Tag: creativity

What Praxis Set Out to Do

When we created Praxis we did it to fill a large and growing gap in the option set facing young people.  So many smart, ambitious, curious individuals are languishing in fluorescently-lit cinder-block classrooms.  Bored.  Racking up debt.  For no clear purpose.

The myth they are steeped in is that they have to do this.  There is no choice.  The options are presented: Be a loser, or sit around for 4-6 years at a cost of tens of thousands.

But the myth goes deeper.

The myth is that learning itself, and by extension self-improvement, are terrible, boring, passionless and must necessarily be enforced by bureaucrats and self-proclaimed authorities.  Your job, if you want to succeed in life (by whose definition anyway?) is to follow the rules, memorize the disconnected facts, take the tests, pad the resume, apply for the jobs, and wait for the conveyor belt to drop you off at ‘normal’.

How depressing and frustrating this is to so many of the best and brightest.

We set out to cut through the crap.  We wanted these talented young people to stop waiting for real life and to jump into amazing work experiences at amazing companies eager for their help.  We wanted them to shatter the old paradigm of education and start fresh, like newborns do, exploring questions that matter to them, creating their own challenges and structure, diving into a rigorous self-improvement project.

The mindset is simple and powerful.  Awaken your inner entrepreneur.  You own your life.  You own your education.  You own your career.  You are the driving force in your own process of creation.  Do things for the results you value, not the hoops arbitrarily placed before you.

We wanted this entire life-shifting experience to take place in the span of a single year and for a net cost of zero.

I received this email yesterday from current Praxis participant Mitchell Earl.  It beautifully illustrates the mindset shift.

“If I had to estimate, I’d say I skipped class 2/3 of the time in college. I don’t sit still well. I couldn’t learn in that type of environment. I need to be stimulated. When I did go to class, I used to take the daily puzzles; either crosswords or sudokus because I needed something to direct my nervous energy toward if I was going to be forced to sit and listen to someone talk at me. I can’t even count the number of times I had a professor yank my newspaper away from me IN COLLEGE.

In my web design class, the syllabus alone put a burr under my saddle reading, “One absence is considered excessive for the course.” I redefined excessive. I turned in my work on time, but I refused to go sit in a classroom and be told how or what to code, design, or write. That’s not how I learn.

I didn’t and don’t want my work to be like grocery store milk, micro-filtered, ultra-pasteurized, standardized, and homogenized. For me to do my best work, I need to have the freedom to explore my creativity. Praxis has shown me that. It’s given me the freedom to explore my own needs as a learner. No one is yanking my puzzle away telling me to pay attention. No one is telling me how to learn. No one is shaming my individuality. With Praxis, I’m free to be me.”

Yes.  That’s exactly it Mitchell.  We set out to create more freedom.  To help you carve out a space, to break the other-imposed mold, and plot your own path to fulfillment as you define it.

Freedom isn’t easy.  It’s much harder work than just doing what everyone else wants and expects.  It takes a lot of deep, philosophical thinking.  It takes self-knowledge and self-honesty.  It takes discipline and hard work.  It takes tolerance of failure and the courage to put yourself in new situations, often over your head, and learn on the fly.  It takes the humility to be in environments where you’re not the smartest person in the room.  Your desire for personal growth must be strong enough to sustain these challenges.

Mitchell is tasting it.  So are our other participants and grads.  This is what we set out to do.  And we’re doing it.  One life at a time.

If you know anyone who sounds a lot like Mitchell was in school, give ’em a little nudge of encouragement to be free.  Remind them the dominant path isn’t the only one, and the best paths are the ones they’ll blaze themselves.  You can even send them my way and I’ll gladly talk with them about taking creative control of their education, career, and life, with or without Praxis.

Let’s awaken people’s dreams and increase the number of those who are truly living free.

‘Begin With the End in Mind’

I’ve never been really big on formal goals, goal-setting, or visualization of a desired end-state.  Instead, I focus on eliminating things I don’t like and always making some kind of progress on things I do, even if towards a relatively open future.  It’s fun and mysterious.

But I’ve begun to realize something.  Even though rarely formalized or deliberate, I’ve always dreamt and imagined myself and my projects in different future states.  The more carefully I observe and recall, the more I see those imaginings becoming reality.  It’s subtle and sly sometimes, but it happens.

