from the cynical and established coastal cultures.

The people aren’t many generations removed from those crazy frontiersmen that trekked out here and started cities. It’s big, open, naive, and simple.

I definitely crave the endless ocean horizon, but these elevated plains offer something I’ve not encountered anywhere else in the world. The land may be ancient, but the people are new.

My Uber driver has been married 34 years.

He told me it’s a tragedy how common divorce is. He said his marriage has been hard, and didn’t get easier with time. But he said weather is hard too. You always want clear skies and sun, but it’s often cloudy, rainy, stormy, and every so often a hurricane may even swing through.

Yet nobody gets divorced from the weather. Because you can’t. You just hunker down and get through it. There’s no choice but to do so because weather is inescapable. Yes, you can alter your location or dwelling to improve the odds of better weather, but you’re always subject to it wherever you go.

Oddly, I’ve never heard someone say they feel enslaved to the weather. When escape isn’t an option, we find a way.

This reminded me of a line in The Horse and His Boy,

“One of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

Most people have been raised with little choice, spending the bulk of their time in schools that resemble mini prisons, given little choice or control over their environs. When given choice, they can lack the resolve to make the tough ones. The power of self discipline has atrophied at the hand of external control.

Freedom is better than slavery. Choice is better than no choice. But we must recognize our own limited power to exercise it wisely, and remind ourselves that we are grittier than we think, and some hardships are worth weathering.

The fact that you could escape a tough situation is sometimes enough to prevent you from bringing your full resolve.

The nice thing about the weather is it usually clears. When it does, the sunshine tends to be all the better.

Usually the next step in life unfolds in a way that is almost impossible to miss if your eyes are trained to notice.

When something you’ve been intrigued by and reading and thinking about gets brought up by a friend in one context, a colleague in another, and a totally disparate interest also intersects with it all within a few weeks or months, it’s usually pointing somewhere you should probably go.

As the threads layer thicker and thicker, the path becomes clearer. Where there is only a single thread or single interest or idea or relationship, and pursuing it does not results in multiple others weaving in, it’s probably a dead end.

Animals to not build civilizations.

Plato might say it’s because they lack the capacity for speech. Language is what civilizes man. That may be true, but don’t think it’s complete.

Sacrifice is what builds good things. Animals can and sometimes do make sacrifices. A mother chimp may risk its life for its child. But for the most part, these are reactive. There is a short time-horizon in the animal kingdom, and the kind of sacrifice based on the imaginings of long-term or even multi-generational plans are not found.

Animals do not appear to have a drive for self-improvement. They improve if conditions demand it, or if biology dictates it. Humans have this drive in spades. And to get healthier, stronger, smarter, kinder, or wealthier, we have to sacrifice.

To have children, friends, or careers, we have to sacrifice. To build houses or businesses we have to sacrifice. To create art or humor we have to sacrifice.

We are able to see in the near-term mini “deaths” – to temporary instincts and impulses – the greater life that can spring from it.

This is why religious traditions have always had sacrifice at their heart. They are laying out the pattern of reality, acting as the base layer by showing with symbols what is always true at every other layer. If our hearts and minds aren’t trained and conditioned to sacrifice as the foundation, we’ll never build great edifices.

This sacrifice used to take the form of murdering other humans or mutilating oneself. This is a dark and twisted form of sacrifice – the inevitable result of attempting to turn sacrifice from a precondition for a good life into a magical mechanism for gaining power over others.

Christs perfect sacrifice broke these warped versions and consummated the other less dark but still feeble forms of sacrifice humans looked to to align themselves properly with reality. He aligned everything. We, by participating in His sacrifice, align our own hearts and take part in the alignment of the whole cosmos.

As all great truths, it’s fractal. We can see how sacrificing a little spending now leads to greater savings and investment for greater future gains. The same principle is at play beneath the entire universe. Beginning each day by participating in the sacrifice that undergirds them all is the best way to fix our aim and move in the right direction.

Different than before

Now my joints are always sore

Time’s a one-way door

I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Hijacking Bitcoin, by Roger Ver and Steve Patterson.

The history of BTC is wild and full of lies, ops, scandals, villains, useful idiots, and (mostly failed) heroes. Like any history of things gone wrong, there’s a tendency to study it thinking you will then be able to prevent the same type of corruption in the future.

But I’m not so sure that’s possible.

Human institutions are run by humans. The more valuable and powerful they become, the more they corrupt the humans involved and attract the already corrupted. History teaches the inevitability of this pattern more than how to avoid it.

But even if it’s unavoidable (it can be stalled and delayed, but not avoided if there’s real power at stake) at the institutional level, the study of history offers you examples at the individual level.

