When you are blessed, you are to be a blessing to others. Your success and happiness ought to bring success and happiness to others.

This is not stated as a guilt-tripping obligation, but simply as a proper ordering of things and a preventative against goodness going bad. Genuine blessing begets blessing. Just as offspring beget offspring, goodness begets goodness.

When you are blessed and you fail to let it spill out onto others and multiply, you are turning the blessing inward. What would be a joy and strength to you turns into a poison. Your cup is meant to overflow, not just to grow ever larger or be pressure-sealed. It will rupture or corrode your heart if you try to keep it in you, instead of letting it flow through you. A pond grows stagnant while a stream remains fresh.

Good comes into the world through good. If good happens to you, you can grow the goodness by letting it overflow to others. Bless with your blessings.

Late over never

Complete every endeavor

Slowly build treasure

Every time I’ve gotten involved in a project or venture, the key to success has been getting the right people rallied around it.

If you’re starting from absolute scratch, it’s very hard to find and rally the right people, and to figure out if they are in fact the right people until it’s too late. When the moment comes, having ready at hand a bunch of people with proven skills and trust is a superpower.

I’m always keeping a bunch of people rolling around in my head, thinking of ways in which I might work with them on current or future projects or companies. I try to keep this inventory fresh, and look for connections not just to my own stuff, but other opportunities I can plug them into.

Stay ready. You never know when you’ll need some help on what you’re working on!

To the pure, all things are pure. To the defiled, all things are defiled.

Someone asked me if I thought freedom was an external thing, or and internal thing. I think it’s both, but I think the internal is far more important and foundational.

If you don’t have internal freedom, you won’t experience external freedom either. You won’t be able to see it or feel it when it’s looking you in the face. If you do have internal freedom, external bondage won’t be nearly as bad, and external freedom will be fully experienced.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to expand your external freedom, but knowing the way the relationship works should direct you to put the bulk of effort on internal freedom first.

In my favorite book, The Great Divorce, the characters who spent their lives working on righteousness found not only the afterlife, but their entire earthly life also to have been heaven. Those who let themselves decay morally found the opposite. Not only was life on earth hell, but even when they experienced a heavenly afterlife it felt like hell to them. You bring with you what you are, and you read it back into your past too.

I can get glimpses of this in my present life. I’ve been married to my wife for twenty years. When we’re both behaving as we should, it genuinely feels looking back like every moment of our marriage has been bliss. In those rare times when we are nasty to each other, looking back on our marriage paints a less favorable picture.

This isn’t to say that perception is reality. But what’s going on inside us limits and colors our ability to experience aspects of reality.

This is why we must always cultivate righteousness, freedom, truth, and beauty in us. It is for our own good. If we do, then we can really experience these things when we meet them. If we do not cultivate them inside us, we will miss them, or worse yet, experience them as torments. If we do, it will always have been good. If we don’t, it will always have been bad.

Everyone is familiar with the impulse to pull others in to whatever lifestyle change is working for you.

Through trial and error and study you discover that abstaining from bread, or dairy, or sugar, or alcohol, or caffeine makes a positive change in your life.

Rather than be content with its effect upon you, you feel compelled to share this effect, backed by all your research and justifications, and convince others to do the same.

Not everyone acts on this impulse, but certainly enough do to make a large portion of online discourse arguments over competing health routines and disciplines. Some of them get quite nasty.

I always assumed this impulse was born out of the evangelical tendency – a desire to see others saved from what you’ve been saved from, and benefit like you are. Bu I came across a comment from CS Lewis that implied something different (paraphrasing):

“There is a certain type of bad man who cannot abstain from something without forcing others to do the same.”

This seems correct in my gut. But what about wanting others to adopt your dietary preferences is bad?

If your are trying to use the force of government, that initiation of violence is easy to identify as bad. If you are being rude or manipulative, that is easy to see as bad.

But there seems to be something bad about this impulse even when not acted on in a way that violates the rights or dignity of others. It seems to reflect a heart condition in the person who has it that is wrong.

I think at least part of it is insecurity, cowardice, and perhaps lack of faith.