I am largely living a life I once imagined.  I frequently have experiences where I’ll stop and realize that what I just did is almost identical to something I dreamed up years before.  Only after launching Praxis, for example, did I rediscover a long-forgotten PowerPoint called “Education Revolution” wherein I laid out my plan for a “new model of higher education”.  I had envisioned it with no particular goal-setting attached, forgotten it, and only after having launched a realization of the concept did I recall the dream.

In recent years I’ve started getting a bit more deliberate with my visualizations of the future.  I don’t know what power, if any, it has to bring it about, but I have discovered the immense power such visualizing has to focus my mood and energy in the present.  There’s also the entertainment value of looking back on thought-out and written-out goals years later to see what I ended up creating and how well it tracked.

I think there is some power in what we feed our subconscious mind.  I think it aids our awareness and thoughts with our conscious mind in ways we don’t yet fully understand.  Instead of simply letting my thoughts run wild, I’m trying to get a little – not a lot, as I want plenty of room for free play – more focused and deliberate with my visualizing.  We’ll see how it goes.

How to Search for a Job

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From Life Learning on Medium.

A lot of people are looking for jobs. The thing is, not all job searches are equal. “Looking for a job” might actually mean hoping someone finds your resume online, shooting out a few emails, or posting unsolicited comments on Facebook pages that say, “Are you hiring?”

If you want a job — really want a job — you’ve got to go level five with your job hunt. And call it a hunt, not a search. You’re not hoping to stumble into a pot of gold, you’re tracking your prey and bagging it.

Let’s take a look at how to do it.

Level 1: A Good Resume

While most of the best jobs you’ll get in life will be gotten without a resume, if you’re job hunting you should have one on hand. I don’t particularly like them, but a lot of people expect them. A good resume will never get you a job, but a bad resume could lose you one.

For a resume to actually convey something, serve as a starting point for interview questions, and keep you from being dismissed out of hand, there are really just two main features: Nice appearance and outcomes-based content.

For appearance, keep it simple, clean, a single page, uniform use of line breaks or bullets, not too many indents and sub-sub points, and a clear order top-to-bottom of what’s most important. (Hint: experience is more important than education to most people, even if you assume otherwise). Oh, and get your spelling and capitalization triple checked.

For content most people simply list credentials they have and activities they engaged in. This is boring and conveys a lot less about your ability to create value than what kind of outcomes you produced. Don’t just list that you were a digital marketing intern and ran email campaigns. Show that your A/B test improved open rates by 10%.

Even if you were waiting tables, see if you can demonstrate value created. “Server at Applebee’s” is less interesting than, “My section consistently brought in 15% more tips than average sections.”

Anyone can have a title and do a task. The good ones create value and can show positive outcomes.

Level 2: Good Profiles on LinkedIn, etc.

Whether you like it or not, LinkedIn is hugely valuable in the working world, especially for those making hiring decisions. Have a profile. Have a decent headshot that actually looks like you. Have accurate information. Keep it up to date.

Your LinkedIn profile should be consistent with your resume, but it is not the same thing. It allows you to go a little deeper into who you are, what drives you, who you’ve worked with, what you did, etc. Same goes for Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else you kids are using these days. Be you, but use good judgement. If someone only ever found your online accounts, would they have an accurate idea of who you are and what you want to be known as?

Many people fear all social media and online presence because they think of it as a liability. Some people try to stay undiscoverable online as a protective measure. This is a terrible idea. First, always assume if some hacker wants to find your stuff bad enough they’ll find a way, regardless of your settings. But more importantly, seeing social media as a liability blinds you to the fact that it can be a huge asset. There is no neutral. It’s either helping you or hurting you. Being completely anonymous online hurts you. Take charge of your online presence and make it an asset.

Level 3: A Personal Website

It’s easier than ever to setup a personal website. If you’re serious about finding a great job, just do it. Go over to WordPress and get started. In a few hours you can have a clean, simple website that serves as a repository of all the things you enjoy and want to be known for.

A personal website gives you far more control than profiles on third party sites. You can feature whatever you wish, you can blog, share video, include a longer bio, express aspects of yourself you wouldn’t cram into a LinkedIn profile, and really use the blank canvas to create whatever you wish.

