In relentless pursuit of freedom.
Over at the Praxis blog, I challenge anyone interested in education, entrepreneurship, career success, wealth, happiness, or personal growth to read five books this summer.
Each book is described with an endorsement from someone in the Praxis network. Check out the article.
The books are:
Dan Sanchez was kind enough to invite me to coauthor a little piece for FEE.org about mindsets inculcated by the schooling process and how a key step toward personal freedom and growth is recognizing and obliterating them. This is what my friend Zak Slayback would call “deschooling yourself”.
Check out the article here. The seven mindsets we outline are:
From the article,
“The first step toward self-emancipation is certainly not supporting or opposing a presidential candidate. Neither need it be civil disobedience, evasion of government directives, or resistance to the authorities. There is much lower hanging fruit to be had than that.”
And,
“Only a people who first free themselves spiritually and individually can hope to free themselves physically and as a society. It is impossible to liberate people, as Voltaire said, “from the chains they revere.” And the first order of business in improving society is, as Albert Jay Nock said, “to present society with one improved unit.””
The idea that you should spend four years and six figures in classrooms, shielded from the real world of opportunity, and cross your fingers and hope it gets you some kind of job is absurd.It’s time for a new era in education and career. If you’re good you can prove it in the market without going into debt or dying of boredom.
That’s why we created Praxis, and that’s why we’re making it better every day.
Over at the Praxis blog is a description of current opportunities with business partners in Austin, Atlanta, Charleston, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, and San Francisco where we’re placing participants. If you get in, you not only get paid to apprentice there, you get a job at $40k+ when you graduate.
From the post:
“Participants accepted into the Praxis program get an intense bootcamp where they gain the skills needed to succeed in their careers. After the bootcamp they begin a paid apprenticeship with one of our business partners. These aren’t dull corporate internships. These are dynamic startups and small businesses where participants get a chance to create real value and do real work. Entrepreneurship is the most valuable skill in the emerging economy, and there’s no better classroom than alongside entrepreneurs in the real world to learn it.
While apprenticing, participants get weekly coaching, access to a rich resource library, tailored modules to improve hard and soft skills, a world-class network, and a portfolio to showcase their work.
Upon completion of the program, graduates get hired full time with their business partner at a minimum of $40k/year.
That means in less than a year and at zero cost you begin your career. No debt. No wasted time. No blasting out resumes to jobs you’d hate. No fretting over GPA’s for four years just hoping it results in a job. You join an amazing team doing meaningful work immediately.
Here are some of our current business partner opportunities, and we’re adding all the time…”
Check out the post to see what kind of companies we’re placing participants with.
A great career won’t come from classrooms or generic resume blasts. It will come from you taking charge and going out and building the mix of experience, knowledge, network, skills, and confidence that can only come from working with dynamic people in real companies.
One of the core building blocks of the Praxis educational experience is the Personal Development Project, or “PDP“. A PDP is simple: a self-chosen 30-day challenge with tangible benchmarks and outcomes, documented and demonstrated.
Project based learning – tackling a challenge that the learner has individual, intrinsic motivation to tackle – is the most valuable method for transforming your mind and habits and building your personal capital. It bypasses dichotomies between theory and practice by focusing instead on desired outcomes. It’s about who you want to become, and what in your unique situation is most likely to help you get there. This is the way most people approach physical health and fitness, but it’s surprisingly rare when it comes to mental and emotional intelligence, character, and skills. It shouldn’t be. It works.
So how do our participants get started with a PDP? My favorite method is to let your obstacles take the lead. Obstacles often hide or disguise themselves, so first you have to find them.
Jot down some bigger picture outcomes or goals or descriptions of the kind of person you want to be. Maybe, “I want to be a published writer”, or, “I want to travel 6 months out of the year”, or, “I want to earn a living as a freelance designer”, or, “I want to be a go-to expert on nanotechnology that people interview”. Think in terms of who you want to be and what kind of experiences and outcomes you want to have, not in terms of titles or labels.
