• After a bad night’s sleep and a hard-to-get-going morning writing something – anything – always makes me feel better.
• Current reading list: Be Slightly Evil, But What If We’re Wrong, Without Their Permission, The Graveyard Book, High Output Management, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Tempo.
• There is almost nothing better than a new T-shirt that fits perfectly.
• If you want to see just how petty and enthused I can get, watch a good sporting match with me.  If you want to believe I’m a largely reasonable human being, don’t.
• Drying off after a shower is really annoying, especially in warm weather.  It takes too long and you never get totally dry.  I want a booth to step into with high-pressure air blowers like they have at car washes.  Maybe a dash of baby powder at the end to prevent any remnants of wetness?
• I often dream of days where I do nothing but read all day, but in reality I can’t read for more than 30 minutes straight without needing to break it up.
• All great stories take shape after the actual events occur.  It doesn’t look like a story while it’s happening.  The narrative arc is crafted in retrospect.  This is why what actually happens in real-time is less important than how it’s framed after the fact.
• I’m still not sure any books about how a particular person or company succeeded are worth reading.  But I still read them.
• Why do men seem to be more motivated by the idea that no one believes in them than women?  Or is this a misnomer?
• If consumers are so dumb that they buy whatever marketers sell them, wouldn’t it be much scarier to give power to elites to curb marketing messages?  Wouldn’t hapless consumers simply look for orders from those elites instead?  Isn’t it less dangerous to have easily duped people in a world where tons of companies compete to dupe them vs. a few elites duping them “for their own good”?
• Almost no one has enough faith in self-interest.
• Preaching to the choir is far superior than preaching to anyone else.  Echo chambers and bubbles are more productive than going out of your way to step outside of them.
• Reading people whose ideas you disagree with is vastly overrated.
• Your gut is probably smarter than you think, but listening to it is harder than you think.
• Steph Curry, despite looking great last night, is clearly still not himself.  I contend that his movement is still limited by the MCL sprain.
• Olympic basketball isn’t that cool anymore.
• “Entrepreneurship” is overused but there’s no going back so it might as well cease meaning someone who starts a business and take on the economic meaning of a descriptive category of action.  That still doesn’t mean you should describe yourself as one on LinkedIn if you haven’t started a business.
• Now I feel better.  Time to kick this day in the butt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Why not?”
“Compared to what?”
“As if it’s true”
“Don’t do stuff you hate”
“Willing to fail“

My family and I just moved to a new house and it’s been a surprisingly hard adjustment.  TK and I discuss how to handle moving, change, grief, and heartache, as well as what a sense of space means and how humans interact with light and their built environments.

Mentioned in the episode: Christopher Alexander, Too Many Dirty Dishes, Tim Ferriss, Peter Thiel, Aslan, In Defense of Metaphor in Science Writing, Jeff Till’s Five Hundred Years, George Lakoff, Your Brain is Not a Computer, Metaphors and Magic,

Recommended: Space and Place, Landscapes of the Soul, A Timeless Way of Building

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Stitcher.

I can tell you right now it doesn’t matter what industry. There are tons of jobs available everywhere. Companies are hungry for talent.

But most job seekers suck. Most of them suck mostly because of years of schooling. It’s given them bad habits, fear, lack of confidence, arrogance, and monetary demands due to thoughtless debt.

Opportunity is everywhere. School is killing the ability of young people to seize it.

Screw school. Go do cool stuff. Go do hard stuff. Go do different stuff. Build things. Try things. Get good at things.

I first heard the phrase from tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

“Strong opinions, weakly held”

I love this concept. (In fact, I almost called my podcast, “Strong Opinions, Weekly Held”).  I had never thought of it in such a succinct way, but this approach has been valuable to me for some time.

The beauty lies in the ability to embrace the power of definiteness and the power of openness at once.  When you act, you can’t be of two minds.  You have to commit and proceed boldly.  But to understand the world you have to constantly learn, adapt, and grow, which implies shifting direction.

Here are the four words I employ to do both:

“As if it’s true”

When I am taken by an idea I act as if it’s true.  The “as if” is important, because it reminds me that I’m acting on the best available knowledge and that I’m fallible.  The “it’s true” is equally important, because unless and until being convinced otherwise I must decisively move forward.

One of the strengths of this approach is the lightened intellectual burden and the enhanced importance of experimentation over theory alone.  If you have to settle on complete truth before translating it to action you’re unlikely to act.  Action is one of the key factors in generating the feedback necessary to know if your ideas are correct.  And on the other side if you only ever act on an idea without reflecting on the feedback you’ll crash and burn if your initial hunch was wrong.

When it comes to something really big like launching a business I think the core idea or purpose of the business – the “why” – must be something unchangeable.  If it turns out the “why” is wrong, better to quit and start an entirely different business than to try to “pivot” to a new purpose.

But the how and what are subject to change.  You don’t plan to change them, or pussyfoot around waiting for a focus group to give them to you.  You arrive at conclusions – opinions – about the world and act decisively, while holding onto them weakly.  You act as if they are true unless and until it’s proven they are not.

New information, new competitors, and new ideas are never a threat but a welcome opportunity.  Any chance to firmly disprove your theory means a chance to improve.  But put the new stuff to the test.  Always operate as if the current theory is true until it is completely clear it’s not.  Don’t just get scared or take someone’s word for it that your approach is obsolete.  Act as if it’s spot on until you know it isn’t.  But always be eagerly looking for evidence that it’s not.

The “eureka moment” is valuable.  Don’t let it get lost in a sea of analysis.  But that doesn’t mean you have to never let it adapt.  Move forward as if your initial insight is true while constantly scouring the globe for reasons it mightn’t be.  Act on your current truths while adding to them.

To hold strong opinions weakly, act as if your current knowledge is true until you know it’s not.

“Why Haven’t You Read This Book?” is now available in audio format!

Huge thanks to Mitchell Earl for his work narrating the book and getting it added to Amazon.  You can get it with an Audible subscription.

Additionally, Mitchell setup an awesome way to get any chapter from the book for free here.  Since each chapter is a totally unique story from a unique author, you can simply pick your favorite and listen as a stand-alone audio essay.