Tag: entrepreneurship

The Education System Isn’t Broken, It Just Sucks

Some people say the education system is broken.  It’s not.  It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do.  The problem is that what it’s designed to do isn’t good, and it’s less valuable than ever.

I’m not one of those people who thinks it used to be a good system.  It’s not obsolete, it was wrong from the get-go.  It’s always produced undesirable outcomes.  I don’t think obedience, the ability to follow rules, falling in line with authority, uniformity of belief and process, and deferring to experts and standard explanations are desirable traits in individuals and societies.  I think they are dangers to be avoided.

To the extent that part of the result of this will-crushing process is some uniform skills that can be plugged into various business roles, there is some potential market value.  Though even these skills can be gained far better, faster, cheaper, and in more exciting and effective ways.

But today even those few things that people walk away with after 15,000+ hours in a classroom are of almost no value, and the trend is a further decline.

It is less valuable than ever to learn a skill.

It’s less valuable than every to learn to memorize, obey, hoop-jump, and test-take for bureaucratically approved authorities.

It is more valuable than ever to know how to think, how to learn, how to do what machines and software can’t.  Create.  Innovate.  Be entrepreneurial.

Once you realize that the education system isn’t broken you can stop trying to fix it.  It works really well based on its own principles of design.  You can’t make a hammer better at performing surgery.  You need to drop it and grab a scalpel, or invent a laser.

You’ve got to step outside of the education system altogether and build your own learning program tailored to your own goals.  It’s a challenge, but a lot easier than you might think.

Humans are naturally curious, stubborn, adaptive, knowledge-gathering, active, creative beings.  Those are all the things you need to begin, and you don’t really need to do anything to get them.  It’s harder to do what the current system does, which is snuff that out and create uniform widgets.  That’s why they need so many buildings, fences, supervisors, guards, and so much money.

All you need is an environment where natural human tendencies can flourish, bump up against the world, get feedback, and adjust.

Sometimes the system isn’t broken, it just sucks.  Get out.  Build your own thing.

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.

Here’s How I Work

My colleagues at Praxis and I found this exercise to be fun and useful, so now it’s my turn to answer.

——————————————————-

Location: Mount Pleasant, SC
Current gig: CEO of Praxis
Current mobile device: iPhone 6
Current computer: ASUS Zenbook. It’s gorgeous and wonderful.
One word that best describes how you work: Fast.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Voxer, WordPress, the Scrabble app, fantasy football apps, and Momentum.

What’s your workspace like?

Tiny.  I purposely have a ridiculously small, clear desk.  I don’t want space for anything on it.  It contains my beautiful sleek laptop, and usually a giant stein of water, and sometimes a few books I’m reading.  I move around and work from different places in the house sometimes too.  My office is actually just a small section of the bedroom, since I got kicked out of my designated office room.  I work from home and as my kids grow they take up more space.  Since I travel a lot and don’t really care where I work, I moved.  I could work in a broom closet as long as it wasn’t cluttered and I got to take walks outside.

What’s your best time-saving trick?

Delete, shred, destroy.  I get rid of absolutely everything nonessential.  Immediately.  I am ruthless with throwing away paper mail, physical notes, business cards, receipts, and other odds and ends.  I am also a strict zero inbox guy, keeping on top of my emails frees my time, but more importantly my mind, to create.

Also saying no.  Often.

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

I’ve tried Asana, Google Tasks, Slack, and several others.  None of them end up being that valuable.  I use Google Calendar and the native Sticky Notes app on Windows, or if I’m not at my computer the native Notes app on the iPhone.  I leave myself Voxer messages in the My Notes thread sometimes too.  Everything else gets too complicated.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without?

Since I just bought a Kindle Paperwhite so I don’t overflow my room with more books, I’m hoping it will become indispensable.  I’m still a lover of physical books, so we’ll see.  Otherwise no particular gadgets really matter much.  I did just get a waterproof mp3 player from a friend that lets me listen to podcasts while swimming, so that might become a necessity too.  Until the weather gets too cold to swim.

What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?

Mornings.  I’m awesome when I wake up.  I’m happy, eager, productive, and full of energy and optimism…even before coffee.

I’m also pretty solid at writing good, concise emails.

What are you currently reading?

Siddartha by Herman Hesse, Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, Outwitting the Devil by Napolean Hill (rereading), and Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse (rereading).

What do you listen to while you work?

While writing I either listen to a playlist on Spotify of Moby songs, or a station on Pandora called “Yoga music”.  While doing less creative stuff I might listen to some Led Zeppelin, or ’90’s era hip hop, or 80’s New Wave, or anything sappy with vocals I can belt out.  If I’m not writing, I mix it up quite a bit.  When I’m writing, it’s only ethereal mood music.

Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?

I’m definitely an extrovert based on any personality test or technical definition.  However, in the last 5 years my ratio of time I need to be with people and time I need to be alone has reversed.  Now for every one hour I spend “on” and around people I need four hours alone.  It used to be the opposite.  I can go mix it up or give a talk or be at an event and enjoy it, but I really, desperately need to get out and be alone for long periods of time afterwards, and I am (no longer) ever the last one at the party, but more likely one of the first to leave.  I’d rather be alone writing or reading or watching a Sci-Fi with my wife than anything else.

What’s your sleep routine like?

It’s not always like this, especially with travel, but my ideal routine is: go to sleep when my mind wants to, wake up when my body wants to.

My mind is typically very active in the late evening until around midnight or 1 AM.  I often feel physically ill if I get up earlier than 7:30 or so, and I much prefer getting up at around 8 or 8:30.  I used to feel guilty for that and make myself get up earlier no matter what, but I found my mornings far less productive because I felt too out of whack physically.  I now try not to schedule anything before 9 or 10 so I can wake up, lay in bed gathering my thoughts for a bit, get some food and coffee, and write a blog post before the hustle and bustle begins.

Fill in the blank: I’d love to see ______ answer these same questions.

My good friend and colleague TK Coleman.  I’ve known him for over 15 years, and I still find his work and life habits a total mystery.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“If it doesn’t affect bowel movements or erections, don’t worry about it.”  True story.  A wise man actually gave me this advice once.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

If you’re not having fun (even if sometimes intense or stressful fun) you’re doing it wrong.

Read More by Reading Less

From the Praxis blog.

It’s an absolute necessity for those who want to seize the entrepreneur-rich future to have excellent grit, work ethic, professional skills, communication, confidence, a network, and creative problem solving. These roll-up-the sleeves habits and skills must be mastered. But it’s also a necessity to read. A lot.

You need hundreds of mental models to draw from and lay over each other to find breakthroughs at the intersections. You’ve got to wrestle with age old questions like how to have a good inner life, no matter what’s going on with your startup or job. These cannot be gained by hacks or tricks. They can only be gained by a ceaseless consumption of high quality ideas.

I once heard said that the older the problem, the older the solution. Maybe SEO secrets are best found in webinars, but the secret to reducing stress and finding meaning in your work is more likely found in a time-tested intellectual tradition or great book. All the best entrepreneurs I’ve met are relentlessly philosophical and voracious readers. Not just of business books. In fact, business books are probably the least read among the most successful people I’ve met.