Which kind of player will you be? What role will you take? By seeing what became of attempted power-seekers, reformers, resistors, those who went all in, those who opted out, those who played politics, those who didn’t, and every other type of character in the story, you can see what it does to them. That helps you choose what roles you should avoid or play.

Learning history won’t save the world, but it could save your soul.

People come and go
Memories fade

The things that you know
Will all get unmade

But for a brief moment
At the pluck of a string

All comes flooding back
With a melodic ring

Worlds are rebuilt
People revived

Feelings recovered
Thoughts made alive

Transported among friends
The sights, the scents

But just as quickly it ends
As the music relents

Memories burned
Intertwined with song

Painfully sweet
You hear, then it’s gone

Bring me back
In joy and pain

Just one more time
Let it play again

Not needing anyone’s good opinion is maturity. Not wanting anyone’s good opinion is pride.

I’ve spent a lot of my life working with young people in their education and career journey and the number one thing that makes them miserable is their need for the approval and praise of others.

As a result, I’ve focused a lot of energy and attention to trying to help people overcome that need. There is a certain confidence, humility (yes humility), and willingness to take risks that is needed to get over seeking stamps of approval or applause. Once achieved, the whole world opens up.

But if you push that mentality too far and actually begin to despise or look down on praise or approval from others or simply not enjoy it, you may be in danger of pride that can lead to darkness. This is a rather rare problem, but among some of the highest achieving not so rare.

If you’re not at least a bit moved and delighted by the praise of others, you’re losing some of your humanity. The process begins by being annoyed at praise from those you feel are lesser, and only enjoying it from your “betters”. It ends in despising it from anyone.

Take joy in a compliment! When someone is impressed, no matter how silly you think the thing is they are impressed by, allow it to warm you heart a little. Don’t need it, but enjoy the bonus. It’s good to know others are moved by things you do.

There is a natural pattern of older people thinking the current culture and trends are inferior to those of their youth.

I am not exempt from this, but I try to remain aware of my bias as much as possible. To this end, I check myself and flip perspective frequently to try to at least understand the point of view of those who think current culture and trends are an improvement over the past.

Every generation thinks theirs were “the good old days” and things are in decay. Each new generation laughs at this and is convinced these “good old days” are a bunch of sentimentalism and the present beats the past.

At least that’s what I’d observed and experienced my entire life until about five years ago.

Something changed, and now I’m wondering if it really is different this time.

Everyone – even young people – now seem to believe the past was superior to the present and even future, or at least near future. The disagreements are only over when things ‘peaked’. Some long for the very distant agrarian past. Some long for the optimistic 50s, the revolutionary 60s, the psychedelic 70s, or the glossy 80s. But the larger number seems to feel culture and “good times” peaked sometime in the 90s or early 2000s.

They debate the specific year, but this general idea is darn-near consensus. My teenage kids think this. Millennials think this. Gen Xers think this. (Boomers might think this too, though it’s hard to tell as they are largely too busy being grumpy and clinging onto their opinions and possessions as they squeeze out their remaining years. They don’t seem to worry much about the next generations.)

This is a very strange turn.

It breaks the typical pattern. It seems to signify that we are, in fact, in a decline. Materially, you can debate about whether it’s an improvement to have iPhones and WiFi while airplanes and customer service are worse, but culturally, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and perhaps cognitively and in physical health, most are fully convinced we have gone backwards. It’s hard to disagree.

It’s tough to determine the level of economic advancement, because it’s harder than ever for a young person to purchase a home in most places, yet they can connect with friends globally, create podcasts, work from anywhere, and many other things not previously possible.

The point is not to determine whether or not things are objectively better or worse. The interesting point is that everyone seems to subjectively experience things as worse and getting worse.

We seem to be sliding down the backside of a waning empire. There is a sadness, a frustration, but mostly an ironic resignation that everything is getting worse and no one knows how to stop it.

Everything breaks. Customer service is abysmal. No one seems to want to work. Pride of ownership is rare. Manners are all but nonexistent. Prices are high, debt is high, and optimism is in the trough.

The wonderful thing about this is it shatters all illusions of political or material salvation. Humans are in a vulnerable spot. We always are, but we can forget it when times are good. Realizing you are forces you to take stock, focus on what’s important, turn to God, and mind your own well-being instead of being a bored busybody for the world.

We were not made for this fallen world anyway. We are incompatible with it. We were made to take part in the process of redeeming it, and restoring it to its former glory as part of the Kingdom of God.

Best to stop feeling sad and get to work. Starting with our own hearts.