Now that you have a handful of these big picture goals listed, pick one and ask yourself what is keeping you from doing or being that right now. Maybe you’re writing isn’t sharp enough, or you are too insecure to submit to a publication. Maybe you can’t afford the travel, or your design skills aren’t hireable, or you know nothing about nanotech. Try to get specific in terms of what’s keeping from these goals. “I’m not organized enough to handle multiple clients”, or, “I procrastinate too much” are good examples.
Now you have your obstacles.
Your obstacles are invaluable because they inform you as to what kind of activities are going to be valuable to you. If procrastination is one of your major obstacles you could build a very basic yet incredibly powerful PDP where you, for example, read one chapter from “The War of Art” and write and publish a blog post every day for 30-days. The mental tools in the book combined with the no-escape activity of daily blogging will absolutely and dramatically improve you ability to create even when the mood isn’t right. You will become a better person in that 30 days and you will chip away at one of those obstacles – maybe even obliterate it altogther.
This is just one example. Maybe you commit to reading five books on a topic in a month. If you read five books on any topic you will immediately be in the top 5% of people with knowledge on the topic. It’s surprisingly easy to make huge gains.
Whatever goals, obstacles, and activities you identify, the most important thing is doing it. You must make progress on it every single day. The beauty is, anyone can do something for 30 days. It’s hard, but not so hard that you have any excuses. You must make the activities measurable and demonstrable. You must setup an accountability method. At Praxis we do this by asking participants to build a personal website and publicly share their PDP activities and then document them as they complete it. Thier advisors are there to coach and challenge them as they craft and complete the PDP’s.
In the end they have tangible evidence of how they increased their value that month – based on their own goals, not anyone else’s. More importantly, they become more of who they want to be. The principle of compound interest is powerful and it applies to more than money. Improve yourself by 1% every day and soon nothing will be out of reach.
Whether a hard skill, soft skill, body of knowledge, a network, a mindset, or a habit: if you want growth and transformation – what real education is – I cannot recommend a PDP enough.
Try building your own. If you have a hard time getting started, try one that we created at Praxis as an excellent entry point. See if you can stick to it, making progress every day. It’s a lot harder than you think, and far more rewarding than you can imagine.
[optinform]
As I mentioned at the end of 2015, Praxis is launching some exciting new things this year.
In addtion to the Teen Entrepreneurship eCourse, we’ve also launched a local version of the full Praxis program, starting with Pittsburgh, PA.
It’s awesome.
This is the same 12-month experience – paid work at an amazing company, intensive personal and professional development, hard and soft skills, and liberal arts education – but with a local cluster of business partners and participants. This allows those in a particular region to get all the benefits of the program AND stay close to home and have more time interacting in person with their fellow participants.
Zak Slayback is the director for the Pittsburgh program. I couldn’t think of a better person. A PA native and Ivy League dropout, Zak has done nothing but crush it since he left the confines of the academy to join Praxis nearly two years ago. He’s a great example of exactly the kind of work ethic + bold thinking we look for.
The cool thing about this model is that Zak can really put down some roots and connect with local networks of young people – high schools, colleges, clubs, homeschool groups, etc. – and local businesses over the long term and offer an amazing opportunity for them to get out of the classroom for a year and learn entrepreneurship from successful Pittsburgh entrepreneurs.
It doesn’t stop there. This model can be replicated in cities across the country and the world. It takes a network of young mold-breakers and great companies with the power of the unique Praxis coaching and education process. Stay tuned as we continue to grow.
Check out Praxis Pittsburgh, and reach out to Zak if you have any connections in the area or want to learn more!
NBA great Stephen Curry has a chip on his shoulder. It’s clear when you watch him play. Even as he’s gotten better, it’s grown bigger. This is what great performers do. They play with a chip.
Steph is a great example of how the factual truth of a situation by itself does not dictate what kind of orientation we have toward it. There are two stories about Steph Curry, both true.