There’s so much great stuff out there. How can you consume it with all the demands on your time? You want to read Hesse, and Milton, and Seneca, and Feynman, and Hemingway, and on and on. But you’re barely keeping up on your email!

First, relax. Stressing about reading or doing it out of guilt is unlikely to do you much good. Try to enjoy it. Next, carve out an hour, or at least a half an hour, each day where you’re not allowed to do other stuff. Just read. Do it before bed to calm your mind and feed new ideas into your brain before you enter the dream world.

Then – and here’s the big secret that’s hard for me and most others I know – stop reading when the book isn’t interesting. Or skip ahead. Pick up a new book. Go right to the good chapter. Don’t treat books like sacred objects that must be read in their entirety, in order, or not at all.

You go to blogs and scan for a good post. You ditch it halfway through if it’s clear the headline was the beefiest part. You scan Twitter and Facebook and feel no guilt for not reading every word. Great books are deeper, richer sources of important ideas, but you don’t have to approach them with fear and trembling. Better to consume one good chapter of Walden than to keep it on the shelf waiting for that perfect weekend vacation where you’ll read it all and take copious notes. It’s probably not going to happen.

Dive in to great books every week, or better yet every day, and keep consuming them. You need a lot of mental models at your disposal to build great stuff and enjoy the process.

Two Tips for Public Speaking That Also Apply to Work

From the Praxis blog.

I was talking with one of the September 2015 Praxis participants during the opening seminar about public speaking.  He asked me what are the most helpful things for me when it comes to reducing nerves and getting in the zone as a speaker.  I told him the two most important things for me are:

  • Lots of Practice
  • Unique Content

Practice is obvious.  Public speaking, like digital skills, social skills, bike riding, creativity, or confidence, is not one of those things you can become great at by studying.  You have to do it.  A lot.  There simply is no substitute for doing it when it comes to gaining comfort and skill.

The second point is not actually about the content in any objective sense.  I don’t think there are right and wrong content decisions, topics, formats, tones, or structures that will consistently lead to success and enjoyment as a speaker.  When I say content matters, I really mean crafting a talk that is unique to you.

If I asked you to give a 5 minute schpeel tomorrow on the importance of accounting to business success, your first reaction would probably be to spend all night researching accounting and articles about this topic and trying to become as much of an expert as one can become overnight.  You’d feel ridiculous stress, and while giving your talk you’d constantly wonder if the audience would call you out or know more than you and think you a fraud.  That’s because you’ve approached it with the idea that your content must mirror what others have already done on the topic.  The truth is, you’re never going to be as good as they are at giving their content.  You’ve got to deliver your own.

Maybe you know nothing about accounting.  No problem.  Give a five minute talk that is completely, entirely unique to you and your life and perspective.  You’ll be the expert.  No one knows your story as well as you.  You can do this in almost any area if you’re creative.  For our example, you could tell us that you know accounting is important for business success because when you were a kid you had a lemonade stand and you thought you were killing it with your $10 in sales…only because you didn’t write down or track the $12 you spent on supplies.  That’s a story no expert could beat you at.  It’s your story.

When you pick content that flows out of you, that you know and live and breath, and work your topic around it, you’ll feel far more at ease and give a heck of a better talk than if you try to be something you’re not.  Your philosophy, hobbies, friends, upbringing, or any number of things truly and uniquely you are the place to start from when building a talk.

As I shared these two tips for public speaking I realized how true they are for entrepreneurship, or any kind of work.  You’ll do your best work and enjoy yourself and find your groove and create value the most when you have:

  • Lots of Practice
  • Unique Content

You can’t discover what makes you come alive or what you hate by thinking about it or reading books.  You can’t gain confidence and skill and self-knowledge by listening to lectures.  You can’t find out if your product or idea is a good one by merely polling people.  You’ve got to get out there and test some stuff.  You’ve got to practice.  A lot.

You’re likely to feel a lot of stress if you spend your time comparing your skills to others.  Just because you’ll never be the coder that you’re buddy is doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in the tech world.  Just because you’re not as good a salesman as your boss doesn’t mean you have no future.  Aping their style will only get you so far.  What do you have that’s unique to you?  What do you do better than anyone in your peer group?  What’s something you’ve got that others don’t?

It might be a skill or personality trait.  It also might be something really unglamorous.  When you’re young you often have something very few more seasoned people have.  Time and flexibility.  A low cost standard of living.  Geographical freedom.  Think about how to build on those far more unique assets rather than trying to compete with someone who has a ten year head start on you in something more generic.

Jump in and do stuff.  Do things that are true to you, and where the unique aspects of yourself can do the heavy lifting.  You’ll do better and have more fun.  Whether speaking to a crowd or working on a career.

Why You Should Apply to Praxis

Why I Started Praxis

Praxis requires the right people.  It’s a challenging program.  It’s not for everyone.

So who’s a good fit?  If you or someone you know fits any of these descriptions, it might be a match made in heaven…

You’re good, but you’re bored

You can do well in school.  You’re typically one of the best students.  You can do well in a job.  You’re typically one of the best employees.  Most social and educational situations are like games, and you’re pretty good at figuring out the game and doing what it takes to win.  Still, you’re restless.

Gaming the school system for grades seems a bit pointless, and you’re jonesing for something more real.  You want to succeed, but you’d like to do it in an environment that’s connected to something bigger, more valuable to the world and to your own future.

You know you don’t know everything and you’re bored getting rewarded for stuff that isn’t all that challenging.  You relish the opportunity to try bigger things, and to be in an environment where open experimentation and failure aren’t the enemy, but stagnation is.

You’ve always got side projects and ideas

Not satisfied with officially sanctioned clubs and activities, you’re keen to create your own.  You’re the one who’s always starting fantasy football leagues or planning poker nights.  What?  No aquatics club?  You’ll remedy that.  Nearest Red Bull supply is too far away?  You’ll start a little delivery service.

From building club websites and Facebook pages to finding someone to make a new logo for your softball team, you never stop coming up with new ideas, jumping on opportunities, and completing projects of your own design.

You know this urge to build things might take you places if put in a more expansive context.  You know you could learn so much more being around others who have built amazing companies and brought big ideas to life.

You can’t stop seeing how everything around you could be done more efficiently

Everyone in line at the airport is staring at their phone and mindlessly wandering through the rope maze.  Not you.  You’re analyzing the way the line is designed and frustrated that they chose such an inefficient configuration.

You immediately see how the class assignment could be done in a much cleaner, quicker way with the same result.  You probably got in trouble for discovering shortcuts and hacks in grade school.  Everywhere you look, you run numbers in your head or ask questions about how the model works.  When you drive through a neighborhood, you’re looking at the cars and houses and estimating the annual salary and debt needed to sustain the residents.  You wonder if they’d have a higher quality of life in a different city with lower cost of living.

You feel like the world is full of inefficiencies but this doesn’t make you angry, it makes you excited.  Where others see pain points, you see opportunity.  You may not know yet how to channel this mindset and you may not have any particular passion, but you can’t turn off that part of your brain that sees areas for improvement all around.