But more than what you have on your site is the fact that you have one. Anyone who has put together a basic, neat, up to date personal website stands out. Not many people do, despite how easy it is, and if you do you’ll have something that gives you far more cred than just a decent resume in a pile.

If you really want to gain an edge, overcome fear, build confidence, and become a better communicator and thinker then take the next step and blog on your site regularly. I recommend blogging daily, but if that’s daunting, try weekly. You can always hide bad posts, but the act of doing it and knowing it can be seen by others will do more for your creative capacity and productive power than any other simple activity I know of.

Level 4: A Portfolio of Projects

If you’ve already setup your personal website here’s a way to really beef up the value. Beyond a nice homepage and about page with a bio your website can feature projects you’ve completed.

Remember when I said the resume should show outcomes instead of just telling about activities? A portfolio allows you to show in much greater detail what you’ve created. It’s especially easy for those with skills in art or coding or engineering to share publicly what you’ve produced. You may think that your management or communication or sales skills can’t really be put into a portfolio that shows what you’ve done, but it can.

Go to a freelancer website and pay someone $50 to design a nice one-pager that shows the results of that event your organized and executed. Have someone build an interactive graph tracking your fundraising or sales campaign. Show articles you’ve written and clicks they received.

If you can think of nothing tangible that you’ve completed to put in a portfolio it’s a good sign you should get cracking! Writers and photographers know that their portfolio of work is what really matters. If they have none, they start out just doing things for free to build it up. You can do the same. Just get started creating something and share the results. Do projects for free that will help you get something under your belt.

The great thing is, the success or failure of your projects is less important at this stage than that you completed it. I’ve talked with tech companies who say they’d rather hire someone who built a cheesy, non-innovative notepad app than someone with a stellar resume who never built and “shipped” anything at all.

Level 5: Unique, Stand-Alone Websites, Videos, InfoGraphics for Your Target Company

Here’s where the great stand apart from the very good. If you really, truly, deeply want to work for a company why not devote yourself to studying them in depth and presenting your unique take?

Remember Nina, whose resume was lost in the heap at AirBnB? She went level five and became internet famous. She put together an impressive site that deserved attention, still it’s telling of just how low the bar is among job-seekers that a simple website was such a viral sensation. No one is doing this. But you can.

One thing employers will tell you when sifting through job applications is that too many people talk about themselves and too few talk about the company they claim to want to work for. “I’m Joe and I’m great at XYZ” tells me nothing about why Joe applied specifically for my company. Does he just want a paycheck, or is he passionate about my business? Does he even know what we do and what we value?

There’s no better way to demonstrate your knowledge and passion for a company than to dig into the industry, business model, customer base, competitors, and build something unique that describes what you love about and what you would do for the company. Don’t think about what would make you look good, think about what would actually be valuable to the company.

I guarantee spending 30 days doing a deep dive on your target company will be more valuable than spending an entire year getting a second major and more clubs to list on your resume. If you can create something of value to the company before you’re even working for them that sends a strong signal that you’re a person they want on board.

What Are You Waiting For?

One of the reasons I launched my company Praxis is precisely because so few young people realize that they have the power to create their own professional future. There are more tools available than ever and more opportunities but so few realize it. You can’t sit on the conveyor belt and expect it to drop you at a fulfilling job.

Look, I’m not saying it’s easy. But don’t tell me there’s no way to get a great job if you aren’t willing to push yourself to level four, or ideally level five. You can probably think of ten more things I didn’t even list here if you really try.

The days of buying a degree and hoping it buys you a job are over. Be your own credential and prove through the work you do that you can create value.

How to Offer to Help Someone

If you’ve ever been moved to help someone, whether by sympathy for their hardship or excitement for their success, you probably did what most of us do.  Made a well-meaning general offer.

“Hey, I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.  Let me know what I can do to help.”

Or,

“I love what you’re doing!  I’m here to help in any way.”

These are not bad offers.  They successfully signal comradery and provide a little bump in mood to the recipient.  But they don’t deliver the kind of help that sticks.  If you really want to do more than signal your sympathy (you are not obligated to do more, so only do if you really want to) you’ve got to get specific.