In one story he was born with great genes to an NBA star dad and volleyball playing mom. He grew up with plenty of money and access to basketball training facilities, coaches, mentors, and opportunities galore. He honed his skills, went to a good school, played well, got drafted for good money, and continued excel with a great team and organization around him.
By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the most fortunate people on earth. How could this gifted athlete have a chip on his shoulder?
In another story Steph grew up with more pressure than most people could imagine. His star athlete parents had done more than most kids could ever hope to in sports. He lived under their shadow. He didn’t grow as tall as he should have for basketball, and was too skinny. Despite practicing the sport almost from birth, not a single major college was interested in him. He ended up at a tiny liberal arts school. He played well, but he was not fortunate enough to be on a team with any hope of a national title. Despite his amazing shooting ability and NCAA tournament performance, Steph was questioned as an NBA talent. He was seen as too small, and mostly just a shooter without a full range of skills. He entered the league with virtually no hype compared to most future MVP’s. He had to scratch and claw through a historically great Western Conference for the first several years of his career before making it to the finals. When there, even though the team he led won, he did not get finals MVP.
By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the biggest underdog greats in sports history. How could this constantly overlooked late-bloomer not have a chip on his shoulder?
Steph can choose which set of facts to focus on and which narrative to tell himself. Off the court, Steph is likely aware of the great life he’s had and thankful for it. Remembering the best facts about ourselves is a powerful defense against self-pity. Yet it seems pretty clear that, come game day, he’s thinking about the second story. He’s not just happy to be there. He’s got something to prove.
At Praxis we like to tell the participants at the start of the program these two bits of professional advice:
The first is a reminder to think in terms of rational choice theory. Deciding someone is wrong or out to get you is unhelpful for determining how to work around them.
The second is a reminder to stay sharp because no one cares about your success. In fact, if you’re doing your own thing, they probably doubt you. Good. Use that. Not with malice toward them in real life, but as fuel for the narrative you weave of your own hero’s journey.
See, we can all be like Steph Curry after all! Now go watch some amazing highlight videos.
I heard an interesting talk from Dan Sullivan on why 10x growth (in business, life, whatever you choose) is actually easier than 2x growth…if you get your mindset right.
He described 2x thinking as fundamentally controlled by the past. You look back at what it took to get where you are and you attempt to do more and better of the same activities, approaches, and processes.
10x thinking is controlled by the future. Since the future hasn’t yet happened, you first have to imagine the future you want. Once your idea of that future is firmly in place you work backward from it. You deconstruct what it takes to get there. You let this vision of the future determine what you do in the present. The past may occasionally provide lessons, but it’s mostly a distraction. What does the future demand? If you are to grow 10x, what would have to happen to get there?
It’s amazing how much this little insight helps. So many things we do unthinkingly just because we did them in the past. We assume they are necessary because they were before. When you ask only what the future wants, instead of replicating what the past was, your entire mindset shifts and you begin to focus only on the truly key activities and those that are scalable.
Are you a slave to the past or are you letting your vision of the future lead?
I’ve been thinking lately about GDP, and common ideas of economic progress more generally.
I just attended an event about the causes of and cures for poverty in the poorest countries. So much of the discussion utilized comparisons between countries based on measures of GDP, GDP growth, and the like. The more I thought about it, the less sense this made. Not that GDP doesn’t decently correlate to overall wealth, opportunity, and progress – it does – but that it does less and less as technology and markets change. GDP charts would fail to show, for example, the tremendous progress made in many poor countries by the fact that nearly everyone now has access to cell phones. In fact, GDP does a bad job at measuring the progress of information/communication/data in general.
Consider MOOC’s and the abundance of free online learning. Since the education industry is a chunk of GDP, putting it all out there for free can actually bring GDP numbers down, even as human well-being and human capital increase.
Think about other areas of misleading measures. What you can do with a computer or smart phone in terms of sending data across the globe means fewer freight ships, the things easily measured in GDP calculations, but not less progress and opportunity.
