Yesterday, someone shared an article about all the bullshitters filling up the web.  It ripped on the kind of people who call themselves creativity coaches and keynote speakers and pump out advice articles and inspiring Steve Jobs quotes on social media, but have never actually built anything.

It was a fun little bit of cathartic sass.

It was also missing something: any chance of reducing the amount of bullshit in the world.

The article was basically, “Bullshitters exist, here’s what they are, they are idiots and should stop bullshitting.”  Commenters said things like, “Yeah, too bad they’ll never read this and listen.”  But why would they?

It reminded me of attitudes you sometimes here about entrepreneurs in illegal drugs.  “Drug dealers are terrible people and should stop ruining the world.”  Maybe it feels good to say, but it’s totally useless because it misses two key components necessary to generate change.

From where does demand derive?

It’s easy to tell self-help peddlers and drug pushers to stop selling.  But why can they in the first place?  If their stuff is so bad, who keeps buying it?

Like it or not, there is demand for both crack and fluffy creativity crap.  Even if you persuade one dealer to step dealing, another will fill the void as long as demand exists.

The article didn’t discuss the followers and consumers of bullshit.  It just suggested the people meeting the demand should stop doing it.  Why?  It’s clearly valuable to someone.  Wouldn’t it be more effective to tell the users they’d be better off not consuming it, but doing something else instead?

Placing all the blame on suppliers ignores the demand that makes them not only possible, but in the long run, inevitable.

What’s in it for me?

The article made no direct appeal to self-interest.  It was a condemnation of bullshiters and that’s about it.  But if you’re making a living or having fun re-sharing paraphrased quotes about people who built things, why would you want to stop just because some online author said you’re a phony?  What do you lose for stopping, and what do you gain?  Everything and nothing, respectively.

A more effective way to change behavior is to refrain from telling the target how bad they are, and instead tell them (or better yet show them) how much more effective they could be if they did things differently.  What are the downsides and unseen costs of building a “tribe” around fluffy secondhand bullshit?  What other ways could the benefits be better captured?  How might an aspiring “thought leader” build something first, or create rules for what kind of content they’ll share?

Put them both together…

Better yet, combine attention to the demand side with focus on self-interest.  Show the consumers of bullshit how it’s hindering progress toward their goals.  Demonstrate the dangers and present an alternative.  There’s a reason people consume this stuff.  Show them how to meet the need in better ways, just as you might help an addict channel their compulsive behaviors into something less damaging.

I actually liked the article.  It was fun, punchy, and described a real phenomenon that I roll my eyes at often.  Still, it’s too easy to assume idiocy instead of rational self-interest, and to demonize suppliers rather than understand demand and create alternatives.

If the world is awash in bullshit, introduce beauty.

Yesterday, my always interesting friend Chris Nelson mentioned a local public works project that struck him as useless.  As we chatted, it struck me how often we give very old things more praise than they are due.

Think of public works projects and boondoggles.  You can probably think of several off the top of your head.  The bridge to nowhere in Alaska, the Big Dig in Boston, Auto World in Flint, ugly windmills dotting southern Ohio, and basically every government project ever in the city of Detroit come to mind.

Give it a few hundred years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if archaeologists and historians treat the crumbled remains of these hideous resource-wasters as brilliant and important stepping stones for humanity.  If you go only by the plaques adorning them and official ceremonies surrounding them, you could conclude nothing else.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as easy to do this now, with so much access to contemporary opinions and information about these dumb projects, but it’s very easy to do with the past.

Watch any documentary about old castles or great tyrant-led serf-funded projects of bygone eras and you might conclude that every cathedral, bridge, wall, and tower was a picture of beauty, ingenuity, and efficiency.  What if many of these remains were the ancient or medieval equivalent of the Motor City’s useless People Mover?  How much graft and architectural error went into these projects?

Knowing what we know about humans, and especially the nature and incentives of force-funded centralized prestige projects, no doubt many of the cherished monuments of the past were big dumb symbols of fatally conceited rulers.  We get to see the remains of buildings, but what we can’t see – and what Frederic Bastiat reminds us we must look for – are all the things that didn’t get built or accomplished because of these massive boondoggles.

All projects are not created equal, all castles are not examples of government waste (many were private endeavors), and perhaps those that survive longest do because they were the most valuable and well-constructed.  Still, we’d do well to take a dose of rational choice realism with our romantic forays into past architecture.

Just as it is naive to assume every practice and belief of the past was dumb superstition, it’s naive to assume every ruin was a brilliant and valuable construction.  It’d be fun to see (and maybe one exists, I don’t pretend to be a history buff) a project that documents great boondoggles through the ages, tallying budget overages, deadlines missed, waste, graft, obsolescence, and idiocy.