My nephew passed away two years ago.  Our entire family was in shock and mourning.  Sympathy cards and thoughts flowed in to my sister and her husband.  It was overwhelming to see the support, and it did them good.  Many offered to help and meant it, but it’s just too hard while grieving to think of something a friend or neighbor or stranger can do for you, and it feels weird to ask.  The greatest help came from those who didn’t ask what they could do.  They just noticed something and did it.  They bought dinner.  They took the kids out to get new shoes.  They cleaned the house.

It’s the same for support with exciting projects.  I get a lot of emails from people saying they’re excited about Praxis and want to help.  I love these emails.  It’s great to know people share my excitement for our vision and progress.  There are a rare few who do more than signal.  They don’t ask, they offer or do something specific.  I’ll never forget just after launch when Zak Slayback contacted me and said, “I want to help.  Let me manage your social media pages.”  He had a good reputation and I needed help so I let him.  Then he started doing other things like setting up email newsletters, improving the website, writing blog posts, going to events, and creating marketing material.  Pretty soon we couldn’t live without him and he was hired.  Others help without asking how by making an email introduction to a business partner or potential participant.

It’s perfectly fine and in many cases preferable to let people know you care.  But for those times when you’re really moved to provide support or help a project move forward challenge yourself to not give any open-ended offers.  Before saying, “I’m with you and here to help”, think long and hard about what needs to be done and what you are able to do.  The more specific the better, even if it’s a rather mundane task.  You might have to get creative, but if you learn to offer help in practical solutions instead of generic words you will change people’s lives forever.  They won’t forget.

A lot of what we do in life is signaling.  That’s OK so far as it goes, but it often muddies our ability to identify cause and effect.  Pretty soon we start to believe bumper stickers and ribbons equal change or progress.  It’s the same on the individual level and society at large.  If you push yourself to figure out what will really help, instead of what will signal your desire to help, you’ll begin to see the world anew.

 

Sometimes Creating Stuff Sucks

I love podcasting.  It’s been a blast.  But it’s a huge pain sometimes.

Today I interviewed Penelope Trunk, and it was brutal.  She was wonderful.  The interview itself was great.  But my technology threw every wrench at me imaginable.  It was stressful and annoying to duct tape together an episode with all the fragmented sections.

She was cool about it, thankfully, and even gave me twice as much time as originally promised.  But it threw my whole day off.

Five minutes before we began I realized I’d never called someone’s phone via Skype, so I did a Google search and downloaded an app on my phone that records phone calls, just in case.  I barely had time to enter my info and set it up as a backup.

Then I go to dial her and realize Skype charges for calls to a phone.  I had to scramble to enter payment info (thank you Dashlane for quick form completion!).  We got started two minutes late, which already had me frustrated.  I hate tardiness.

Things were going great for 12 minutes, then the call dropped.  We dialed again.  It went well for about three or four minutes and then she couldn’t hear me anymore, though I could hear her.  Drop.  I dialed again and she still couldn’t hear me.  Drop.

I frantically grabbed my cell and called her.  We proceeded for another 18 minutes on the phone when I realized the app only allowed 20 minutes free and I never put in billing info to go longer.  She had to go anyway, so it wasn’t too bad, but still rushed at the end.

I just finished editing four clips into one and adding an intro and outro.  It got done, though the sound quality for the second half of the interview was pretty rough, even though that’s where the conversation was best.

In addition to the sound there were several points where I interrupted her in a pretty bad way.  It’s one of those things I sometimes do as a host and with some people it happens more than others.  She’s confident and straightforward so we kept plugging along, but man, I finished the interview pretty annoyed at the quality of the whole experience I created.

My goal is to make my show really fun and easy for guests.  I want them to shine.  I want them to come back on the show.  I want them to love it so much they forget the time.

Oh well.

I cranked it out anyway and it will go live Monday.  The content is great, even if the process wasn’t.

Sometimes I really get in a groove where my daily writing and weekly podcasting and everything else just clicks.  I really like what I’m producing and the process.  Days like today are a great reminder that, when what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance” crops up, you’ve got to do your work anyway.

Once it’s done, you can’t look back.  Ship it.  Then put your head down and start working on the next thing.

Thanks Penelope for your patience!