Automation, information technology, decentralized networks, open-source…these make the world better and increase human flourishing, though they don’t do much for old-school metrics like employment and GDP. Being listed as on the payroll of a company doesn’t always equal being better off (depending upon what else you might be doing of course), and having a larger number of physical objects to count doesn’t either.
For this reason, I don’t take much stock in those who lament slowed economic growth and fear it will bring an end to the complex market systems in countries like the US. We used to consider farming the only thing that really mattered for economic well-being. Then manufacturing. As machines can do more of both of these, we humans can be redeployed in myriad ways previously unimagined. Think about all the micro entrepreneurship going on today. Think of crowdfunding for one-off projects. I know authors who probably aren’t technically “employed” most of the time, if at all, and don’t produce GDP enhancing widgets, but they live wonderful lives by pitching book ideas on kickstarter, raising the money, travelling the world, doing the writing, and selling ebooks. They may make aggregate data appear we’re economically worse off, but they’d rather not trade their life for one hoeing rows or assembling buggies.
The fact that no one quite knows how to calculate the value of the internet and other information age technologies probably causes us all to underestimate just how well-off we are today, and how bright the future is. It’s the perfect time to seize the opportunity and do something new. Carpe diem.
In the 1980’s if I told you for only a few hundred dollars anyone could have a $1 million asset in their pocket you’d call me crazy. But here we are.
The chart above (actually a picture of a chart taken with my iPhone and uploaded to this blog with an app to further emphasize the point) is from the book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
The above chart only scratches the surface. It’s hard to comprehend just how much wealth (not income) we have today compared to 20, 30, or 50 years ago, let alone a century or two ago. Anyone who complains that income gaps are growing misses the miracle under their nose of wealth exploding, and more accessible to individuals at any income level than ever before in human history. 50 years ago, it could take a hefty sum to launch and run a basic advocacy organization, for example. You would need a secretary, long-distance phone line, office space, filing cabinets, a travel agent, a print shop that you’d have to visit to approve runs of literature (at least several thousand at a time), space to store them, shipping cost, etc. ad nauseum. Today you can setup a WordPress website, bid out for design work on Fiverr or 99 Designs, get VistaPrint to run a few hundred after proofing a digital copy, book your own travel, store your own files, run email campaigns with MailChimp, etc. ad nauseum for a few hundred bucks.
Anyone can write and record songs, publish books, start businesses, sell goods and services, learn anything in the world, or meet people across the globe for free or close to it with a phone and some WiFi. These things are equally accessible to rich and poor. Wealth – as measured in opportunities and fulfilled desires, the real end of money – is greater than ever and flatter than ever.
The biggest obstacles are those erected by the wealthy to stymie competition from upstarts taking advantage of all this accessible capital. Licensing requirements, regulations, wage laws, tax laws, immigration restrictions, intellectual monopoly status on non-scarce resources, and subsidized education and idleness are the biggest hurdles to the poor seizing the newly available wealth and creating a better life. It’s not about income or even net worth. It’s about what you can do and the value you can create and consume. The chart above and the world around us indicate that there has never been a more broad and deep spread of wealth.
GDP doesn’t matter. Neither does income. Opportunity matters. Value matters. Times have never been better across the board, which is exactly what most threatens those precariously perched at the perceived top. Don’t worry about them. Let the doomsayers and wannabe warriors of equality clamber for an illusive goal that doesn’t make anyone better off. Take advantage of the exponential growth in opportunity all around you.
Have you ever watched a baby with a goal? They know what they want, but they don’t know how to get there. They have limbs they can barely control and a variety of toys, tools, and furniture around them. They collect information by watching others. They test and explore, flailing their limbs until they invent their own kind of motion to get from point A to point B. It’s remarkable when you think about it. None of the adults around them are crawling, but babies find this solution on their own. They will not be denied.
