Isaac Morehouse

Death and the grief that come with it are hard enough. They are made worse by the corruption and control in the providers of end-of-life services.

The series of actions and activities after someone dies in modern America are impersonal and dehumanizing. Strangers you’ve never met take the body of your loved one, put it in a badly designed stuffy hotel-lobby-like place you’ve never visited and never want to visit, then a bunch more strangers transport it to a gravesite and lower it into the ground, or it gets cremated.

Not that some people wouldn’t choose this. Some might. But I imagine most of us would prefer something a little more real, intimate, connected, and personally relevant to the deceased. We aren’t given many choices.

Few realize how cartelized the death industry is. Casket makers, funeral home directors, morticians, embalmers, cemeteries, grave diggers, and all the other parties involved are not participating in a free market. They are part of a tangled web of government controls that dictate what you are allowed to do, all to enrich the interests who lobby for these rules.

Things as simple as making your own casket can be legally complicated, let alone digging a gravesite for your relative. Good luck trying to open a funeral parlor or offer services for any other element of the process. It’s pretty locked down by a handful of companies, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and lawmakers.

This makes prices insanely high and quality low, with little accountability to customers.

It’s easy for this perverse arrangement to persists, because who of us wants to spend time thinking about end-of-life stuff until we have to? Who’s going to lobby or complain about prices or lack of choice in these things while their loved ones are still living?

But when the moment comes and you need to engage their services, you’re in no frame of mind to negotiate or complain. You just want to grieve.

Death, Inc. is a great example of what happens when you have government regulations in any industry. They always makes things worse.

I love remote work. But wherever I work, I need a place that is clean, consistent, and my own.

My home office is that. But I haven’t always had one. I’ve had a desk in a bedroom more than once. The more dedicated to the purpose a space is, the better. But in the very least, I need a desk that is my own and I can leave it as I want it and no one will disturb.

Coffee shops and such are a nice change of pace every so often for a few hours, but not for managing everything every day.

My and my workspace become one over time, and infidelity doesn’t pay.

The less accountability you want, the less freedom you can have. The more you want freedom, the more accountability you must take on.

Companies sheltered from the market (low accountability) in turn have little freedom to innovate because they are hampered by regulations.

Those most free to innovate are most immediately accountable to the market.

You can raise capital to put a buffer between the business and the market, which reduces your accountability for a while, but it also reduces your freedom, as investors want things and prohibit things.

There is grace for bad ideas. But judgement increases with knowledge, and especially with passing knowledge on.

The more you have engaged ideas, and the more you teach them, the greater will be your accountability for them.

This is a frightening thought. I love to explore ideas, and I love learning out loud along the way. But I don’t want to be accountable for people I may influence. I don’t mind talking, and quite confidently, about my ideas, but to be judged based on whether they lead others astray? Yikes.

Part of that is a proper humility. Part of it is laziness and fear. I want all the fun of talking about ideas and none of the seriousness of their implications or (mis)applications.

The temptation is to run away from teaching. And maybe in some ways its good to not want to teach others, just like it’s often good to not want to lead others, but respond to it only when called in a way you can’t deny or escape. Of course this orientation has pitfalls too. It’s easy to tell yourself “I don’t even want to do this, but the world simply needs me so bad I must”, a dangerous false humility.

So maybe it’s better to be real about the fact that you like teaching, do it openly, but constantly remind yourself and your pupils that you are just a guy/gal, and you’re learning along with them. You can’t remove your responsibility, but you can pray for grace and try your best to never let a cult form around you or your ideas.

Death is God’s mercy

Yet sickness is from the curse

Mercy also heals

It’s hard to let people go on with incorrect assumptions or conclusions. But you have to learn to do it often.

The more experience and knowledge you gain, the more you must learn to live with not conveying it all. So many situations involve others discussing matters about which you know a lot, but it would not be appropriate to take over the conversation to enlighten them. You have to not only accept their inaccurate discussion, but also suffer them assuming you don’t know anything about it.