Tiny, Ridiculous Daily Challenges Work Better for Me Than Big Goals

I’m not big on goals and goal-setting.  I’ve done it at various points, and it’s had a few positive effects and can be somewhat fun, or at least useful in challenging me to think bigger.  Still, I find that I’m more of an opportunist than a planner.  I prefer to keep building things – myself, my project, social capital, etc. – and be aware and alert to opportunities to leverage those things.

This means creating and succeeding and finishing things in general is more important much of the time than any perfectly plotted sequence of what it is I’m doing.  I try to cultivate creativity as a discipline, while what I use my creative energies for remains flexible to seize opportunities.  I want to also cultivate opportunity spotting abilities and the willpower to act on them and see it through to completion.  “Be ready in season and out of season.”

What this translates into practically for me is a series of very small, daily (sometimes weekly) challenges.  Things that are a little difficult, but simple enough that I have no excuse for missing them.  My typical set of challenges is this:

  • Blog every day
  • Do one form of exercise every day
  • Walk outside every day
  • Consume ideas every day
  • Do one thing to add value to Praxis every day (in the areas of money, talent, and vision specifically)

Many days I do more than this.  I might write a blog post and a newsletter or book chapter.  I might go for a swim and ride my bike.  I might read several articles and listen to a podcast.  I typically do many things to add value to Praxis in a day.  The trick is, doing at least one form of each of these in a day, every single day rain or shine seven days a week.  The fact that they’re so easy is what makes it so hard.

If I had “Run five miles every day”, or, “Train for a marathon” on the list, I wouldn’t feel bad about myself if I missed a day or two.  You wouldn’t look down on me either.  It’s a tough goal, and you might be impressed that I even tried.  But doing one form of exercise every day is so damn easy – some days I literally do a handful of pushups and that’s it – if I miss a few days I feel like a loser, and you’d be a little confused as to how I was unable to complete something so easy.

For me, a big, grandiose, far-off goal like, “Be in peak physical shape”, or, “Make $X by 2017” doesn’t do a lot to help me optimize my days.  It’s too easy to slack and think you can make it up later.  It’s too easy to not push because no one will look down on you for missing your goal.  But blogging every day is totally visible to all and totally doable.  It might suck, but it can be done if you really want to.  I’ve even written some posts on tough days that were nothing more than a haiku about how hard daily blogging is (Salvation by Haiku!).  One day I wrote a post that was a single word.

But I did it.

By showing up and completing it every day, I learn to succeed.  I learn to create as a discipline, not in response to a mood.  I also add value to myself every single day by this practice.  Maybe only a fraction of a percent, but if you know the power of compound interest, you can see how much this can add up when you show up daily.

I recently tried a 30 day experiment going a little more abstract with my daily challenges.  I switched it up so I had to do one thing each day for my…

  • Body
  • Mind
  • Spirit
  • Company

It didn’t go well.  It was too easy to begin to define things in weird ways so that I could check the spreadsheet off (I love checking items off).  I mean, I walked outside, so that’s good for my body, and my spirit, and I thought about stuff with my mind, so I hit them all, right?  But it wasn’t a challenge and I never felt that pride for completing it.  I needed to go back to my tiny, silly, well-defined challenges.

Maybe you work well with bigger, longer term goals and plans.  But if they don’t work for you, try a 30 day challenge of a few small things that you have no excuse for skipping.  You might be amazed at how good it makes you feel to deliver, especially on the really hard days.

The added benefit of doing something creative like writing is that creativity begets creativity, and you’ll become a font of ideas for business, personal, and even other people’s use.  Give them away.  Act on them.  Ideas are infinite and the more you create the more you get.

Marketing as Creating

A lot of creative types have an antagonistic relationship with their audience, or at least with what they perceive it would take to have an audience large enough to make money from.  There’s this idea that just creating great stuff is fulfilling but won’t sell, yet marketing yourself to earn more money is selling out your true artistry.

Paul Cantor does a phenomenal job showing the complex, cooperative relationship between artists and the marketplace in his books and lectures.

My friend TK Coleman said something really profound in an email exchange we had with a frustrated creator recently.

“As artists, we not only need to be creative in our work, but also create in how we generate opportunities to do the work. If I’m a painter, then that makes me an artist in two ways: firstly, I have to create paintings. Secondly, I have to create the time, space, and energy to create paintings in a way that’s profitable for me.”