You’d love to enter an environment where that mindset is valuable and cultivated.  You’d love to take it to the next level.

If that’s you, so is this

Praxis is ideal for anyone who fits any of these descriptions.  An intensive 3 month bootcamp on personal and professional skills, 6 months working at an amazing startup, a rigorous series of personal development projects, coaching, and a deep dive into what it takes to be an entrepreneur and self-directed learner.  This is the career and educational experience you’ve always wanted.  No fluff.  No BS.

Why wait to do awesome stuff and work with innovative companies?

Start today.

Entrepreneurship Needs the Right Context

Entrepreneurship is really sexy right now.  Startup founders are like rock stars and you can’t go a day without seeing articles about them.  As far as it goes, I welcome this trend.  Entrepreneurship, as J.B. Say might define it, is the act of moving resources from lower to higher valued uses, or more concretely, creating a new process or product to solve old problems in innovative ways.  This seems a pretty good thing to glorify, at least compared with some other superficial traits that get a lot of attention.

Still, if entrepreneurship is praised across the board, regardless of the context, bad things can happen.

Absent competition and markets, being entrepreneurial has no value.  In fact, it can destroy value if channeled into the political process.  Political entrepreneurs find new ways to access resources first taken from others by force (taxation), and therefore do not create wealth.  They shift existing wealth around with no value-add, because the profit/loss signals are short-circuited.  Furthermore, they divert resources from productive activity to lobbying, currying favor, or massive projects with populist appeal but no market value.

Just about any entrepreneurial endeavor with the words “green” or “sustainable” has a high likelihood of being a fraudulent political game rather than genuine value creation.  The web of grants and subsidies and tax incentives and price supports and mandates in this industry make it all but impossible to identify real value creation as distinct from political shenanigans.  There are a great many media friendly entrepreneurs who chase government dollars instead of private investor or customer dollars, which are the real indicator of value creation.

Furthermore, all the buzz about entrepreneurship has given tech founders a huge platform from which to weigh in on a great many other issues.  Many people assume anyone smart enough to build a great app or billion dollar company could improve public policy.  The problem is that policy doesn’t get debated and implemented in a startup environment, but a monopolized, violence-backed, and fundamentally warped institution with all the wrong incentives.  The technocratic desire many startup types have to make gov’t more like a Silicon Valley company is what Hayek might call the fatal conceit.  It won’t work.  “If only smart people would control all the resources (and the guns that seize them) we’d make public infrastructure flawless!”  This kind of thinking is more dangerous, even if more noble on its face, than political actors openly seeking their own enrichment and not trying to solve grand problems with central plans.

The same thing happened in the industrial era.  Titans like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie were heroes because of their amazing success at improving the world through entrepreneurial action in the market.  When they turned their attention to politics, Gilded Age entrepreneurs built up a horrific behemoth of graft and monopoly that only slowed progress.

In a free or mostly free market entrepreneurs are the greatest force for good the world has ever known.  More than any amount of philanthropy or good intentions.  Outside the market context there is nothing inherently noble about entrepreneurship, and when directed to the political process it can be downright destructive.

Credentials are Killing the Classroom

(A slightly tighter, probably better version of this was published for the Freeman.)

I’ve been to a lot of educational seminars put on by organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education and the Institute for Humane Studies, among others.  One thing these events have in common is incredibly high quality participants and deep discussions late into the night.  They tend to be multi-day intellectual feasts that leave you as tired as invigorated, and always challenged in the best of ways.

Nearly every time you hear one or more participants say something like, “This is what I wish college was like!”  The attendees are blown away by the caliber of the content, the professors willingness to engage amicably even in free time, and the intelligence and interest level of the other participants.  Faculty and students alike talk about how these seminars are far better than typical college classes.  This is no accident.

The obvious explanation most people give for this quality differential is self-selection.  Those who choose to give up a week of their summer to discuss ideas – both faculty and students – are high caliber and highly engaged.  This is true so far as it goes, but if we stop there we miss something even more fundamental and profound.  After all, college has self-selection too.  Shouldn’t it be full of professors and students who are earnest truth and knowledge seekers of the finest quality?  Yet college is nothing close to this, but for extremely rare exceptions in one or two classes.  Why does the self-selection only produce quality learning in these seminars?  The reason is right in front of us.

It’s because college offers an official credential and educational experiences outside of college do not.

That’s it.  Everything else is minor compared to this causal factor.  It’s easy to see when you look.  Imagine one of these summer seminars if they offered an official, government-approved piece of paper at the end that most HR departments used as a baseline screen, without which you couldn’t get past the first wave of job applications?  A summer seminar selling a magical ticket to a job that mom, dad, and society would feel proud of would be overwhelmed with attendees.  And most of them wouldn’t give a hoot about what they had to do to get the paper at the end.  Demand for faculty would spike, and most of them would do whatever it took to get the paycheck and quickly retreat to quiet corridors where they could be with their books and the few colleagues that actually care.  It would become, in a word, college.

The evidence is everywhere that the credential is killing the classroom.  I’ve guest taught entry level college classes before.  It’s pretty painful.  Most of the students are half asleep, grumpy, forlorn, texting, and generally inattentive.  I like to joke that if aliens from another planet came down and observed a typical class at a typical university and were asked what they witnessed, they would scan the cinder block and fluorescent room, ponder the pained look on student faces, and conclude it was a penal colony.  Imagine their surprise when told these people are not only here of their own free will, but paying tens of thousands for the suffering!

Not every classroom is that painful, but it’s the rule not the exception.  If you need further proof consider the fact that when class is cancelled everyone is happy, student and professor alike.  What other good can you think of where you pay in advance and are excited when it’s not delivered?  That’s because, much to the confusion of most faculty, the good being sold is not their lectures or the knowledge therein.  None of the students are buying that.  Sure, it’s nice if they get a little enjoyment and knowledge out of the deal, but that’s not why they’re there.  After all, if that’s what they wanted they could simply sit in on classes at will without registering or paying.

They are there for the credential because the credential is a signal to the working world that they are at least slightly better on average than those without it.  That’s it.  In some fields the credential is legally required, and in many others alternative ways to measure competence are illegal, so the signal of a degree retains artificially enhanced value.  Even so, that value is fading.

Large institutions form because transaction costs are high with tons of individuals exchanging goods, services, and information separately.  This is why family name mattered so much in times past.  Economist Ronald Coase famously explained the existence of firms using this basic logic.  It works for universities too.  When it’s hard to prove your worth alone, you get a trusted institution to vouch for you.  It’s s shortcut that reduces risk on the part of those who want to hire you.  But each passing year the value of this institutional reputation-backer declines compared to the available alternatives.  Technology has dramatically reduced information costs so it is now easier than ever to be your own resume.  You can vouch for yourself and create results easily seen by others that can speak for you.  It’s Yelp reviews instead of a few food critics determining whose steak is good.  You can build a better signal than what college is selling.

So long as legal and cultural (we might almost say religious) norms continue to see the degree as the primary signal of value in the marketplace the classroom will continue to decline in quality.  When the majority of students are purchasing one good (the credential) but are made to endure another (the classroom) they will continue to see it as a cost more than a benefit, and behave accordingly, sliding through with minimal pain and suffering.