It takes years in a conformity-based education system to train that kind of initiative out of us. In fact, conformity was one of the primary goals of the education system when it was established. Experts believed that people needed to be molded into uniform widgets, then plugged into an assembly line like spare parts, ready to take orders. It wasn’t a great model then, and it’s even worse for the world today.
Despite the slower economy, opportunity abounds. Cloud-computing and other innovations have dramatically reduced the cost of creating, collaborating, and starting a business. The best businesses are struggling to find people who can come in and add value, out-of-the-box thinking, and innovation. The market is full of unmet needs, but there aren’t enough entrepreneurs to solve them.
Now is not the time to wait around for more jobs to open up. Now is not the time to wander aimlessly through a status quo education, or sit in classrooms struggling to stay awake. Now is the time to rediscover your inner entrepreneur. Break free. Pick goals, even if they’re notional, and think clearly about the best way to achieve them. Test different approaches. Is the well-worn path really the best option?
All learning is self-motivated. No one has ever successfully crammed a belief down the throat of another. Enough brow-beating can coerce someone into changing their actions, but it cannot change their heart. Even absent heavy-handed tactics, telling someone they are wrong will never induce them to alter their worldview unless they are already seeking.
Engaging those without some level of curiosity in your ideas is a waste, unless you enjoy it for its own sake. But that’s the really peculiar thing; no one does. When people get frustrated by discussion, it’s not because their open-minded interlocutor is asking too many good questions and seeing too much merit in the other side. It’s because the hidebound counterpart can’t even work from the same basic assumptions, and resorts to illogical arguments or ad hominem. That’s not because the wrong words are being used, it’s because the wrong person is being talked to.
A lot of people claim to love debate as a format for discovering what is true. It supposed to be more balanced and less dogmatic than a presentation on just one side of an issue. It seems just the opposite in practice. Never have I seen a debate where a debater says, “I’ve really learned a lot and changed my position!” Of course, it’s the audience who are supposed to learn, but that too is a rarity. People watch debates for the spectacle, and to cheer when their side scores a rhetorical point. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but if a person were genuinely uninformed and wanted to learn about an issue, a debate would be the a poor way to do so, as the emphasis is on posturing and outwitting, not enlightening. When defenses are up, nothing gets in.
If your goal is to be understood, or to help others see how a change in mindset could better their life and the lives of others, the choir – those who have self-selected into the space where your ideas are discussed – are the best audience to preach to. If you value your own happiness, abstaining from street corner sermons to uninterested or hostile passersby is a must. There are many derogatory sayings about talking to people with similar ideas, but it should be the opposite. All the grumpy, hateful, fruitless and frustrating conversations happen when people walk away from the “echo chamber” and shout into ears that don’t care to hear.
Don’t waste your breath on people who have not signaled somehow that they are interested in your ideas. You’ll live a happier life, and reap the immense rewards or real, back and forth, give and take conversation that builds the mind of truth seekers on both sides. You learn to dance where you can freely try, in a studio with other dancers, not at the Bomont chapel.
I am currently reading Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building on the recommendation of a friend. It is one of those books that is so full of insight that it cannot be absorbed all at once, especially with the analytical part of the brain. It is as intuitive as it is logical. It’s the kind of thing that forces you to think outside of your paradigms, but in a way that is oddly comfortable.
Yesterday a section of the book stood out to me in particular. It was about the patterns in building that are good at resolving conflicting forces, and those that are not. Alexander maintains that there is near universal agreement on what patterns of, say, a window or a garden resolve conflicting forces. He asks people how they feel in a certain window area vs. another, and 95% or more feel good in the same one. It may seem outlandish to claim that there is so little disagreement about what makes for a good pattern in building, but the key for Alexander is the word feeling.
He does not ask what they think of flat windows vs. Bay windows. He does not ask their opinion on window material or position. He does not ask what a builder should do. He does not ask anything that evokes a belief or idea or a connection to some overarching plan or policy. These ought expressions get in the way of the is of the forces at work within us. It turns out it is incredibly hard to be honest with ourselves about what feels good. It takes a lot of discovery, and shedding all the baggage and ideology we carry around.