That mindset is powerful, and I think can relieve some of the tension between creating and selling.  It also reminds to be true not only in your creating, but in your marketing.  How you feel about your sales tactics will bleed through, so keep it genuine.

Writing and I Might Need to Get Counseling

I’ve developed a complicated relationship with writing.

I’ve been blogging every day since February, and prior to that had been blogging anywhere from 2-7 times per week over the past three years.  The surprising thing about writing regularly as a discipline is how much my relationship to the practice has changed.  It’s like a marriage, with honeymoons, dips, plateaus, and every other vicissitude imaginable.

So where do things stand now?

I like writing.  In fact, I love writing.  I need it.  It’s still hard, but I have this unshakable faith that I never had before.  I know when I sit down and start typing, something will come.  I never fear for lack of content.  The knowledge that as long as I sit down, face the page, and hit that first keystroke I will get something written is wonderful.  So as an inward-focused self-development project, writing and I have a good thing going.  It’s when third parties get involved that things get complicated.

I’ve posted before and I still maintain that I write primarily for myself.  Still, I love it when my stuff gets a lot of traction, shares, and views.  I’m a slow learner, but I’ve recently hit on a few elements that dramatically increase the level of attention a piece can get.  That’s the source of the complication between writing and me.  Do I just sit down, hammer away at the keys, and wait for the Muses to reward my discipline with inspiration, or do I deliberately construct content to include elements that will gain wider reach?

I have no ethical worries about “selling out” and don’t look down on marketing or even those who’ve mastered the art of click-baiting.  I don’t think there’s anything more or less pure about writing to get read, as long as you’re honest with yourself about your intentions and don’t feel shame over it.  I love the constant give-and-take game that creators and consumers of content play, trying to understand and anticipate each other.  I think good marketing does not harm a product, but actually creates value.  I am impressed by those who really grasp that the game is less about creating content than it is about structuring it.

Still, writing for reach doesn’t come as naturally to me and I only occasionally enjoy it.  I hate posts that have images attached to them for no reason.  Why does a stock photo of people on an escalator make the ideas better?  Most people prefer images with everything, and I don’t look down on that.  I like titles that are a bit ambiguous, but most people want a big, clear “pop” up top.  I vaguely understand it and oscillate between stubbornly refusing to try and happily playing around with small tweaks that appeal to would-be readers.

When I first began blogging no one read any of my stuff.  That was the second hurdle to overcome.  Before I started writing I had to overcome the fear of being misunderstood or disliked for my sometimes radical views, but I quickly learned the more common and more difficult reality is that no one is offended because no one is reading.  I came to terms with a small audience and writing and I really focused on our relationship in private.  I do not pretend to have a massive audience today, but readership has steadily grown and with increasing frequency I write a piece that gets widely shared.  The thing that makes this hard on my relationship with writing is that the most popular pieces are rarely the ones I care most about or think are my best stuff.

I’m beginning to be able to penetrate the mystery a bit and see what makes some pieces more popular than others, but most of those characteristics aren’t elements of my writing that I find most fundamental or unique to me.  If I allowed myself to indulge in artistic self-pity it would feel like the world is telling me, “Just be less like yourself and you’re work will get more attention”.  It’s not nearly that simple, nor do I think that I could magically master massive reach by “selling out” or any such nonsense.  It ain’t easy to get traction even if you’re trying.  There is just a tiny tug-of-war going on between me and writing about how to proceed in our partnership.

Do I continue to use our encounters in co-creation as a form of therapy and self-reflection, or do we agree to turn toward the wider world and produce things that connect?  Not that I can flip a switch and do the latter easily.  But how much should I try?

For now I’m going to try to have my cake and eat it.  I’ll write for myself every day.  But I’ll also try once or twice a week to let audience-consciousness guide a few of my choices.  Call it an experiment.  I need to know if I’m avoiding writing with the audience in mind because it’s really not me, or if I’m avoiding it for the same reason I used to avoid writing altogether, because it’s hard and scary.

The Inability to Make Choices

For most of us, the first 25 years or so of life involve almost no important choices.  Rather, all the important choices (and many unimportant ones) are made by someone else on our behalf.  When you sleep and eat and study and what you learn and how and when you’re done and why are all prescribed for you.  Sometimes you get to pick one school from another, or a few classes instead of others almost identical, but for the most part, how you spend your time and energy and when and on what is laid out for you.  Your job is to ride the conveyor belt.