On the flip side the classroom isn’t doing the credential any favors either.  Even though many still lack the imagination to see the alternatives right in front of them, most employers now admit that a degree signals very little these days.  Everyone has one.  Though there are still sometimes significant qualitative differences, most universities sell as many as they possibly can.  Cases of professors passing bad students and universities passing bad professors are well known, and the clout of the institutions is waning.  Even those who still require a degree ask for much more on top of it, because sitting through a bunch of classes you didn’t care about and doing the minimum amount of passionless hoop-jumping doesn’t convey much about your energy, eagerness, and ability to create value in a dynamic market.

A number of my professor friends sometimes chastise me for what they think are unfair criticisms of college.  Yet what I’m suggesting, that the credential be separated from the classroom, reflects my respect for great professors and the value of their style of education.  It is precisely because classroom learning at its best, like I’ve experienced so many times in those seminars, is so powerful and valuable that I wish to see it no longer destroyed and diminished by artificial attachment to a supposed magic job paper.  The subsidies, loans, restrictions, requirements, licensure laws, as well as the parental and societal worship of college as the great economic security blanket have filled the classroom with so much clutter it’s a rarity for quality interaction to occur.

The exciting thing is that a cleavage between the credential and the classroom is happening right in front of us.  It’s not MOOC’s that will fundamentally change college in countries like the US where access to information is already rich.  That’s just a new delivery system for a current good, and one that most American’s aren’t buying anyway.  The real shift is occurring as fewer and fewer employers look to the degree as the dominant signal, and as more and more young people build their own.

When the dust settles I’d love to see every great teacher and researcher doing their thing with eager audiences who are actually there to purchase that unique product, rather than suffer through it on their way to getting something else they really want.  The host of mediocre faculty will lose, but the good ones will win big, both in economic opportunity and quality of the craft.  So will the young customers who wish to learn from them.

Build a Better Signal

Why pay a university to do something you can do better yourself?

From Medium.

A college degree is a signal.

It’s a signal to the world of your value in the market. It conveys information about your ability, skill, and intelligence. There is a lot of noise in the world of work, and it’s hard to figure out who’s worth working with. A degree cuts through some of that noise and puts you in a smaller pool of competitors.

The thing is, this signal is not that valuable. It’s also very expensive.

Not long ago a degree may have been the best signal most people could get. There weren’t many ways to demonstrate your value to the market, so a degree was one of the better bets. Things have changed dramatically. Technology has opened up the world. The tools available to you now have lowered search and information costs, and you can create signals of your own that are far more powerful than a degree.

What’s Better?

A person with a strong GitHub profile has a signal that beats a degree. If you’ve launched a startup, even if it lasted only six months and ultimately failed, you’ve done something that sends a more powerful signal than a degree. If you’ve raised money, sold products, done freelance work, produced videos, run social media campaigns, mastered SEO or AdWords, built a website, designed logos, started a nonprofit, been published in a handful of outlets with good content, had valuable work experience, or even just have an amazing online presence via a personal website and/or excellent LinkedIn and social media profiles, you have a signal more valuable than most degrees.

If you are not very talented or ambitious and you are unable to do anything like the above, a degree might be the best signal you’re capable of getting. When you realize that all the other students half asleep around you in class will walk away with the same signal, it becomes clear that it doesn’t carry that much weight. It says, “I’m no worse than everyone else with a BA.” If getting a BA is a really hard task for you and building something better is overwhelming, the signaling power of a degree might be worth it. But if you are able and willing to do more — if you are above average and can excel in most environments, than you have in your power right now the ability to build a better signal than a degree.

You have at your fingertips tools that young work-seekers and employers a few decades ago didn’t. Never has it been easier and cheaper to start a business, offer freelance services, learn to code, show off your writing or artistic skills, and build a portfolio of value created.

Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them

Consider the woman who created this website in an effort to get hired at AirBnB. Her resume listing her academic accomplishments and other common signals was lost in the noise. So she built a better signal.

AirBnB website beats a resume

The website is far more valuable than any degree or honor roll listing. AirBnB took notice, and I can guarantee that website alone has created more job offers and interest than she can handle. In fact, so entrenched is the degree-as-signal mindset that this woman’s effort went viral immediately. The competition among degree holders is fierce, while the competition among those who build a better signal is almost nonexistent.

There is nothing in her story that required a degree. If you want to work for a cool company, you can do something like this yourself right now regardless of educational status. Why settle for a dated, baseline signal that says you’re no worse than every other degree holder?

What Happens to College?

Here’s the interesting thing: The more young people begin to build better signals, the better college will become.

Fewer people will go because most students attend to purchase the signal and that only. But those who stay will be there for the best reasons. They’ll be there because they love the college experience, the lectures, the professors, and the rest of the bundle.

Losing all those customers who are just suffering through the courses to get the signal will hurt the bottom line of most universities. Some might go under entirely. But for those who care deeply about higher education in its best form, this will be a welcome change. Schools will get sharper and better as they face competition. Instead of contenting themselves with delivering mediocre product because they have consumers who feel captive to the need to get that degree, colleges will begin to become more accountable to the customers there to gain knowledge.

Professors — good ones at least — will love this change. Students in their classes will be the ones who actually want to be there for the value of the classroom experience itself. Severing the credential from the classroom will enhance the quality of both.

How Do I Do It?

Most young people don’t know how to take advantage of this new world where they can craft their own signal. They’ve spent years in a conveyor belt education system that has instilled in them a rule-following, paper accolade chasing mentality. They see degrees and grades as safe, as fallbacks that will magically keep them afloat in hard times. They overestimate the signaling power of paper and underestimate their ability to create product. Product beats paper in the world of signals.

Entrepreneurship is becoming more than just an activity that a tiny number of company founders engage in. We once shifted from farming to factories, then from factories to offices. Today a shift from corporate offices to remote workers, freelancers, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs is happening fast. Those who learn to think entrepreneurially, whether or not they ever launch their own company, and see themselves as their own firm, regardless of where their paycheck comes from, will build the future.

It’s hard to internalize and act on the opportunity in this new world. That’s one of the main reasons behind Praxis, the entrepreneur education company I launched. We want to help you build a signal that is more valuable than a degree. We want to help you do it in one quarter the time and for zero cost. We want you to have fun and become excellent in the process. We want to help you use the tools available and create your own future.

That’s why we place participants with growing companies to get work experience. That’s why we help them create personal development projects, tangible skills training, portfolio projects, and personal websites.

Praxis is just one way to help young people take advantage of the opportunity to build a better signal. The options are limited only by your imagination. Find one that works for you.

Carpe Diem

The future is bright. You have in your hands the power to create your own brand, to broadcast it to the world, to demonstrate your ability to create value. You can built a better signal than the generic one in the hands of tens of millions of other young people.

What will it be?

When Ideas Aren’t Enough, Start a Company

From Medium.

For me it was education. I had ideas. That wasn’t enough.

I worked in and around higher education for the better part of a decade and it confirmed and strengthened the belief I developed during my own college experience: the whole system is a wasteful mess.