If you feel convicted about drink, and heed the inner voice telling you to abstain, the best is to be secure in your decision, not fearing what others think and not wavering in your faith that this is right for you regardless of unpopularity or arguments against it. That is a healthy heart.

A weaker, sicker heart will want to shore up all kinds of external supports so that they can feel in the right, because being in the right is not enough. A weaker mind will constantly doubt their own inner conviction, and even their own positive results, if it makes them different from others. Weakness and badness are not the same thing, but nearly every form of badness comes from weakness.

So Lewis is right. Be wary of the man who cannot simply improve his life with this or that diet or discipline, but must wrap his entire identity around pleading, begging, forcing others to join.

This is not to say joyfully or academically sharing research or results of our own life choices is bad. But when tinged with a need for others to understand, defensiveness, or attacks on other choices, you can bet a bit of badness is festering or will be soon.

Subject: Followup on the deal

Hey Michael,

I appreciate all the info you’ve provided and the helpful back and forth about your product. Sadly, I’m going to have to terminate this deal.

I try to make a habit of sharing my feedback, so here you go:

It’s not the product. It seems like a great platform and meets the specs I’m looking for given our needs. The pricing is a bit high but within range for this project. You have been responsive and fairly easy to work with in general.

But at the end of the day, part of my job is to make the best use of this company’s resources and ensure we are not in a vulnerable position with any of our vendors. That requires a good deal of trust between us.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can trust you.

As we explored this deal, there were a few occasions at which your response time was just a few seconds slow. On one occasion, you appeared to have used a neologism. I do not mean to offend, but I’m just not sure I can trust that you’re actually a bot, and not a human pretending to be one.

As such, I’m going to go with another vendor that does not have any signs of potential human involvement in the sales process.

Best,

Dave

Think of a person that makes you mad. An archetypical face for the forces that oppose you, lash out at you, despise you, want to bring you down.

Then pray for that person.

Our real enemies are spiritual forces. The human enemies we see in front of us are hurting, broken people. They need prayer and redemption. The darkness wins if we fight them with the same weapons they use against us.

What does it mean to be disappointed?

You first have to be appointed. Something set before you. Something in your veins. A calling. A will. A fate.

To the extent to which you want and don’t shirk this thing, it’s also a desire. A dream. A goal. Perhaps a fantasy.

To realize you will never attain or achieve or become it is to be disappointed.

The appointment is over. The calling failed. The dream left empty, denied. The desire a vacuum.

The disappointment is in the finality.

The embers of hope burn painfully.

They were misplaced. The appointment was of what could be, but not what will or must be. Not what is.

Whether you failed it or it was always an ideal rather than a reality, you may not ever know.

But you have to let it die.

A man wants some land

To supply his own demand

Solid place to stand

Every additional day is an opportunity to move closer to God.

Every day is an opportunity for those who are moving away from Him to stop, turn, and come back towards Him.

This is why, despite the strong desire for a final judgement when observing the sickness of the world and its institutions, we should be thankful for the delay.

In the meantime, we have work to do. On ourselves, with each other, and for others. The darkness that seeks to consume and enslave souls answers to us, for we have been given the power of Christ. The victory has been won, but we are the cleanup crew. Tasked with declaring the freedom available to those previously in bondage, and clearing out the lingering corners of darkness.

In Lord of the Rings, after Sauron is defeated, all of Middle Earth is free from his dark reign. Yet each people, each land, each village still had cleanup work to do to clear out any last vestiges and begin to rebuild on a good foundation.

When the Hobbits returned to the Shire, despite Sauron’s defeat, they found it ruled by a petty tyrant. They, knowing the power they had and the end of Mordor, quickly deposed the former servant of Sauron. Even though the war had been won, minions of the Dark Lord roamed and lingered, clinging to any bit of power they could get until someone with courage conquered them.

That is the position we are now in. Each day gives a chance to expand the Light, expose the darkness, and increase the number of those set free.

The biggest factor in how lucrative a business venture is is the business model.

Yet this is the part most neglected.

People think about cool new products or services, fun branding, effective sales and marketing tactics, how to service customers, pricing and discounting, and all the other more forward facing elements of business first.

