I’m stuck in a low-grade hotel in Corbin, KY.  The coffee tastes like burnt water.  But it’s free.  So is the surprisingly fast WiFi.

Corbin, I discovered from a roadside sign, is the home of “Colonel” Harlan Sanders and his famous fried chicken.  The town makes quite a celebration of the fact.

I love it.

How cool is it that a guy born in 1890 who built a restaurant chain that sells one of the humblest foods imaginable is honored like royalty?  Don’t get me wrong, he was a total baller.  He was the closest free-markets get to royalty; someone who created tons of wealth by making other people happy.

Most honorifics are reserved for pompous, often murderous asshole politicians.  I don’t know anything about the Colonel’s personality or integrity as a man, but I know he sold a ton of tasty, cheap chicken.  I prefer monuments to that over anything any politician ever did, every day of the week.

Oh, and I found this to add icing to the Americana cake…apparently someone in real life dressed up like the Colonel and pretended to beat up someone who dressed up like a chicken…and people paid to watch it.

It’s enough to give you chills.

via GIPHY

*Double bonus!

I flipped on the hotel TV, and after finally figuring out how to exit the hotel promo channel, stumbled upon the classic film, “The Waterboy”, right at the scene when Adam Sandler’s character screeches like a wild pig and tackles a professor that he calls “Colonel Sanders”.  Coincidence, or fate?

Yesterday, I published a list of some books that have provided useful mental models.

It was a huge mistake.

I edited it at least six times after publishing, and felt stress ever since, even waking up at night thinking of titles I forgot, or knowing there are still more I forgot that I forgot.

It feels wrong and inaccurate an unfair to post an incomplete list. But a complete list is not possible.

I’m done trying to document all the great books. I’ll just reference them individually when they come to mind.

The Inner Game of Tennis

The Act of creation

‘Till We Have Faces

Finite and Infinite Games

Breaking Smart Season 1

The Great Divorce

Paradise Lost

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Human Action

The Gervais Principle

That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen

The Optimistic Child

Punished by Reward

Dumbing us Down

A Timeless Way of Building

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Free to Learn

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

Flatland

Zero to One

The Scapegoat

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Future and Its Enemies

A Conflict of Visions

Theory and History

Abundance

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Principles of Economics

A Renegade History of The U.S.

Beyond Politics

The Not So Wild, Wild West

The Fourth Dimension

A Secret History of the World

The Myth of a Christian Nation

That Hideous Strength

The Book of the Dun Cow

Siddhartha

The Ultimate Resource

The Most Dangerous Superstition

Crisis & Leviathan

The Divine Conspiracy

Outwitting the Devil

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

That is an incredibly optimistic statement.

The sophomoric reading is that you are a bad person who should feel bad.  There is little optimism there.  To better appreciate what this statement can do for you, consider it in light of another Biblical statement,

Have I not said ye are Gods?

You fall short of your own potential.  In other words, “All have sinned” is an acknowledgement of the simple fact that you are not who you want to be and who you are capable of being.  The optimism is the possibility nested in this statement; that improvement toward your divine potential is possible.

It needn’t be read religiously if that distracts you.  Your own divinity can mean simply your ideal version of yourself; the best you can imagine being and desire to become.

If you have godlike potential and want to move toward the ideal form of the person you want to be, you must begin by acknowledging you are not there.  Progress requires discontentment with your current condition.  Then you can move to the optimism that says, “Which is precisely why I am constantly taking action to move towards what I am not yet.”  To see the possibility of your future potential requires accepting your current distance from it.

In Christian language, this is the process of salvation.  You could call it self-improvement, enlightenment, or progress if you like.

The first instinct is to think “Ye are Gods” is the optimistic statement, but it’s not.

It forces you to confront the reality of your own lack of divinity.  The fact that you can imagine a self better than who you currently are reveals inescapably that you are not yet Godlike.  “Ye are Gods” by itself can cause cynicism or depression: either the statement is a delusional sham because I can see I’m not Godlike, or I’m a sham for my failure to be so.

Hope is found in first owning the fact that you fall short of your potential and desire.  This leads to the discontentment necessary to drive action and the optimism that action can move you closer.

Create value for your customers before they’re your customers.

Create value for your customers when they are your customers.

Create value for your customers after they are your customers.

Who are your customers? Anyone with whom you want to exchange anything.