Hardly anyone involved enjoys it. Students and professors complain about each other. Both are happy when class is cancelled. Employers don’t think grads know what they need to know, grads don’t feel ready to embark on careers, and everyone is spending everyone else’s money with unknown results and little accountability.

“I see opportunity”

I openly talked about the problems of credential inflation, student frustration, artificially stimulated supply via tax dollars in myriad forms, artificially stimulated demand via licensure requirements and restrictions on employers using other means to test competence. I wrote and discussed the dangers of the cultural narrative that guilts, shames, and scares everyone into buying a multi-thousand dollar product that they don’t much enjoy and don’t know what to do with.

I saw the emergence of MOOC’s and the decline of informational gatekeepers. I heard business owners say they don’t care about degrees anymore. I imagined far more efficient, customer-centric, accountable, exciting, and effective ways of providing education, experience, confidence, skills, and a network to young people. In short, I had ideas.

The problem with ideas is that they’re almost costless. I could broadcast my ideas and others could broadcast theirs, and ideas people can lock in an endless tussle over whose are better. Who cares? Nobody wins when it’s all talk. It hit me one exciting, frightening day. If I’m really correct about the problems with higher ed, and if my ideal alternative is as valuable as I think it is, I need to put my money where my mind is. I need to build it. So I did.

Make it real

I created a company that puts smart, hard-working young people in great businesses while they are engaging in a rigorous educational experience complete with tech skills, professional development basics, liberal arts, coaching, and self-guided projects that demonstrate tangible value.

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.

Suddenly, I went from the guy with opinions and ideas about education, entrepreneurship, and career to the guy who’s going to succeed or fail based on those ideas. I learned that the only thing critics love more than ideas to disagree with are physical manifestations of those ideas. But once I launched Praxis, everything became clearer. I was playing a new game. I was no longer worried about the critics, I was interested in my customers.

Have something to lose

This change in focus is the healthiest thing in the world. Economist Nassim Taleb talks about the concept of “skin in the game”, and every entrepreneur knows exactly what he means. Nothing sharpens your focus and clarifies your thought like having something on the line besides just the pride of being right. Nothing helps you gain valuable information from those who disagree like the need to succeed in the development and deployment of an idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an ideas person. Philosophizing is my favorite pastime. But the best philosophers are those who don’t limit themselves to thought experiments, but also put their ideas through field experiments. It’s not enough to have ideas that seem superior in mental models. The real impact comes from the thinkers who take the next step and incorporate their vision.

Entrepreneurship is philosophy in action.

Use the value-creation test

A good exercise is to attempt to turn every idea into a business model. Think people eat too many carbs and they’d be happier and healthier on your preferred diet? If you’re right, that’s value sitting on the table. Can you create that value for others and measure it in revenue? Think people watch too much TV? What need are they trying to meet and what other services might meet it better? Can you build it? Can you sell it?

I am not claiming that speculation without action is worthless. All action starts in the imagination. I am saying that every idea can be sharpened by forcing yourself to put it into some kind of model that creates value. Not every idea is monetizable, and that’s OK. But neither is monetization some kind of lower life form or dirty word. It’s nothing more than a representation of the value your idea creates for people. The practice of putting theories into business models will reveal weaknesses in the idea, or demonstrate that it’s so good you can’t wait to act on it.

Don’t get stuck talking

There are limitless entrepreneurial opportunities, and today it’s easier and cheaper than ever to turn an idea into a business. But there is also infinite information and no shortage of platforms with which to discuss ideas. This presents a challenge to big thinkers and entices many of us to stay forever in the world of speculation, avoiding implementation.

If you want to change the world and your own life, you can’t stop at ideas. The transformation of those ideas into something that receives feedback from the market is the hardest, yet most worthwhile journey I can think of. Embrace it.

Age and Your Option Set

I meet a lot of young people who have the skills, interest, maturity, and resources to do right now the very thing they want to be doing in five years.  Almost none of them realize it, or feel free to do it now.  They feel as though they need permission, or need to be in the “normal” age bracket for it to be in their set of options.

I know some coders who have the skill and interest to work for a software startup.  They don’t enjoy school.  They don’t feel it’s making them a better coder.  They have a job offer right now to go work someplace they love.  They even say that the job offer is exactly the kind they want to get in four years when they finish school, and voice disappointment that it came their way too early.  How could it be too early?  The company wants you and you want them, right now, today!

The conveyor belt mindset is so strong in most of us that we are incapable of seeing options in front of us if they aren’t part of the set of options that is supposed to be in front of a 16, 18, or 24 year old.  At 18 your options are among different colleges, internships, summer jobs, or gap year programs.  That’s the norm, and that norm blinds people to the massively larger set of options they actually have.  This blinding is so strong that even when offered something that they hope will be available four years hence, they are unable to see it as a serious, viable option, and they say no to go suffer through something less interesting for four years and untold thousands.

This isn’t just about college.  Our tendency to stick with the age-defined conveyor belt option set society expects is strong throughout life.  I’ve met women who desperately want to stop working and have and raise children, but they feel like they aren’t allowed to until they’ve put in a certain amount of time as a working woman, even though they could afford it today.  I’ve met people who want to play gigs at bars with a band, but they feel that’s the kind of thing an accountant can only do when he retires.

Don’t be blinded by social averages and expectations.  If you want to learn code today, who cares that you’re only 10 and supposed to be doing other things.  If you want to switch careers, who cares that you’re 60 and it’s supposed to be too late for that.  If you have a job offer today that matches what you hope to get after graduation, who cares that you’re only 18.

The conveyor belt sucks.  Get off.  Pave your own path.

What to do When The Game Kills Your Entrepreneurial Dream

I’m putting the finishing touches on several presentations I’ll be giving next week at FEE’s Economics of Entrepreneurship seminar.  I always love crafting a new talk, and I’m especially looking forward to one on how insights from Public Choice Theory can help entrepreneurs.

I don’t want to give anything away, but here are the four options I’ll discuss for entrepreneurs when they face a clumsy, interventionist state that stymies innovative efforts with political games:

  1. Ignore the game
  2. Defy the game
  3. Play the game
  4. Change the game

We’ll see how the talk goes, and if it works I might keep it in the live mix and give it this fall at some events.

My Education and Career Path

I was homeschooled, but in practice that meant playing Legos most of the time.  My mom felt guilt over her failed attempts at creating a more structured learning environment and curriculum.  At the time I thought I was probably embarrassingly behind my peers in “normal school”, but I didn’t much care.  We (my siblings and I) always had lots of chores to do, and I had paid jobs from age ten or earlier (weekly then daily paper routes, golf course, grocery store, construction…).  I had no interest in any kind of intellectual life until I was about sixteen.  Up until then, it was sports, Legos, earning money, playing guitar, and whatever I had to do to get decent grades in my few homeschool classes or textbooks.

When I was 15, I attended a small private school for my sophomore year in high school.  I enjoyed the sports and made some friends, but after years of loose homeschooling, it felt stiflingly prefabricated.  I don’t think I took homework home with me the entire year, since so many classes required almost no attention, I’d do homework right there at my desk.  The whole thing seemed artificial, and I found it absurd that we all followed the same bells and schedule, like cattle corralled through the halls.  I was not too smart for school – plenty of kids there were smarter than me – but too impatient with the lack of individualization.  I was also irritated that it severely restricted the hours I could work.  I decided to quit.