But if I were advising an aspiring young entrepreneur, I’d tell them to think roughly in this order:

1. Market/segment
2. Business model
3. Unique value proposition

The caveat is that this assumes a desire to maximize for profitability. Very many (most in fact) entrepreneurs are chasing a curiosity, a passion, or a sense of personal mission more than max financial ROI. That’s perfectly fine.

But if you want to maximize the financial ROI, start with identifying a good market, then a good model, then figure out the ideal way to solve a problem for this market under this model.

It’s amazing how easy it is to sell something that there’s too small a market for. Or something with too small margins. Or a sales cycle that cripples cashflow, or kills predictability in revenue.

These all sound like boring accountant things to the starry eyed young innovator, but they can make or break the financial side of the business.

It doesn’t have to be all mercenary though. Most companies start with a big idea for a product, and that’s fine. But before sinking a lot into it, really think through market, model, and value prop.

Start with curiosity. Observe every business around you and ask yourself about their cost structure. What’s fixed and what’s variable? Ask about their revenue model. When do they get paid by whom and how much? When do they have to pay their vendors? What’s the margin between costs and revenues? What’s the ceiling to growth? What’s the ramp time for employees to reach full productivity? See if you can model it out on a spreadsheet. A lot of cool looking businesses are actually pretty brutal to be in. And plenty of unsexy ones are crushing it with brilliant models.

If young people regularly asked these questions, there’d be a lower failure rate for new companies.

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” — Proverbs 25:2

The drive for knowledge is electric. Finding secret truths, piecing together mysteries, understanding the hidden aspects of the world; these are some of the greatest motivators of man. This is a good thing, and how we were created.

But why does pursuit of mysteries so often lead to madness?

The deeper you delve, the harder it seems to be to come back up with anything useful. Or, as I often say of psychedelics, you may become more enlightened yourself but you become less valuable and reliable to others.

Read deep penetrators of mystery like Carl Jung, or some of the great mathematicians and it’s hard not to conclude that they started out ravenously curious and ended up raving mad. Same goes for many brilliant artists who are trying to understand and portray hidden aspects of reality in their work. Ever read James Joyce, or listened to Kayne West talk?

What’s the lesson?

I’m not entirely sure, but I suppose it has something to do with constraints, hierarchy, and perspective.

One thing I’ve noticed as an entrepreneur is that having a wife and kids acts simultaneously as a constraint and a saving grace. It puts limits on how much time and mental energy I can spend on my big ideas. It constrains how crazy I can get and how much risk I can take.

Sometimes, especially in a very early stage startup, this can put me at a disadvantage against single founders. But over time, it keeps me sane as some of them go mad.

I think it’s similar when it comes to pursuing truth.

It’s not just the constraints time and attention, but the rank-ordering of importance. Knowing family is more important than my vision is key to not losing my grip. Knowing God is above family all the more.

It pulls you away when you’re about to get sucked too deep. You remember that, some corners left unexplored or mysteries not pondered is a price worth paying to have a right relationship with your family, and with God.

You just can’t achieve everything or know everything. An eternal perspective helps keep madness at bay as well. No, you won’t get the answers in this life. But why the rush anyway?

This is why I resonate more deeply with pursuit of freedom than pursuit of truth. Of course I love and pursue truth, but sometimes that pursuit can make one a slave to paranoia.

I’ve written elsewhere that insanity and genius come from a common root – seeing connections. When you start to see them, you can’t unsee them. Then you see them everywhere, within and around everything, even when they’re not there. Seeing too many connections is at least as dangerous as naively seeing none.

Seek the mysteries. But realize it will never have a natural stopping point. It’s up to you to impose one on yourself.

“And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” — Ecclesiastes 12:12

I was chatting with someone recently who was surprised and impressed from his interactions in the not-fully-regulated gray market of health supplements.

The mechanisms by which consumers and producers keep each other honest seemed more sophisticated and effective than in the normal, fully above ground economy.

I suspect the reason has to do with the stakes of the game.

Give a phony review on Amazon, and what’s the worst that can happen?