The problem is we all want meaningful lives.  Meaning must be created, and creativity requires choices.  Especially choices about what not to do, what to avoid, what to ignore, what to exclude.  These are the toughest choices for most people to make.  It terrifies many people.

After a few work trips where my son was unhappy with the book or trinket I brought back for him, I decided to ask him ahead of time what he wanted me to get.  He was a bit irritated and said he didn’t care, I should just pick.  He’s a bit of a natural pessimist and doesn’t mind feather-ruffling and cynicism.  I pressed and he insisted I just pick.  I did, and again he complained about it.  I asked why he didn’t just tell me ahead of time and he admitted that he didn’t want to choose something only to regret it, because if it was his choice he’d forgo his right to complain about it.

I think that approach is more common than we might assume.  If you’ve ever tried writing consistently you discover pretty quickly that the most difficult decisions are about what to leave out.  Take this post for instance.  There is so much more to be said on this topic, and so much more I believe than I can reasonably include in a single post.  I’ve got to exclude stuff.  Yet I know that every caveat or footnote I leave out allows room for readers to say I missed something or got it wrong.  When you create you’ve got to pick what’s most important and leave aside many other valuable things.  It’s vulnerable.  What if people blame you for leaving them out?  They will.  But if you attempt to include everything you’ll never create anything.

It’s amazing the number of people who have agreed with my reasons for why you should blog every day.  They agree it would make them better at achieving their goals.  I challenge them to try it for 30 days.  Almost no one does.  I’m not trying to shame anyone or claim superiority (I ignored the same challenge and tried and failed at it a few times before I really got going).  The reason it’s so hard is because every day sitting in front of that blank blog-editor you are faced with choices.  What to write about?  More accurately, what not to write about?  What if I write this and it’s misunderstood?  But to make it understood would be way too involved.  I’m overwhelmed.  I don’t have anything to say after all.  Maybe after I’m an expert.

The thing is, the more expertise you gain the harder it is to make these choices.  For every additional bit of knowledge you have it’s that much more you’ve got to leave out when you create.  There will never be a time when you’re ready or when it’s easy.  Just start.  The only way to overcome choice paralysis is to make choices.  Start with small easy ones to train yourself in the fine art of creativity by exclusion.

Most of us have a lot of bad habits and mindsets we need to unlearn in order to create meaningful lives.  First among them is the ability to make choices.  The best part is no one is paying attention as much as you think, so you don’t need to take the prospect of imperfection so seriously.  Just try it.  Anything that’s not wrong is right.

The Power of the Subconscious

I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, and what it says about the subconscious mind being the key to scientific discovery, artistic expression, and other eureka moments.  Koestler describes a common process where those trying to solve a problem or create something new consciously wrestle with the ideas so much that they seep into the subconscious.  After some time away (sleeping, a vacation, a walk, other pursuits) the solution emerges from the subconscious into the conscious mind when least expected.

A friend was telling me recently about a similar observation Napoleon Hill made about those who write down and read or recite their goals regularly.  The goals, after being absorbed and repeated over and again, seep into the subconscious.  That’s when the real stuff happens.  The subconscious takes over, works on the goals, heightens your awareness to ideas and opportunities that move you towards them, and sends out a kind of invisible signal to the world that attracts people and things that assist you in the achievement of the goals.

This need not be interpreted as a mystical phenomenon.  How many times, after learning a new word, do you begin to notice that word everywhere?  How many times, after naming a child something unique, do you begin to hear that name regularly?  Once your subconscious has material to work with, it alters your perception and enables you to tune in to the things that best resonate with whatever is bouncing around in there.

This means that, whether or not you’re deliberately putting it to work, your subconscious mind is working.  What is it doing?  What problems is it solving?  What opportunities is it making you attuned to?  In what ways could you put it to work for you more effectively?

Rules Make the Exceptions More Valuable

I shared recently several rules I have for myself that increase my productivity and happiness.  I was discussing these and other rules with my brother, and we both concluded that, despite the value of our rules, some of the most valuable times are actually when we break them.  This is especially the case with time-management and schedule rules.