I’ll never forget when I told the music teacher of my decision to leave and enroll full time in the local community college.  I considered him a friend and something of a mentor.  He helped awaken my musical interest and gave me opportunities to sing and play that I was not qualified for, something I’m still grateful for.  But he just didn’t get it.  I came in to class after running around outside in a rainstorm with a few other students and broke the news.  He stared, mouth agape with a bewildered, wounded look in his eyes and said, “College!?  Isaac, you’re not ready for college.  You’re still a kid who runs barefoot in the rain!”  Any doubts I had about my decision vanished then and there.  It was a well-meaning plea, but I took it as a challenge.  I felt he underestimated me, and that was a great motivator.

I spent the next two years taking a full load of classes, packed into two or three days a week, and working as many hours as I could the other two or three days.  I loved it.  I could choose the classes I wanted, make my own schedule, and interact with a variety of people much wider than in the private high school, and even more than at the university I later attended.  Most of the classes were ok, some bad, some good.  The best classes I ever had were business and marketing from a crazy, middle-aged, self-proclaimed capitalist fanboy who ran a successful business but taught for fun.  It was around this time that I awoke to the world of ideas.  It had nothing to do with any of my classes, but for some reason (probably a breakup with a girl) I started picking up books, something I had, with a few early exceptions, hated.

I found myself mesmerized by philosophy, theology, and eventually economics.  My job had me travelling across the state and installing phone and computer cables (pre WiFi), and taking on scary amounts of responsibility, mostly making things up as I went.  My education, which came almost entirely from books I read on my own and late-night conversations with friends at church, the used bookstore, and coffee shops (which were kind of a new thing in Kalamazoo, MI at the time) was moving at breakneck speed.  It was like my whole childhood I was just doing whatever I had to to get by educationally, but the dam broke in my mid-teens and I was in love with the life of the mind.  I also had something of an entrepreneurial spirit and helped start a nonprofit and did a lot of international missions work, which at the time I thought was the best way to make the world a better place.

After community college I continued the work/school split while attending the local, generic, massive state university where I majored in political science and philosophy.  I changed majors several times, but finally settled on subjects I most enjoyed and would let me finish as fast as possible.  I didn’t mind school, but hated the amount of money I had to pay, and just wanted to get the piece of paper that was supposed to be a ticket to a job.  Trying to save money, I went two whole semesters without purchasing a single textbook and still got good grades.  It seemed like a racket.

With the exception of one professor and one TA, none of my fellow students or faculty really aided my intellectual development in comparison to what I was pursuing on my own and with friends outside of school.  I used to walk around an old building downtown and imagine buying and turning it into a real college, where students only bought the items they wanted from the bundle, and where work and classroom were not in competition, but complementary.

Despite never having a single meeting with an advisor, somehow I graduated.  At least I assume I did, since they sent me a certificate in the mail.  I was 19 and I started a business with my brother.  It was something of a failure, with a few high points.  We folded it up after just nine months.  I spent the next five years as a very young and very poor married guy working in the state legislature, then at a think tank.

I loved ideas, and had come to believe the way to make the world a better place was through political and policy change.  But the more I studied and observed the machinations of the political world, the less faith I had in it as an avenue for change.  While at the think tank I took night classes and got a Masters in Economics.  It was a uniquely amazing program, as we used no textbooks but instead read all primary works beginning with Hesiod all the way through Marx and Mises and Friedman.  I drove across the state three hours each way, one night a week for a year and a half during the program.  By the time I was done, my belief in the inability of politics to improve the world had become firmer.  I had little interest in anything besides educating people about the perils of government intervention and the wonders of the market.

My wife and I took a chance on a great job offer running libertarian educational programs in Arlington, VA, a city we weren’t too fond of before we moved, and one that, after leaving I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  The job was amazing.  Over my four plus years there I ran fellowships, seminars, mentoring programs, and raised money.  I interacted with hundreds of bright students and dozens of successful entrepreneurs.  I began to observe troubling trends.  So many young people were stacking up degrees and educational accolades, yet wandering aimlessly, insecure and unsure about their career prospects.  They had degrees and debt, but couldn’t find a job.  Many of the smartest decided, since they didn’t know what else to do, to go to law school.  So many came out the other end with massive debt, no closer to finding a fulfilling career.  (If I had a nickel for every lawyer that told me they wished they hadn’t done law school…)

Meanwhile, in fundraising I met countless business owners who claimed they were always hiring, even in a supposedly down economy, but couldn’t find enough good talent.  Something was amiss.

My views on changing the world were shifting too.  Education as I thought of it – convincing people to change their worldview – seemed insufficient.  I began to observe areas where change happened, it seemed to have a great deal to do with entrepreneurial innovation.  You could spend your life trying to convince people the Post Office is inefficient or immoral, or you could invent FedEx or email.  I got the itch to disrupt the status quo as an entrepreneur.

A culmination of desires I had in college and opportunities, skills, connections, and worldviews I’d developed since came together.  Cliché as it sounds, I went for a walk on the beach and had an epiphany.  A single word, “Praxis”, popped into my head.  I could almost see it in bold letters floating on the horizon.  A relentless flood of ideas filled my mind, and I ran to my car and drove home as fast as I could to type it up.  I was going to create an alternative to the university system.  Better, faster, cheaper, and more individualized.  I wanted to create a new class of entrepreneurial young people.  I wanted to seize the best online educational material, organize it, add a powerful credentialing signal, and combine it with work experience at dynamic companies that couldn’t afford unproductive interns.  I was tired of seeing young people languish and drown in debt.  I was tired of seeing business owners struggle to find good workers.  I was tired of seeing so many entrepreneurial opportunities and so few people with the confidence to pursue them.

Thus Praxis was born.  It’s kind of the incorporated version of my philosophy on education.

While living through the various phases I was only sometimes conscious of these things, but in retrospect I can draw several lessons from my educational and career path:

  • Free time is more valuable than planned time.
  • Work is more valuable than school.
  • Responsibility and ownership at an early age are irreplaceable.
  • College is what you make it, but nearly everything good you get from it can be had better and cheaper elsewhere.
  • Your education belongs to you, and no institution can give it to you.
  • Discovering what you hate is more important than finding out what you love. As long as you’re not doing things you hate, you’re moving in roughly the right direction.
  • Seeing geography as a constraint is a major impediment to your educational and career progress.
  • Your personal philosophy and educational and career path should feed each other.
  • Wandering and experimenting are great, but not at any price. Meandering through an educational path you’ll be paying off for a decade or more is different than dabbling in a free class or internship that will only cost you a few months.
  • Don’t fear how you compare to your peers.
  • If the interest isn’t there, don’t put energy there. But when it is, go all the way.
  • You always get more out of things you choose over things you’re made to do. Find ways to have more of the former, and fewer of the latter.
  • Work ethic can overcome knowledge deficit, but not the other way around.
  • Mentors can be great, but they can also hold you back. Don’t take them too seriously.
  • If the process isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.
  • If the process isn’t hard, you’re doing it wrong.
  • You’ll be doing it wrong at least some of the time. That feedback helps you figure out how to do it right.
  • Push your imagination to see yourself as capable of great things. Continue to do this.