What if you have no identifiable customers?

You are your first and last customer. Create value for yourself every day.

This week on Office Hours, we talk about the power of daily challenges and answer four listener questions:

When I’m driving, I sometimes imagine individuals from various points in human history riding with me as we listen to the radio. I think about the songs, lyrics, even ads, and consider what kind of conversations and reactions they would generate from a person from medieval England or turn of the century America.

What would Bach think of The Black Keys? What would a farmer or slave in the new world think of modern blues and folk? What would a chariot driver think of going 70 on the highway?

I’ve played this mental game as long as I can remember. Sometimes it gets so exciting I feel genuine pain that I can’t transport someone from the past to experience the present.

Moved from one house to the next in the same neighborhood. Night and day difference. Never underestimate the importance of the direction light comes into the house.

I’m taking questions on Quora today on this topic.  Here’s the first, and my response.

In the startup world, an unspoken hostility exist towards having a family life while trying to grow startups. What’s your advice for how to go about doing both?

Well the first thing is to not worry about unspoken hostilities.

In general, just focus on your startup when it comes to investors, employees, etc. If what you’re doing makes sense and you’re getting traction, they won’t much care what you do outside of work.

If someone pushes or asks, own it. You can say, “It might be harder to do this with a family than without, I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier. I don’t really care. I’m doing it with a family and it’s going to succeed!”

I once heard someone say that if you want to be in startups, you get to pick two items from this list:

• Your company
• Social life/hobbies
• Family/love life

You can’t put energy into all three.

I fully believe this, and I’ve come to believe the trilemma goes further still…

It’s not just that you get to pick two, you have to pick two if you want to succeed.

That is, if you have absolutely nothing outside of your startup, you are likely to burnout, go insane, become a tyrant, lose heart, lose perspective, and lose your edge easier and sooner than if you have one other thing to ground you.

With a family, you’re at an advantage! You have no other hobbies or distracting flim-flam. You have your business and your family. Outside the company, you have but one incredibly powerful, grounding, perspective-granting, efficiency-rewarding, bullshit-cutting, incentive-setting thing that will make every minute you spend on your startup more valuable, and demand that you step outside of it every so often.

The three clearest ways having a family has helped me as an entrepreneur is with time, perspective, and motivation.

Bottom line, startups are really, really hard. There are always going to be challenges unique to you, or reasons you or others think you won’t succeed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a family, a hobby, a personality, a missing skill set, lack of capital, or anything else. Those are the obstacles that prevent everyone else from doing what you’re going to do.

Take pride in it.

Footnotes

[1] You Get to Pick Two | Praxis

[2] You Have to Pick Two – Isaac Morehouse

[3] The Advantages of Having a Family While Running a Business – Isaac Morehouse

At Praxis, we have an all-remote team, work happening nearly every hour of every day, rapid communication, high expectations, and bend-over-backwards customer service.

We are all pretty independent, confident, and unafraid of conflict.  We debate and discuss a lot of stuff, and have little patience for poor performance, delay, bureaucracy, or make-work.  We’re competitive, we want to win, and we’re trying to grow every day.

This is a great recipe for startup growth.  It’s also a great recipe for stress, misunderstanding, frustration, and tension.

To date, the greatest tool to relieve potentially contentious situations and re-frame things with proper focus is a movie reference.

Slack, Voxer, Zoom, email.  Doesn’t matter the platform.  When we’re deep in work discussions, a clever, well-timed movie reference always makes everything better.  I can’t think of an exception.

Someone finds out another team member was already working on a project they’d been grinding on themselves without telling them?  Everyone’s a little miffed, but there’s only one way to reset the mood and restore a proper, productive pace…

Sometimes, I ask two team members to work together to handle something where it might be quicker for just one.  A little annoyance at being pulled into an unexpected task can fester and harm culture.  But who could let it if it’s followed by this?

I can’t tell you how many times movie or TV references have bolstered morale, broken tension with a laugh, or re-aligned the narrative in a productive way when it could have gone subtly south (and sometimes inspired a mini YouTube binge session…maybe not great for productivity, but good for fun!)

The only things that come close to the power of movie and TV references for the health of the Praxis team are NBA references.

(Hip-hop references appear sometimes too, but those usually require a higher level of background knowledge and aren’t as universal).