It someone asked me what I thought of using locally grown ingredients in food, my mind would immediately leap to the idiotic and regressive political movements that seek to force economies into localism, drive up prices, drive down quality, get everyone too involved in everyone else’s business while self-righteously proclaiming the superiority of an absurd proximity bias. In other words, my thoughts on the matter would probably be negative.
Because of this, it is possible that I would overlook an opportunity to bite into a delicious and juicy local fruit at a farmers market, for fear of giving credence to the food busybodies. These thoughts – my view that no one ought to get preachy about local ingredients – might prohibit me from finding alignment with the genuine feelings within me. It’s harder than it first seems to constantly stay in touch with what feels right – with who we actually are – in the face of all the things we think we should be and believe.
This is one of the reasons democracy is such a poor way of resolving collective action problems. It not only seeks and allows our mere opinions, it rewards our proclamations of what we wish we thought, or what we pretend to want, instead of what actually make us fuller, happier people. It rewards and glorifies the boring lies and spin we weave into our narratives, and vilifies our honesty about what really harmonizes with us.
It’s much more fruitful to dig down to the bottom and discover what you really do feel, and work with those forces rather than pretending they don’t exist. This is why capitalism is such a powerful and beautiful system of social coordination; because it takes humans as they are, imperfect knowledge and motives and abilities, and the scarcity and difficulty the natural world presents, works with it, and channels it all in a harmonious and life-giving way. Capitalism is honest.
This is why the economic way of thinking – the rational choice model – is so enlightening and useful in explaining human behavior and institutions. It does not condone or condemn, it just accepts ends as a given and seeks to understand what means will and will not achieve them.
Certainly some goals or desires or feelings are better than others. Certainly some are worth trying to change. But playing pretend and building patterns around forces we wish existed in us and in others, instead of what’s actually there, doesn’t help. There is no better way to express this insight than to quote The Timeless Way at length:
“But a pattern which is real makes no judgments about the legitimacy of the forces in the situation.
By seeming to be unethical, by making no judgments about individual opinions, or goals, pr values, the pattern rises to another level of morality.
The result is to allow things to be alive – and this is a higher good than the victory of any one artificial system of values. The attempt to have a victory for a one-sided view of the world cannot work anyway, even for the people who seem to win their point of view. The forces which are ignored do not go away just because they are ignored. They lurk, frustrated, underground. Sooner or later they erupt in violence: and the system which seems to win is then exposed to far more catastrophic dangers.
The only way a pattern can actually help to make a situation genuinely more alive is by recognizing all the forces which actually exist, and then finding a world in which these forces can slide past each other.
Then it becomes a piece of nature.”
Mr. Alexander is an architect and is here talking about patterns in rooms, gardens, buildings and towns. He refers to things like the human desire to go towards the light in the room, and the desire for comfortable seating. The patterns he seeks are those that bring into harmony such forces. But read the above again, slowly, and consider how much broader this insight might apply; to institutions, to social coordination problems, and to our own lives.
People who live the fullest lives have a loose grip on everything. They don’t cling too tightly to relationships, possessions, health or life itself. They are free from mood-controlling fear and worry. They take the prospect of terminal illness or the loss of a job with ease, because they don’t find their solace in their present material position relative to others, but in something deeper and more unshakable.
The ability to let go of things is useful in every arena of life. Let go of your kids rather than lamenting their choice of hobbies, or the fact that they grow and change. Let go of your fear of losing and put yourself into your sport with abandon. Let go of the desperation to be loved or else you are likely scare others away; to be less lovable. Let go of fear of death, and what life you have is richer.
All this freedom found in letting go, yet humans are programmed to seek their own survival above all else and against all odds. Are we to fight our own hard-wiring? And why are humans so universally inspired by stories of fighting cancer, fighting the odds, resisting the inertia of world, not giving up, not letting go? There is something noble and heroic about refusing to roll with the punches.