The few regrets I have for the path I took boil down to one: I wish I had more confidence, and earlier, about going my own way.

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Excerpted from The Future of School

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*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Time for Entrepreneurship to Replace Schooling

Software is eating the world.

Those words, popularized by the creator of the first web browser and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, describe the present and foretell the future. First it was industry and ever more advanced machines. Once machines became programmable, software became the most powerful force for progress.

This scares a lot of people. It shouldn’t. Shovels are an improvement over human hands for digging a ditch. Software is an improvement over human minds for solving equations and handling transactions. The future belongs to those who master the uniquely human, not those who fight with software and hardware over rote tasks.

What is the uniquely human?  Creativity. Machines can perform but humans are relentlessly creative. We adapt, mimic, adjust, experiment, fail, try again, and reshape our conceptions of the world without any external programmer making it happen. We are the most complex combo of hardware and software on the planet and we can program and reprogram ourselves.

Embracing the future without fear means becoming more human than ever before. It means leaving the grunt work to the tools we make. It means coordinating those tools like a conductor does a symphony. It means, in a word, entrepreneurship.

No longer relegated to those who start a business, entrepreneurship is becoming a necessary way of life. It’s an outlook. You must be the President and CEO of your own firm. You must be the creative force in your world and coordinate with the resources around you.

It’s easier than ever before. The tools are there. All that stops you is an outdated mindset. The key is to break free from old modes of thought and realize the beauty, power, and boundlessness of technology-plus-human enabled progress. What is software but the expression of human ideas in digital form?  If we open our minds and engage reality as possibility and play the fear dissipates.

The opening sentence could be restated: Imagination is eating the world. The problem is that few have learned to dream. Or it might be more accurate to say that the natural human propensity to dream has been suppressed. It’s time to unlock it. It’s time for an un-education.

The role of education in society

Prior to the mass schooling movement education was used broadly to describe the acquisition of knowledge and skill useful in achieving goals. Education is a highly cooperative endeavor and critical to the life of any community. We learn how to navigate the world from observing those around us, copying them, getting results and feedback, adjusting, and trying again. In isolation humans are mediocre learners at best. In a vibrant community humans can master almost anything if given the freedom to try.

Observe the first few years of life and it’s easy to see a natural thirst for learning and an entrepreneurial approach to self-education. Babies are wide eyed. They take in everything. Then they test. They try to crawl and talk and play. They repeat over and over. They adapt and try again. They watch those around them and model their successful actions. This process can be called education, but note that no one needs to deliberately plan or structure it. No external incentive or impetus is required for children to acquire the most fundamental and important skills. They want to and they won’t stop trying.

A vibrant community is rich with examples of what to do and what not to do across a variety of ages and levels of expertise. Learners are constantly bumping into new ideas and methods. Ideas are non-scarce goods that fly freely, articulated and unarticulated. Patterns and norms emerge not from the minds of elites but from constant trial and error and observation by each member of the community. What works for one is repeated by another. Paths are worn by walking.

This is not to say no deliberate or planned education takes place. When someone discovers something they love it’s natural to want to learn everything possible about it. Those with particular skill and knowledge and the ability to impart it specialize and exchange what they know for something they value. Teachers and institutions for learning play a role. In a vibrant community they are part of the same trial and error marketplace as everything else. That means no one is forced to engage in any particular form of education, and educators aren’t guaranteed pupils or funding for their efforts.

What is commonly considered education today is really just one very narrow delivery mechanism for learning. This mechanism, called school, has so dominated the education landscape that many have come to completely conflate the two terms. If we are to boldly seize the opportunities of the future, we’ve got to start by rethinking our forms of education. We need to allow for the cultivation of entrepreneurs, not the mechanization we ask of machines.

How school kills entrepreneurship

The dominance of school as education is dangerous. It’s not only that the method of conveying skills and ideas is itself ineffective and inflexible. It’s the effectiveness of school at generating a particular mindset that’s cause for greatest concern. I call it the conveyor belt mindset.

You are plopped onto a production line at whatever stage you’re supposed to be based on arbitrary things like your age, class, and gender. Then you let the belt do the work. By essentially doing nothing but what you’re told, you get handed certificates at each next stage. 18? Unless you did something truly outrageous, here’s your diploma. 22? Here’s your degree. Degree? Here’s your job.

Most people believe this and live it. It’s revealed in the kinds of questions we ask strangers. “What grade are you in?” “What’s your major?” “What kind of job do you have?” If your answer is not the appropriate one for your age and assumed station in life, people worry. “I dropped out of school to do X” is cause for concern to almost everybody, no matter what X is. “I’m a sophomore at university Y” is cause for comfort to almost everybody, no matter what you’re actually doing with your time at Y. So long as you’re at your station, no one much cares if you’re productive, happy, successful, fulfilled, or free.

Parents obsessively check their child against a list of averages on everything from height to reading ability and stress if junior is not “on track.” No one really ever asks who built the track, where it’s going, or whether junior has any interest in arriving there.

Schools are the factories within which the conveyor belt mindset operates. They are structured to breed conformity and obedience. Students don’t even have control over their own schedules or basic necessities like bathroom and meal times. Schools were intended to be and still operate as places that restrict rather than expand the quantity of education in the community. Too many diverse ideas are a threat to efficiency obsessed do-gooders and social planners. Schools produce a more uniform product that can be plugged in like a machine to any part of the stagnant world once imagined by its creators. The conveyor belt produces the very thing that humans can’t compete with machines and software on: rule-following. If your primary skill is repeating known processes and adhering to protocols, you’ll lose to technology every time. Why are we educating humans out of their greatest strength?

The conveyor belt saps creativity and freedom. It is anti-entrepreneurial in every way. It’s not taking you where you want to go. Aggregates are not individuals and your goals and abilities are not definable by summing the abilities and behaviors of everyone your age and dividing by the population size. It’s time to get off.

The way forward

How to create an entrepreneurial education?  It’s actually a lot easier than it may seem. Start by quitting. Opt out of the activities and mindsets that are killing you. Take yourself or your kids out of school and let them do and learn whatever they want to in a safe environment. You don’t need anyone’s permission.

Step up and out into the world in which you want to live. Work with interesting people, read interesting books, do interesting things. No need to pay for someone else’s stamp on someone else’s set of activities just because everyone else does. You don’t need a external validation to do what you want. You may choose to get degrees and certificates. You may decide it’s worth the trade-offs. You may enjoy it. Do it if you do, but don’t ever do it, “because you have to.” You don’t have to. Create a way to do what you want without it. It’s harder, but freedom is always harder than the comfort of captivity.

The reason many people fear opting out is because of that paradigm of linear, externally-defined progress. It’s the conveyor belt. It’s time to jump off.

Yes, you want an entire community of free-thinking unschooling entrepreneurs. But you don’t need to wait for society to get there. You can jump off the conveyor belt immediately and create a better way for yourself. Not only do you immediately gain more freedom, doing so is the most likely way for a broader social movement to follow.