Have poor customer service or unclear information as an FDA approved, compliant, publicly traded drug company, and consumers just assume they are the ones who lack understanding.

Signals of trustworthiness are complex things. When outsourced to large institutions, especially governments, people get lazier and less scrutinous. Likewise, polite society tends to have relatively small punishments for inaccurate signals. It would seem barbaric, for example, to imprison someone for a false Amazon review.

The cost of this humanitarianism is less reliable signals. In medieval times, people could swear a verbal oath, or appeal to a family name or signet ring and be believed. Those are very easy to fake, but they remained believable because the stakes for faking were absurdly high. No one wants to be put in stocks or beheaded.

This is true in most illegal trades as well. If you’re selling or buying something that could land you in prison if caught, you’ve got to find really robust mechanisms for proving reputation.

I’m guessing this is what my interlocutor bumped up against in the supplement market. Though not as high stakes as something like the market for cocaine, higher stakes than selling gummy bears. Producers and consumers, without recourse to regulatory bodies, courts, or even public opinion, must find reliable ways to signal trustworthiness.

There’s a lot to be learned from higher stakes environments when it comes to reputations.

I have a very hard time not getting annoyed at my physical body.

I feel a kinship with St. Francis, who called his body “brother ass”.

Injury, illness, hunger, fatigue; these are so inconvenient that my first reaction is irritation. Why is this body so demanding? I’m trying to get stuff done!

I suspect this is one of the attractions of Gnosticism. Let’s just call the body bad and try to escape from it.

But that isn’t right. Christianity offers a bold, difficult, but also comforting picture.

The body is imperfect. You must master it, but not reject it. It is useful and, in its pure state, an imager of God. It’s not in its pure state, but the answer is to allow God to redeem it and to participate in that process. It needn’t be worshipped or rejected.

I’m trying to switch my default reaction from annoyance to thanks when my body impedes my will.

Being both spiritual and material is a blessing. I certainly remember this when eating a good steak or smoking a cigar or enjoying other physical activities (wink wink). I should remember it in the suffering too.

I think everyone believes in eternal life.

Some will say they don’t, and of course I can’t prove otherwise, but the way they live seems to indicate that deep down, eternity is set in their heart.

If you really, fully, confidently believed you were going to cease to exist entirely forever after 80 or so years on this earth, would you put effort into improving yourself? Would any kind of sacrifice make sense? Would the desire for a legacy exist?

Wouldn’t it make the most sense to spend every bit of goodwill, reputation, and social capital accumulated, not to mention physical wealth, by the time you die? Why take it to the grave with you if you could cash it out in your final years of existence and have a better time? Why not steal, lie, cheat, or even kill if it benefited you and you were close enough to the end to evade earthly judgements for these things?

Why would concern for the welfare of your children extend beyond your existence? From your perspective, when you cease to exist the whole world might as well cease to exist.

Yet we are concerned with these things. We don’t live as is we’ll be forever snuffed out upon our death. We live as if all of humanity is in some way our business, and our place in it will always matter.

Probably because it’s true.

But the fact that we don’t live as if we’ll cease to exist doesn’t mean that we do live fully recognizing the weight of eternity.

It seem everyone believes in eternal life, but no one believes in it quite enough.

If we were really, truly aware of our immortal souls, we’d likely spend this 80 or so years differently too.

For one, we’d probably slow down. It’s not a race. We can work on our minds, our health, our character, as we should, but without as much desperation for particular outcomes or attainments. We have eternity to keep improving. The habits themselves become more important that what they produce in the blink of an eye that is earthly life.

Same for bad habits. Sure, we can get away with them and put up with the bad consequences for a few score years, but imagine the compounding effects of those habits over millennia?

When you consider the idea that you have to live with yourself for eternity, it changes what seems important to focus on. The news and trends of the day will pass. But who you are will persist.

This is weighty in some ways, and convicting. But I find on the whole it comes as a relief. I don’t need to strive quite so much to achieve specific outcomes or worry about where I stack up in the eyes of others by the time this body fails me. I have eternity to keep working on the things I’ve started here.