How can we square these competing approaches? If suffering from a serious sickness, is it best to let go of our fear of pain and death and find our zen, or should we fight the degradation of our bodies with every fiber?
Both.
There is a way to reconcile a loose grip on life with a refusal to let go of our dreams. I haven’t mastered it. Few have. The space between freedom from worry over the vicissitudes of life, and intense focus on how to overcome them, is the place where greatness emerges. I’ve seen it in sports. Think about Michael Jordan playfully taunting his opponent at the free throw line. He was so free from the worry of missing the shot, or of embarrassment that he closed his eyes while shooting – a loose grip on the game. At the same time, he was so focused on dominating the game, being the best, and making the shot. Greatness.
The key is to hold on to what we have and keep climbing the obstacles that impede us to obtain what we want. The key is also to let go of what we have and be free from the fear of not obtaining what we want. Now all you have to do is both at the same time.
In the business and startup world scalability is the word of the day. Products that can be built once and used infinite times by infinite consumers are the ultimate prize. The hype might cause us to overlook other valuable products and services.
The quest for scalability makes sense with software, online products and social media applications. They can be built relatively cheaply, honed in beta mode, and then sold an infinite number of times at no additional production cost. But it’s not true that scalability equals profitability, nor is it true that the inability to costlessly scale means lack of profitability.
There are countless examples of great products and services that are non-scalable, yet highly profitable. Personal trainers, legal counsel, health care, home repair, tutoring, food production, etc., etc., are not scalable. Sure, they realize some economies of scale as they grow, but each new customer means new inputs like labor, raw materials and time. It’s also true that some of these like legal or health advice or general education can be produced once and shared infinitely at zero marginal cost online. But that is not the same as a visit with a physician who gets to know your unique symptoms and gives a tailored recommendation.
In fact, most of the best things in life are not scalable. I can’t produce quality time with the family, or a night out at a fancy restaurant with my wife once and reuse it over and over at zero cost. There is no demerit in a product that is not scalable. One of the great virtues of the things that are scalable is precisely that they free up so much time and so many resources that can then be devoted to things that are not scalable.
Modern technology opens a world of possibility and the ability to realize amazing returns on small investments due to scalability. But don’t overlook the innovation, benefit, and profitability of non-scalable or less scalable products.
A good friend told me he experimented with something totally out-there: agreeing with everything.
He said he made a conscious effort, as a sort of experiment, to find a way to agree with every statement, worldview, attitude and belief he came across, no matter how incorrect or crazy it seemed. The results were pretty invigorating. Not so much that he found new value to beliefs he previously discarded, but more because his enjoyment of life, resilience to the unsavory words and actions of others, and ability to find laughter and entertainment all around him increased.
Give it a try, just for a day. Resolve to accept everything you hear today as true. See what happens. Every opinion has some kind of truth in it, even if twisted or put out of focus in some way. Look for the nugget you can agree with.
If you’re a big sports fan and you see a post about how sports are shallow, and numb children to violence, and are corroding societal values, agree with it. Find the interpretation of the statement that you could see value in, decide to take the statement as such, and without qualifiers say to yourself, “That’s true.” When you see a comment on the post that says, “You small-minded fool, sports are uplifting and a great way to channel aggression and tribal instincts in a playful and non-harmful context.”, say to yourself, “That’s true”, without giving further explanation to the apparent contradiction. Find a way to be mentally at ease with granting the label “true” to both statements.
I’ve tried this a few times and have been surprised at just how entertaining and challenging it can be. It requires some serious mental stretching and imagination, but it’s an addictive kind of game; I found myself looking for more and more extreme claims, just to test my ability to treat them as true in some essential form.
Rebuttals and rejoinders and back-and-forth over ideas are fun and productive. Analysis – the systematic division, categorization, and counter-position of concepts – is fruitful. But it also comes naturally, and often too emphatically. Try a radically accepting approach that synthesizes everything, just for the fun of it.
This blog post is true. So is your objection to it.