This is maturity. And it’s really annoying.

I tell young people not to let options blind them to opportunities. But options are not a bad thing in themselves. In same cases, they are better than concrete opportunities.

When you jump on an opportunity, you want to go all in and ‘burn the ships’ as it were. This means you don’t have a backup plan. If you have a backup plan, you’re not all-in and it will be harder to get through the rough patches and succeed. Necessity is the mother of invention.

But not having a backup plan doesn’t have to mean you will be ruined if the opportunity ends. If you continue to pursue opportunities with abandon as they come, you will develop skills, knowledge, and relationships. Those are pregnant with potential opportunities – options – that can emerge on their own or be cultivated at any time.

If what I’m currently doing comes to an end, I never have a clear backup plan. But the longer I go in my career, the more I know I have options. There are plenty of things hiding in my orbit, and if it becomes necessary, I’ll find or create one. Or one will find me, as is more often the case.

When something doesn’t make a lot of sense or pieces seem to be missing, it’s easy to assume the simplest explanation. But there is no reason a made-up simple explanation is any more likely to be true than a made-up complicated explanation.

How many things that are true are quite complicated and counter-intuitive? Why would the things we don’t yet understand be simpler, on average, than those we do?

There’s a lot of focus on “first principles”, another way of saying things that will always be true. For good reason. When you understand and can live in accordance to first principles, you will do better than if you’re unmoored to anything beyond trends and tactics.

But there might be some missing value in not spending a bit more time trying to tease out the things that aren’t first principles, but seemed unshakable for a time. (Second principles?) Things that were so true for some period that you could bank on them, but they are no longer.

These often get swept in the dustbin of history, because they reversed usefulness so spectacularly, and now suffer only ridicule. Yet there are lessons in them, and often they come back around to being true again, or at least being similar to things that will be true again. They can point to and reveal first principles.

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how through most of the 2010s in marketing, Facebook and other digital ads were so ridiculously efficient that you could build entire business models around their low cost customer acquisition. Marketers learned totally different tactics and skills in that world, and it all made sense. Then it didn’t, and now marketers are scratching their heads.

Rather than just mock those heady days or throw the old playbooks out the window, it’s instructive to study what used to be fact and is now myth: just buy more leads on Facebook. What always-true first principles can this temporarily-true second principle point us to?

There’s a lot to work with and unpack. New models emerge and the gains go to the first movers. All games get gamed. Markets tend toward equilibrium. Arbitrage isn’t indefinite. Easy money makes weak workers. Whatever you tease out, it’s worth digging in to and hanging on to the memory of this discarded principle of marketing.

Plus, you know another wave of easy wins will come back dressed in different clothes. You want to see the similarity so you can take advantage of it, and so you can be prepared for its short lifespan.

Some people do not like to do hard work. They just want to party, even if their version of party means only sitting down with a book and a cup of tea. They will avoid hard work at all costs, sneak around it and cheat out of it.

Others have willed themselves to do hard work because it is required. They make a big deal to themselves and others about how hard the work is and how little they like it. They have a grumpy sort of pride in their discipline, but nothing approaching joy.

Still others manage to do hard work and enjoy it. Without bitterness that it must be done, without a sense of unfairness (though it sometimes is), without dullness or sullenness, and even without self-righteousness. They tackle their work as a routine, with a prayerful, thankful simplicity. It does not ruin their day nor does it make them feel better than others. They just do it with dignity and happiness and move along.

I am each of these at different times. You probably are too. It’s amazing how much better life is when I’m the third, but how hard it is to zoom out and remember that when the first is tempting me or the second is welling up.

There is a book on your shelf. If you read it, it would undo everything in your world.

It looks interesting, and you’ve thought about picking it up many times. With no strong aversion, some small thing has always prevented you from cracking it. You’ve pulled it out a few times, but a noise, a friend at the door, an interruption has come and you’ve slid it back into place.

There is sits. Proud, unmoved, powerful. It does not impose itself on you or draw you to it. Nor does it repel you. It’s just there. Somehow, it cannot – will not – be read.