If the Great Men approach to history is dangerously simplistic (and it is), so too is the Great Works approach.

If I could choose to be the most knowledgeable person in the world or the most curious, I’d choose the latter without hesitation.

Every interesting thing I’ve done has been a direct result of curiosity.  Every professional success has stemmed from the fact that I was curious about more than just my role, but every facet of the organization and everyone else’s job, story, process, and motivations.

Curiosity spurs action, knowledge kills it

A burning question drives a relentless pursuit.  A heap of facts cultivates cautious analysis.  I would have never attempted to launch Praxis if I had more knowledge at the start.  Knowing what I know now wouldn’t have been an advantage, but a roadblock.  Instead, I was driven by a question, “What if you could get young people from where they are to a career they love for zero cost in a year or less?  What would that look like?”  I had to find the answer, and the market was the only reliable source.  I had no choice but to build this thing.

This is a common story.  Nearly every entrepreneur will tell you that their early ignorance of the road ahead, coupled with insatiable curiosity, was a more powerful force than a mass of market knowledge.

If knowledge drove innovation, startups would be primarily founded by very old and very knowledgeable intellectuals.  Instead, academics are usually the most risk-averse, inaction-biased people on the planet.  They know too much (or at least they think they do).

Don’t lose the questions.  Don’t lose the curiosity.  Even after pursuit of it rewards you with knowledge.  Never be so knowledgeable that you lose naive optimism that new discoveries are around the corner.

Knowledge is cheap, curiosity is priceless

Google has made factual knowledge all but useless.  Remember when you had to call your music obsessed friend to settle a fight over what year a song debuted?  Knowledge has never been less valuable, which in turn has made penetrating curiosity and ability to ask the best questions more valuable than ever.

But it’s not just about the internet.  Knowledge has always been less valuable than curiosity.  Henry Ford didn’t know how to do almost any specific operation in his business, but he could let his questions drive him to find those who could.  Einstein was famously ignorant several of basic facts, because he wanted to free his mind up for the higher level work of questioning and imagining.

Cultivate curiosity

Doubtless some people are born more curious than others.  But curiosity can be cultivated.

School tries very hard to kill it; in fact, it is designed expressly for that purpose.  Determine what questions are fair game, make kids answer them with threat of punishment, treat all other explorations as wasteful, distracting, or disobedient.  Reward recitation of previously answered questions and shut down new ones.

Formal education won’t do it for you.  You’re going to have to become curious yourself.  Deschool your mind, then begin to ask questions.

Curious games

I play simple games, like trying to calculate how much money a coffee shop is making during the hour I’m sitting there.  Try it.  You’ll soon start wondering how much they’re paying for rent and wages and supplies, and how much profit they’ll pull in (or loss).  Next, you’ll begin to wonder how long they can stick around at this estimated pace.  Before you know it, you’ll have dreamed up the next three most likely businesses to fill the vacated real-estate when the coffee shop flops.

The curious employee > the knowledgeable one

I’ve hired curious people and I’ve hired knowledgeable people.  The latter are generally less fun to work with and have a much lower ceiling, even if they can do their specific task well.  The former are a font of delightful surprises.  They make me better because they ask questions I hadn’t thought of.  They excite me, because every waking hour I know that not only are they doing their job, they are exploring and probing and chasing their curiosity all kinds of places and will bring back cool new ideas that benefit the company.

Even abstract questions that seem at first to have no connection to your daily work will make you better and more valuable. I stumbled upon Rational Choice Theory via myriad rabbit trails started due to my curiosity about how wealth is created, and it’s made me far better at management, product design, sales, and marketing.

Don’t overthink learning

Learning new things is far easier and can be done much faster than everyone thinks.  Possessed by a fit of wild curiosity, a person can learn at breakneck speed.  Possessed of a desire for the prestige or safety that comes with certified knowledge, learning is slow and painful, and the rewards full of stagnant, predictable mediocrity.  Explosive growth is spurred by curiosity, not knowledge.

Be interested.  Be curious.

I have a Pandora station built around epic move soundtracks and songs that make me feel like I’m fighting a dragon with a flaming sword.

It works every time.

If I’m a little stale or dull or tired of the same old podcasts or in a work rut, I go for a walk, pop in the headphones, and let Hans Zimmer, Michael Giachinno, or Ennio Morricone pull my body out of the suburbs and into the epic tale of my life, seen from 30,000 feet.

Few things have the same power to remind me why I do things, and inspire me to push through the crap.