It’s scary at first, because your mind is trained to think that progress is defined by moving on the conveyor belt in the only direction it goes. Maybe really special or hard working people go faster, like the people who run up an escalator instead of letting the machine do all the work, but everyone is channeled in the same narrow corral moving in the same direction. That’s not progress.

Progress is moving towards your own goals and desires and becoming more fulfilled as you grow and overcome challenges. There are as many directions as there are people. Once you jump off the conveyor belt, the hardest part is actually discovering what makes you come alive, then being honest and unashamed of what you discover. It’s worth it. You can never start too soon.

The thing is, the mold-breakers who jump the belt don’t struggle any more or less than those who stay on. They have a hard time too. But it’s a different kind of pain. It’s the pain of working to achieve a goal they’re passionate about that has huge rewards when won, not the pain of subjugation to a monotony that brings you nothing in return.

Once you’re off the conveyor belt and seeing a world of possibility you can begin to create the kind of education you want. Education, like entrepreneurship, is not a stage in life but a way of living. You’ve got to become a lifelong learner. Cultivate questions and curiosity. Get comfortable with failure and restarting. Think big thoughts but don’t relegate your creativity to the realm of ideas alone. Test them. Thought experiments are great, but the best philosophers engage in field experiments. Those are the entrepreneurs. The only thing keeping you from joining them is an outdated mindset someone sold you. It works to suffocate the entrepreneurial embers deep within your nature. Fan them back into flame. You’ll light your own way and maybe start a brush fire that spreads to your community and beyond.

If you do, we’ll soon be saying that entrepreneurship is eating the world.

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*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

The Advantages of Having a Family While Running a Business

The Advantages of Having a Family and Running a Business at the Same Time
What better motivation is there to succeed, use time wisely, and not feel defeated?

It’s no secret that being an entrepreneur is stressful and time consuming.  It requires not just physical but immense mental energy and brings pretty severe emotional swings.  Sometimes it involves emails or phone calls or travel at all hours of the day all days of the week all year long.  It’s also financially unpredictable.

All of these things suggest that having a family while starting or running a company is a bad idea.  I often tell young people that if they have a startup idea they should pursue it sooner than later, because the risk, stress, cost of failure, and available time will only get worse over time and after a spouse and kids.  Still, lots of people do it.  I’m doing it now.  Despite the very real ways in which a family makes entrepreneurship harder, there are some powerful advantages too.

Time

I’d rather be with my family than doing just about anything else.  This is a huge advantage.  When you’re starting a company and seeking funding, partners, employees, customers, and allies there are an infinite number of things you could do at any time.  Networking event downtown tonight?  Maybe you’ll meet someone there and make a decent connection.  The thing is, 80% of the events, calls, emails, and activities won’t be that valuable.  When you are a time billionaire (as my friend TK calls it), the opportunity cost is low.  You might as well go to the happy hour.  Something might come out of it.  So single entrepreneurs do it.  Over and over again.  They hit so many conferences and meetings that the line between what’s valuable and what’s a waste begins to blur.  They can get distracted and burned out on things that don’t really enhance their core value proposition or product.

When you would rather be with your family anyway, you develop a very high bar for any reason to do otherwise.  I’m not going to drive downtown and spend three hours sipping cocktails for a 30% chance of meeting a person with a 20% chance of introducing me to someone with a 10% chance of investing 5% of what I need to raise if it means not getting to watch Finding Nemo with my kids and tuck them in bed.  It raises the cost of wasted time and sharpens your ability to distinguish what’s really worth it.  You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule.  Being an entrepreneur with a family dramatically raises the stakes and makes you a lot better and quicker at identifying your 20% activities and ignoring the rest.  Saying ‘no’ is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur can learn, and having a family makes you a little better at it.

Perspective

When you’re running a venture, it’s all you think about.  As it should be.  Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham says, “It’s hard to do a good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower”, and he’s right.  But things don’t always go well.  Sometimes they downright suck.  You lose a client, a deal falls through, your website launch is months late, you face legal battles, you can’t get a meeting with an investor, or any number of other hurdles real or imagined.  If you’ve got nothing but your business, these can destroy you.  If your venture is failing you feel like you are failing.  Someone who feels like a failure in life is not going to create a winner in business.

Having a Business and a Family at the Same Time
What were you saying about not having a good life?

It’s times like these when a family is the most amazing psychological strength I’ve found.  Crumpled in a real or metaphorical heap on the floor feeling like you just got your ass kicked by the world and all is lost, you look up at two cute little girls having a tea party and asking you if some imaginary tea will make you feel better.  How can you not smile?  The number of times I’ve laughed at myself for feeling like I just can’t win is countless.  Every time it’s because I consider my family and wonder how I could ever feel desperate.  Who cares if the businesses struggles or fails or I have to go work another job to make ends meet?  If I accomplish nothing else in my life besides raising these kids and spending time with my wonderful wife, who could ever call that a waste?

This perspective is healthy and needed.  Yeah, you want to be your work and throw yourself 100% into it.  But you also want to be more than your work.  Families have an amazing way of helping you see that you are.

Motivation

No matter how type-A you are and how many sleepless nights you’re willing to put in, you’re still human, and humans are lazy.  We prefer lounging to working.  Sometimes we disguise lounging as working and fill our time with activities that don’t add real value because the valuable stuff is hard or boring.  Especially after the early build and launch phase, the dip comes and it’s really hard to push yourself to do a bunch of crappy tasks to keep things moving forward.  If you have no family, and therefore very little time or financial obligation, you can easily pivot to a new job, pick up some side work, or sleep on a friend’s couch if your lack of effort should result in lack of income or delayed success.  You can wait to work hard until the moment of inspiration comes, no matter what day or hour it strikes.  When you have a family, these are all much harder to do.  If it’s 2:00 PM on a Friday and you agreed to hang with the kids for the evening beginning at 6:00, and then a long-promised family camping trip will consume the weekend, you have no choice.  You’ve got to make the next several hours count.  You’ve got to do the hard work no matter how little you want to.

It’s not only the financial incentive and desire to provide stable quality of life and time availability to your family, but also the desire to provide an example.  You want your kids to be excited by the opportunities life provides.  You want them to work hard.  You want them to see that you never gave up on your vision and you always buckled down and made things happen.  Especially if you work from home as I often do, you want your kids to get a feel for what it’s like and see your relentless focus and drive.  Alone in an apartment, it’s easier to justify a break for binge-watching your favorite show (I sneak that in after the kids are in bed.  What? I’m not a machine!).  Worst case, your venture fails and everyone still thinks you’re cool for trying it.  With a family failure is more costly, and that can be a great motivator.

Don’t Fear

While being entrepreneurial as a mindset and way of life is open and available to everyone, starting a business of your own is definitely not for everyone.  But if you feel that fire burning within and think it’s too late for you because you have a family and can never compete with single and childless founders out there, you’re wrong.  There are a great many entrepreneurial wives, husbands, fathers, and mothers, and we’ve got some advantages that those without a family don’t.