What would happen if you tried to read it?

More than physical

Not less or just mystical

Beyond whimsical

Heaven is a weekend or holiday working alone in my office.

No colleagues are online, customers aren’t active, meetings aren’t scheduled, messages slow to a trickle, and I have my time, my quiet, my thoughts.

I put on some music, grab a cup of coffee (or a whiskey if it’s the afternoon), and use my whiteboard, Trello board, notepad, Google Slides, Docs, Sheets, or sticky notes to work on the business instead of in the business.

2-4 hours of this is perfect. I leapfrog ahead of tasks I was previously lagging on. I accelerate from barely hanging on to the train of the present to someplace miles in front of it, scouting the route into the future.

Few things feel better, and I’m reminded of the joy that comes in the toil set before mankind. I know the word “toil” sounds glib for a desk job. But I don’t take it lightly. Toil is every bit as real at a desk than behind a shovel.

When we owned some acreage and (I wasn’t behind on office work), I felt the same about farm work weekends. It’s not the nature of the toil, but the process of doing it alone, unbothered, on my own time, in my own way, at my own pace and with room to think. The act of clearing the to do list and plotting the next phase.

I don’t know the mechanism, but I know that the experience of true beauty makes us better people.

Beauty is not a luxury or an optional frill to the human existence. Nor is it a danger to be avoided. It is a necessity if we are to live as we were meant. We require beauty.

Step into a beautiful sunrise, or sunset, or wood, or field, or coast, or rain, or mountain view. Look at it and take it in. Now tell me it didn’t make you better, feed your soul, bolster your moral foundation, increase your charity.

A beautiful sculpture, piece of music, building, or face can do the same.

Beauty has a bad name because we are surrounded by its perversion. The devil always warps and distorts and shrivels and shrinks what is good, leaving only a parody-like husk of it that brings out our vices.

Overwhelming appeals to the erotic side of beauty, in places they do not belong, have made God-fearing people reticent to celebrate beauty. The cure is more and greater beauty, not ashes.

I gave a short pep talk this week to a class of graduating Praxians. I had about 10 minutes at a coffee shop to prep, and asked myself, “What would I cultivate if I were just starting my professional career today?”

Interestingly, what I came up with varies somewhat from what I would’ve (and have) said for most of the last two decades. I think cultural and technological change have shifted the ROI for various skills and mindsets.

The most prominent shift is in the first item on this list. Not many years ago, I would’ve said the opposite.

1. Idea generation. Ideas are more valuable than execution now. The ceiling on a great executor with few or weak ideas is lower than a person full of good ideas who is moderate but not great at execution. Why? Because there are more tools to handle more of the execution part than ever before. Generate tons of ideas, sort them later.
2. Good judgement. Judgement is hard to define and I’m not entirely sure how to cultivate it, but roughly it could be described as, “Knowing what to say and do when.” Read the room. Understand motives and incentives. See the games.
3. An entrepreneurial way of seeing. This is where the sorting of ideas comes in. Learn to see not just products or companies, but markets and business models. The order of importance in building a good business goes something like: Timing>Market>Segment>Problem>Distribution>Business Model>Team>Sales>Product>Innovation. When you look at products and businesses, ask yourself who their market is, what their model is, and whether it makes sense.
4. Story finding. When you encounter facts, learn to tease a narrative arc out of them. Get curious about the story behind them. Seek it out. Find it. Humans (including you) are motivated by stories, and learn through stories. Turn data points into a connective tale.
5. Story telling. Now learn to put those stories into a compelling format and deliver them. Story tellers can win partners, investors, employees, and customers. Start by learning to tell and retell your own story to yourself. Where are you in the grand arc? Knowing this will help keep you motivated and focused.

Don’t hold me to this as the definitive or absolute top five things to cultivate. They came to me top of mind at a coffee shop. But I’d absolutely tell my 20-year-old self, if he existed in 2024, to get busy cultivating these.