There’s a reason stories have been the most effective medium of communication since man’s beginning.  Music that conjures and teases out your story in your mind’s eye is a powerful tool.

This isn’t a blog post, it’s a last ditch volley of flaming arrows to signal the coming charge into destiny.

My son does a rock climbing class every week. Today, he remarked how funny it is to hear hardcore climbers talk, because their lingo is like a foreign language. 

I just watched a recap of the Kentucky Derby, and had the same thought. The world of horse racing has a language as comfortable to its participants as 80’s power ballads are to me.

Technically, these all share the same language.  But practically, they are as inaccessible to an outsider as a conversation in Spanish or Cantonese to an English-only speaker.

It makes me think about the definition of a language. How many are there?  Is it infinite?  What’s the line betweeen accent, jargon, dialect, and language?

Some games you can hack and bump with no fouls. Others get ticky-tacky and call every touch. Still others are inconsistent and make calls to stop and start runs and momentum swings to make it feel balanced.

The point is that it doesn’t matter how the game is called. Greatness can adapt and win under any conditions. What matters is knowing how the game will be called so you can exploit it.

The longer you complain about how it should be called, the less time you have to get an edge by playing to the way it is being called. 

Someone who can only succeed with a certain type of calls isn’t great. Someone who plays the same no matter what isn’t great either.  Greatness requires adjusting the game you practiced in the gym to the one being called under the lights. 

You can’t control what you don’t have a stake in.

Likewise, you can’t be controlled if no one has a stake in you.

Jesus said the devil had nothing in him.  He didn’t say the devil had nothing on him, or no leverage over him.  Anyone can use information about you as dirt on you.  Anyone can use their perceived position, or your desires, to have something over you.  But the only real harm is when you let those things in you, let them claim a piece of you, let them have an equity share.

Let them do and say what they will.  Let them plot and scheme and attempt manipulation.  If you don’t need them, they have nothing in you.  If they have no hooks in you, you won’t turn when they pull their strings.

Fans are fun, customers are crucial.

Fans tell you keep going no matter what, customers seek value.

Fans have lots of positive and negative feedback, customers have their wallets.

Fans can make you feel like a millionaire or a schlub, customers can make you one.

Fans want your time and attention and want to give you theirs, customers want results and give you what they think it’s worth.

Fans want to know what you think, customers want to experience what you build.

Fans like big movements and camaraderie, customers like effectiveness, even if lonely.

Fans like your personality, customers respect your product.

Work-life balance is an overrated concept.

Even if you think only in terms of your work, you’ll find need for ample time outside, with others, excercising, unplugged, creating, and consuming new ideas.  Focusing on good work alone will lead you to this. Good work demands it. You don’t need to separately worry about your personal self as distinct from your productive self.

You can if you want. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just overrated. 

Getting “right” personally as a precondition to professional growth is overrated too. Personal problems and stresses are discovered and improved better and more often through productive work than through avoiding it to get personal.

Finding your passion is more likely if you’re busy creating value. 

Finding yourself is easier if you have a context within which to apply yourself and get feedback from the world. 

Self-reflection is improved by real world experience, not a prerequisite for it.

Get busy building something. Your personal problems will begin to assume proper proportion.  You’ll know yourself better and improve yourself more if you’re productive. 

I think it’s a decent default rule to take the lowest pay you can for the first decade or so of your career.

If you ignore pay and focus on other things, I’m willing to bet you’ll be happier and earn more pay a decade in than someone who maximizes pay from day one.

I’ll walk you through my own example to explain some of the reasons I think this is true.

An early choice

It wasn’t a dramatic sell-your-soul-for-riches moment, but at age 19 I had a juicy job offer.  I had just gotten married, had no job (nor did my wife), zero cash, and a mortgage to pay.  I was working odd electrical and landscape gigs and sending out resumes.

I had a job opportunity that my friends were jealous of.  It had a $45k base salary, company car, plus commission.  They said I’d likely make around $50k in my first year.

I said no.

I wasn’t really excited about the job, but I could’ve been fine with it.  Beyond looking for something more connected to my interests and skills, I also knew this job had a fairly low ceiling.  I’ve never been primarily motivated by money, but I knew some middle aged people who had essentially the same job and I knew their life seemed pretty mediocre to me, financially and otherwise.

Instead, I got a job I was thrilled about that paid $25k.  I excelled, and it led to several next steps with slightly higher pay.  Here’s my first eight years in the professional world.

My actual pay trajectory:

Year 1: $25,000
Year 2: $28,000
Year 3: $35,000
Year 4: $35,000
Year 5: $40,000
Year 6: $40,000
Year 7: $45,000
Year 8: $75,000

Seven years in, I was still making less than that first offer I turned down.  I never focused on pay.  I don’t think I ever asked for a raise.  That year seven job probably paid me too much too.  I would’ve done it for $40k, but I wasn’t going to turn down the higher offer.