I try to get 8 hours of sleep every night because I function better.  Yet some of the best flow states are induced when I’m up until the wee hours cranking away on a creativity binge fueled with caffeine.  If I did this often, I’d be terrible.  But it’s so valuable when employed as a rare exception.

This is one of the other benefits of rules.  Keeping to them gives you space to kick it up to “11” when you need it.  Try going without coffee for several weeks, then when you really need to dial-in have some.  You’ll find the boost from a single cup to be amazing in the clutch when you limit your intake on normal days.

Make rules if for no other reason than the value it adds to breaking them.

Escape

When was the last time you escaped?  I mean fully escaped into a wonder-inducing, awe-inspiring landscape, or sci-fi, or song?

Humans are meant to escape.  We are driven by the impulse to escape.  It’s what led us to multiply, fill the earth and attempt to subdue it.  It’s what drives us to space travel and interplanetary colonization.  It’s what allowed us to discover mind-altering substances and rituals.  It is not the avoidance of living, it is living.

We all have a deep longing for escape.  Escape is a kind of homecoming.  We all feel slightly out of place; we all have an urge to return home, whatever that might mean.  It is the drive to do this which lies at the back of all of our other impulses.  It’s a beautiful motivation.  It is making peace with life and death.  It is seeing beyond time and space.

I do not mean escape motivated by fear.  That is hiding.  I mean adventure motivated by the desire to escape in and of itself.  Escape requires boldness, persistence, vision, and integrity.  It is not cowardice but courage.

What are you escaping into?  What are you enraptured by?  Do you have the courage to follow it?  Your point of origin is not your destination.  Living is escaping.

The Problem of School

The great problem of school is that it’s a constant search and effort to teach children all the things they’d learn naturally if they were not in school.  School removes children from the world – the natural learning environment – hence kids don’t pick up the skills and knowledge they need and want. Schools then struggle and attempt all manner of convoluted methods to replace the knowledge they prevent kids from acquiring.

None of these methods work as well as freedom. Remove kids from schools and the purported purpose of schools – educated children – will be realized.

Of course, it will be realized in great abundance, depth, and diversity. This flowering of individual plans and ideas is messy and threatening to moral busybodies and power hungry social planners. It prevents mass control and threatens the status quo with wild beauty and innovation. Liberty upsets patterns. That is precisely why it is so important.

What History Really Is

The other day one of the Praxis participants posted this to Facebook:

“As a former history major in college and a college drop-out, I never thought I could love history even more then I did back in school. But as I go through the history module for Praxis, I feel like I’ve been cheated my whole life through school. Instead of learning about the greatness of government and its political figures we get to learn about individuals that have actually changed society for the better through markets and with an entrepreneurial spirit.“

He found the secret.  Each module contains a core theme not directly expressed but conveyed through the broader arc of all the content.  The secret of the history module is to dispel the myth of Great Men.

Most history in textbooks and schools tells very little about how we got here.  How did humanity overcome environmental and social challenges to move from stone tablets to touchscreen tablets?  How did all the order we see around us evolve?  How did languages form, and great stories and myths, and breakthrough inventions?  How can the great fact of exponential human progress after the Industrial Revolution be explained?

Most histories are really only the history of those who have ordered and overseen the deaths of masses of people.  Military and political figureheads who pass laws and give speeches and take credit for all the good things that happen during their reign.  Even non-political figures like artists or entrepreneurs get portrayed as lone geniuses who never collaborated with others or engaged in a rigorous, messy, back-and-forth process in broader society and market.

History is now.  We are making it.  So has everyone before.  We want to open up the mind to the possibility that the great advances in society aren’t from Great Men or Lone Geniuses with top-down plans, but from the dynamic creative process of market and social exchange.  Whether hearing Stephen Davies discuss lesser known but more important dates in history, reading Anderson and Hill on how complex disputes were settled in a decentralized way in the American West, listening to Paul Cantor on Shakespeare and Dickens and the X-Files taking feedback from their audiences and incorporating it into their work, or watching Kirby Ferguson on how everything is a remix, the secret is there.  History is about a complex interplay of people and processes.  The pomp and parades and statues are easily seen, but they don’t tell of the fundamental force in society; creative individuals interacting and exchanging with one another.