Let’s compare my pay trajectory to a very reasonable estimate of what I would’ve pulled in over the same eight years with the other job.

My forgone pay trajectory:

Year 1: $50,000
Year 2: $55,000
Year 3: $60,000
Year 4: $60,000-$65,000
Year 5: $60,000-$65,000
Year 6: $60,000-$65,000
Year 7: $60,000-$70,000
Year 8: $60,000-$70,000

The job had a pretty consistent ceiling.  The best performers made somewhere between $60-70k.  It wasn’t a role or industry that really had a clear path to something else within either.  A jump to something totally new can always be made – I’ve done it myself more than once – but one of the dangers with high pay early is that it makes those jumps harder and less likely.

So for seven years, I looked like a poor sucker compared to my company car driving alternate self.  But by year eight, I not only surpassed the ceiling of the previous trajectory, but had massive amounts of opportunity and social capital at my disposal, not to mention greater fulfillment in my work.

Why does it work this way?

I think there are several reasons I was better off taking the lowest pay my wife and I could handle for nearly every job for the first several years.  If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t find a way to live on even less and worry even less about pay.

For me, lower pay early on meant several things:

1. It was easier to be impressive

A great way to get ahead in your career is to always strive to be the best employee anywhere you work.  Not all employees are equal, and this is where low pay can be a big advantage.

A young $35k worker gets noticed for being just a little above average.  A young $60k worker, on the other hand, had better be pretty damn good to command that salary early in their career.

You can stand out to your colleagues and the broader world pretty easily when you’re a low paid employee.  Soon, you develop a reputation.  “Hey, have you met that young dude from that one place?  What a hustler.  Maybe he’d be a good fit for this…”  Again, this works both internally at a company and externally.

I had little problem establishing myself as impressive because being obviously worth more than a low salary is doable with a little hustle.  A great reputation built over those first several low pay years can catapult you to a higher pay in ten years than yearly cost of living increases at a fatter starting point.

2. It was easier to find what I loved and hated

$50k isn’t quite golden handcuffs, but it’s kind of like copper handcuffs.  Early, that’s a lot of money.  Once you’ve tasted it, it’s very hard to go back.  One problem my wife and I have is that we’ve always managed to live right up to our level of income.  Always.  Once you have high pay, going back is brutal.

This means that if you discover two years in you never want to audit tax documents again, it might be too late.  Not just to change, but to even see it.  You actually become worse at knowing yourself and being honest with yourself if you are paid a lot.  You weave stories about how much you kinda sorta like it, or how you’ll leave in five years.  Lies.  I saw many people do it.

Self-discovery is too important to play servant to your early income goals.

3. It was easier to find new opportunities

Opportunities travel through the grapevine.  You have to be sending a frequency that others tune into in order to find them.  People have a rough idea how much you make.  If you are a young hotshot with a big salary, I can almost guarantee someone somewhere has said, “Hey, she’d be a good fit…but doesn’t she make like $50k right now?  This role starts at $35k.  Doubt she’d do it.  Who else?”

I’ve said it about people many times.  Sometimes, the person in question was too senior for the role, but sometimes they were perfect for it but their pay was just too senior for the role.  Some of them will be making about the same in five years, where the role I decided not to consider them for could have blossomed into much more than that.

I got some very cool opportunities for jobs and side gigs that I never would have gotten had I started at the $50k job.  Low opportunity cost was my secret weapon.

You don’t realize it, but a highly paid young person is like a red flag to people looking for hungry young talent.  Salary maximizers often miss out on the best long-term opportunities.

4. It was easier to act on new opportunities

Even if you manage to gain self-knowledge, and you manage to find cool opportunities, if you’re earning bookoo bucks early, seizing them isn’t easy.

Again, the copper handcuffs begin to chafe.  You are used to a certain standard of living afforded by your high pay.  It can be hard to move to completely different areas and maintain it.  I had little trouble early on saying no to bad fitting roles and yes to cool ones with low pay.  I started at $25k and we learned to live on that (we had our first child while I was still making $28k for goodness sake!), so new opportunities weren’t big sacrifices.

Focus on what matters

Go in to each job with a mission to be the best employee there.  To create the most value, have the most fun, capture the company vision and help build on it, learn everything you can, help as many people as possible.  Don’t turn down a job you like over a few thousand in salary.  Don’t haggle over an offer to ratchet up the pay inch by inch.  Ignore salary altogether if you can.  Focus on building value for yourself and others.

I’m willing to bet the entire $50k I passed on in year one that you’ll be doing better a decade down the road than those who maximize pay above all.

I watched Greg Popovich in a press conference the other night and loved it. 

Pop is cold, short, sometimes rude.  Once upon a time, I would’ve thought it needlessly impolite. I placed a higher value then on gentle interactions and decorum. I’m not a naturally rude person, and I looked for sunshine in others and felt uncomfortable if it wasn’t there.  I’ve always liked direct people, but preferred it colored with a smile. 

Every year that goes by I value politeness less.  I don’t really care about rudeness. In more and more instances, I think it’s actually preferable to be colder.

I’m not sure why. I do not feel jaded or bitter or cynical. If anything, I’m more at peace, optmistic, and fulfilled than ever.  Maybe that’s it. Perhaps offense at impoliteness betrays nagging tension with our own relationship to the world. 

Or maybe I’m just getting old. 

One in ten is a generous estimate of medical professionals who are highly knowledgeable and passionate about their work.  This is based entirely on my own interactions with everything from surgeons, specialists, pediatricians, ER doctors, and more.

From a customer standpoint, this sucks.  A tepid box-checker is a poor vendor of any good or service, not just health.  When you get your car fixed, you want the guy who’s fascinated by the clunking noise and getting all House M.D. in his zeal to find and fix it.  You want the lifetime gearhead who dreams about pistons at night.  When it’s your body, you want the actual House M.D.

But you’re almost never going to get it.

Most medical professionals aren’t very sharp, interested, passionate, or eager.  Not trying to be rude, they just aren’t.  It’s almost always a lackluster if not downright crappy experience.  They aren’t thrilled by sleuthing the root cause behind the symptoms in your unique body.  They rattle off tons of drugs they haven’t studied that might dull the symptoms, classify you with a government/insurance approved code, order several useless tests, and blather some condescending thing about flu-shots or the latest seasonal scare.

I suspect the reasons for the disinterest in most medical professionals are several.

1. They pursued the career for prestige, not intrinsic interest.
2. Intrinsic interest was beaten out of them in the industrial schooling system.
3. They are protected by a labyrinth of government regulations and monopoly status, so the incentive is to master the government game rather than master the craft, since the former is rewarded and the latter isn’t.
4. They have grown intellectually arrogant and stagnant due to the universal respect and awe in which they are held by a credential-worshiping media and public.
5. They were schooled in a “lump of dough” philosophy that treats problems and solutions in aggregate and plays down biological diversity while playing up one-size-fits all scientism.

It seems dentists, and especially chiropractors, have a much higher rate of deep interest in their field.  Midwives and doulas have a ridiculous, almost pathological love for their craft.

Not surprisingly, they have less of all of the above.  Their fields are less prestigious, less monopolized and cartelized with legal privilege, and they are less revered.  In the midwife/doula case, they almost never get reimbursed by insurance or recommended by the health industry, so they have to win and keep customers themselves like a self-respecting market participant.  They often face legal obstacles that make their practice borderline banned.  You’ve gotta be driven by a deep interest to persist in those cases.

Incentives matter more than anyone thinks.  The medical licensing regime is one of the more pernicious and pervasive elements of society.

My son told me about a plot he created for a dystopian movie.  It involved dissidents being sent to a dreaded penal colony another planet away, never to interact with the home civilization again.   When they got there, they realized it wasn’t the hell they feared and fled from their whole lives, but a paradise filled with the best minds (the kind who would be banished from a despotic society).  Incidentally, the only way to discover paradise a planet away was to be captured and banished, since no one there had any way to inform others about what was waiting on the other side of the law.

It got me thinking about examples of similar expectational twists, when the most deeply dreaded outcome turns out to be better than anything you could’ve imagined.  Especially those where there is no way of knowing how good it can be until you do it.

Everyone fears the horror of a world without government support for education.  What if no one could afford to go to school?  Most assume hell, I think it would be delightful.  Our transition into unschooling was a microcosm of this realization.

Leaving your loved ones sounds terrifying to most.  What if you were uprooted from your hometown, leaving all friends, family, and network behind, forced to start fresh in a new city far away?  Few things are more amazing and valuable for personal growth.  In fact, the more you fear it, the more you probably need to do it.  And you can’t ever access what’s on the other side without biting the bullet and saying goodbye.

My son was convinced our new baby would ruin the balance in the family, taking his happiness with it.  He came home and met his baby brother and told me his months of stress were for naught.  Maybe that’s what inspired his plot.

I suspect death will be the ultimate plot twist of fear into wonder.  Guess I’ll have to wait and see.